51 pages • 1 hour read
Sylvia PlathThe Bell Jar
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1963A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 7-9Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 7 Summary
Constantin, a short but attractive man, picks Esther up and drives her to the UN. On the way he holds her hand, and Esther feels happier than she has since childhood when her father was still alive. As they enter an auditorium at the UN she reflects on how strange it is that she’s never before realized she was “only purely happy until [she] was nine years old” (75).
Esther is impressed by a burly Russian girl performing a translation. She starts to think of all the skills she doesn’t have. She hasn’t learned shorthand and hates the idea of transcribing men’s letters for the rest of her life—she wants to write her own letters. She can’t dance, sing, or speak a foreign language. For the first time in her life Esther feels inadequate. She pictures her life like a fig tree, with each branch holding a fig that represents the vision of a possible future: dutiful wife, world traveler, Olympic champion, famous editor. She sees herself sitting in the tree, starving because she is unable to decide which life she wants. One by one all of the figs shrivel up and drop off the tree.
After the UN Constantin takes Esther to a fancy restaurant. Esther feels better after eating and by the time they reach dessert, she decides that she will let Constantin take her virginity. She’s wanted to sleep with someone ever since she found out about Buddy’s affair. Esther recalls a man named Eric with whom she once had a frank conversation about sex. Eric told her the story of losing his virginity to a prostitute, an experience he found underwhelming. Eric told Esther that sleeping with a woman he loved would ruin her by turning her into “just an animal like the rest” (79); if he loved a woman, he would go to a prostitute rather than sleep with her. Esther thought Eric might be a good person to sleep with since he seemed less dirty-minded than the other boys she knew, but he wrote her a letter confessing his love. Therefore, he could never go to bed with her.
Constantin invites Esther to his home. She contemplates sleeping with him and recalls an article her mother sent her called “In Defense of Chastity,” which made the point that men and women have such disparate emotions and experiences that only marriage can unite them. The author of the article warned that all men will try to persuade a woman to have sex with them but lose respect for her as soon as she acquiesces. Esther muses that the one thing the article doesn’t consider is how a woman feels. She thinks it’s unfair that a woman has to lead “a single pure life” while a man can have “a double life, one pure and one not” (81). She sees the world as divided up into virgins and nonvirgins and anticipates that some great personal change will occur when she joins the latter category.
Esther and Constantin lie down on his bed. She thinks he is stunningly beautiful but worries that she will find fault with him as soon as he starts liking her. She doesn’t want to get married to a man who will ultimately be disappointing—she wants a life full of excitement and freedom. They both fall asleep without touching, and when Esther wakes disoriented at 3 a.m. she studies Constantin’s face and thinks about marriage.
She believes that no matter how well a man treats a woman before marriage, all he wants afterward is “for her to flatten out underneath his feet” (85). She recalls that Buddy once told her that she’d stop wanting to write poetry after having children, as if she was going to be brainwashed. When Constantin wakes up to drive Esther home, she acts coldly toward him.
Chapter 8 Summary
Esther recalls visiting Buddy at a sanitorium in the Adirondacks. She is disappointed to find that the building is worn-down and unattractive, and that Buddy has gained weight from the sanitorium’s food—all this time, she had been picturing him as appealingly wan. In his room, Buddy asks Esther if she would like to be Mrs. Willard. She responds that she never wants to get married and reminds him that he once asked her whether she wanted to live in the city or the country and, when she replied that she wanted both, told her she had “the perfect setup of a true neurotic” (93). Esther admits that if wanting two mutually exclusive things makes you neurotic, then she is indeed neurotic.
Later in the day Buddy takes Esther on a ski outing to Mount Pisgah, where he insists she ski an advanced course from the mountaintop. It does not occur to Esther to say no. As she stands at the top of the mountain looking down at Buddy, she calmly realizes that she is going to kill herself. With this thought in mind she pushes off down the hill, feeling utterly free and happy. She feels as if she is hurtling into the past, shedding off “years of doubleness and smiles and compromise” (97), until she collides with another skier and falls hard. She immediately wants to ski the mountain again, but Buddy touches her leg and informs her, in an oddly satisfied tone, that it is broken in two places.
Chapter 9 Summary
On Esther’s last day in Manhattan (and the day of the Rosenberg execution), Jay Cee summons Esther to her office to have her picture taken for a spread in Ladies’ Day. When asked to smile for her photo she starts sobbing uncontrollably. Jay Cee brings her a pile of manuscripts to cheer her up, and Esther is bolstered by the thought of a summer school writing course she had applied for, taught by a famous writer. She decides that she will send in the stories she writes in this class to Ladies’ Day under a pseudonym to surprise Jay Cee.
Doreen convinces Esther to go to a dance at a country club with Lenny and a blind date. As the internship draws to an end Esther is becoming increasingly listless and indecisive. She looks around the room at all of her expensive clothes and tells Doreen she cannot face them when she comes back. Doreen stuffs all of the clothes away under Esther’s bed.
When Doreen and Esther arrive for the dance, Esther doesn’t recognize Lenny even when Doreen flies into his arms. Her blind date is a tall, dark man named Marco who wears a diamond pin on his tie. Marco gives her the diamond and insinuates that he will perform some “service” worthy of its value. He squeezes her arm hard enough to leave bruises. Esther can tell right away that he is a “woman-hater.” At the country club, Esther doesn’t want to dance, but Marco tosses her drink away and pulls her onto the dance floor for a tango. Esther protests that she can’t dance, but Marco pulls her against him and tells her to pretend she is drowning.
After the tango Marco leads Esther in the club garden. She asks him who he is in love with, and he responds that he loves his first cousin, a nun. Esther tells him he will love someone else one day. Marco responds by throwing her to the ground and climbing on top of her, ripping her dress. Esther thinks to herself that she can let it happen if she just lies there, but when Marco calls her a slut she begins to fight back. She punches him in the face, bloodying his nose, and he smears the blood across her face. He demands to know where his diamond is; Esther refuses to tell him. She leaves him searching for it in the mud and hitches a ride back to Manhattan. Back at the Amazon, she climbs to the hotel’s sunroof and tosses all of her expensive clothes into the darkness.
Chapters 7-9 Analysis
In these chapters, Esther’s problems escalate beyond normal young-adult angst. Her suicidal ideation appears for the first time in the memory of her visit to the Adirondacks. Because we see the novel through Esther’s eyes, her thoughts of self-harm don’t always feel shocking. Her realization that she hasn’t been happy since she was a child is expressed as a passing thought, and even her suicidal plunge down the mountain feels almost reasonable when expressed through Esther’s wry, matter-of-fact internal monologue. Plath immerses the reader completely in Esther’s mind, making her decline feel less dramatic than it would be if viewed from the outside, but the escalation of her condition is undeniable. Because an older Esther narrates The Bell Jar, we can assume that she will survive the events of the novel.
Death and rebirth become inexorably tangled in Chapter 8’s skiing accident. As she plunges down the mountain, Esther imagines retreating into her past, shedding all of her mistakes and becoming a “white sweet baby cradled in its mother’s belly” (97). Her desire to die is inseparable from her desire to be reborn into a happier, purer life. Death of the body offers Esther the tantalizing possibility of escaping the confines of her own mind and beginning again.
Esther continues to grapple with what it means to be a woman in the 1950s. Her vision of the fig tree illustrates the way she thinks of her choices. Esther thinks that she can’t have it all—a career, a family, a carefree life full of casual affairs: this duality is reserved for men. She has to pick one path, and she worries that if she lingers in her indecision all of them will close off.
Plath explores the character of Esther’s mother, Mrs. Greenwood. Like Mrs. Willard, Mrs. Greenwood follows social norms, although she is forced to be the family’s breadwinner after the death of her husband. Mrs. Greenwood subscribes to misogynistic ideals, including that women should remain virgins while men can do whatever they want. Mrs. Greenwood’s traditional views further contextualize Esther’s desire for freedom.
Esther’s encounter with Eric further highlights the intensity of the sexual double standard faced by young men and women. Eric perceives women as belonging in two distinct categories—women who remain virgins are pure and lovable, while those who have sex are “animals.” Esther disagrees with his conviction. She knows that having premarital sex won’t make her an animal and actively seeks to lose her virginity as a way of transcending the limitations placed upon her by a misogynistic society. She also hopes that having sex will help her define her murky identity.
Esther’s remembered visit to the sanatorium develops the character of Buddy Willard. Buddy appears good-natured and kind, but he is unable to understand Esther on even a basic level. He assumes that she must want a domestic life and can’t appreciate her reservations about getting married. Although Buddy is outwardly a gentle man, he commits indirect violence toward Esther by taking pleasure when she breaks her leg after she tells him she doesn’t want to marry him. His vengefulness represents the repercussions of straying from a traditional path and highlights that his supposed love for Esther is conditional, based on her ability to embody his idea of a good woman rather than her actual character.
Buddy contrasts with Marco, the violent misogynist Esther meets at the country club. Esther can tell from the outset that Marco hates women and is a potential danger, yet she is partially drawn in by his charisma. Marco is the direct antithesis of Buddy Willard—nothing about him is safe or expected. If Buddy appeals to the part of Esther that wants to be a typical “good” woman, Marco plays into Esther’s desire to be subversive and rebellious. In the end, both men cause her pain.
Esther displays abnormal decision-making in her encounter with Marco. As he pins her to the ground and attempts to assault her she considers letting the assault happen and only becomes angry enough to fight back when he calls her a slut. Marco also serves to validate her hatred of societal misogyny. Esther’s problem is both chemical and societal. She inhabits a world where women are subjugated and hurt for their gender, and this exacerbates the depression caused by her inbuilt brain chemistry.
Esther tossing all her clothes off the roof symbolizes her shattered expectations of New York. She has not solidified her identity or reinvented herself, and her summer has been a failure.
Related Titles
By Sylvia Plath
