THE BELL JAR - CHAPTER SUMMARY AND NOTES

CHAPTER 7

Summary

Constantin is too short for her, but he is handsome. He has intuition, something Esther thinks no American man has. They both joke about Mrs. Willard. She begins to think Constantin will see through all the exterior things and see what she really is. He drives her to the UN and she feels happier than she has in years. When inside the UN, she muses on the surprising thought that she has not been happy since she was nine years old. Despite all her motherÂ’s sacrifices to pay for activities for her, she had never been happy again. As she watches the proceedings of the UN, she begins to add up the things she cannot do. She cannot cook. She doesnÂ’t know shorthand. Her major is English and her mother always tells her an English major who knows shorthand is set for life. Esther, however, hates the idea of serving men in any way. She wants to dictate her own thrilling letters. She cannot dance, sing, has no balance, canÂ’t ride horses or ski, speak German, read Hebrew, write Chinese, and doesnÂ’t know geography. She feels inadequate. She is only good at winning scholarships and prizes and that era of her life is almost over.

She imagines her life as a big fig tree with each fig representing a possible direction for her to take. One would be to marry and have children, another is to be a famous poet, another is to be a brilliant professor, and another was Ee Gee, the amazing editor. The list is long. She imagines sitting in the tree starving but unable to decide.

Constantin takes her to an interesting restaurant. She tells him over dinner that she plans to learn German, go to Europe, and be a war correspondent like Maggie Higgins. By the end of dinner, she decides to have sex with him--or, as she thinks of it--"let Constantin seduce me." She has been thinking she needs to have sex ever since Buddy told her about Gladys. She thinks of Buddy as being ahead of her. Once, she had discussed sex with a man who had come to the campus for a date and found his date had eloped. His name was Eric and she had gone to a coffee shop with him to cheer him up. Eric was from a southern state. He was disgusted with the practice of women at the college standing around outside their dorms kissing their dates. He told her about his experience with sex. His southern prep school specialized in producing gentlemen and by the time one graduated, he was supposed to have had sex. EricÂ’s classmates took him to a house of prostitution. The woman he had sex with was fat and middle aged. She did not take off her clothes and would not turn off the light. He thought it was as boring as going to the toilet. Esther suggested that he might enjoy having sex with someone he loved, but he insisted that love would be spoiled by thinking this woman was an animal just like the rest. He told Esther if he fell in love, heÂ’d never have sex with her, only go to prostitutes for sex if he needed it. She had imagined that he would be a good candidate for having sex with, but he had then written her that he could fall in love with her, so the plan was lost. She wrote him back saying she was marrying a childhood sweetheart.

Esther likes the idea of "being seduced by" Constantin. He has all the right qualities: heÂ’s mature, he knows none of her friends, and she would enjoy the irony of having sex with someone to whom Mrs. Willard had introduced her. Constantin invites her up to his room to hear some balalaika records and Esther immediately thinks this is merely a ruse. Her mother had mailed her an article on the impossibility of preventing pregnancy by 100 per cent. The article was titled, "In Defense of Chastity"and it argued the extreme differences between women and men and proposed that only marriage could bring the two worlds together. The article added that most men wanted their wives to be "pure," but that they would try to convince their girlfriends to have sex. After they had sex, however, they would never want to marry the woman for fear that she would have sex with others as well. Esther notices that the article never considered how the woman felt. She worries about what would happen if the woman remained a virgin, married a man who said he was a virgin, and only later found out that he had lied. She hates the idea of the woman having one life--"a pure life"-- while the man was able to have a "double life, one pure and one not." She decides it would be better to have sex now and marry a man who also had lost his virginity. Then if he tried to make her life miserable as the article alleged he would, she could return the favor. At nineteen, virginity is the primary dividing line categorizing people for Esther.

Esther and Constantin sit on the balcony for an hour listening to music and Constantin makes no move to seduce her. Finally, she goes inside and lies down on his bed. Then he comes in and lies down beside her. She peers at him from behind her hair. She wonders if when she begins to like him he would fall into ordinariness as Buddy had. "The last thing I wanted was infinite security and to be the place an arrow shoots off from." She wants "to shoot off in all directions" herself.

She wakes up and itÂ’s raining outside. She hears Constantin breathing. She looks at him lying there in his clothes and tries to imagine what it would be like to be married to him. She would have to get up at 7:00 in the morning and cook breakfast for him and then wait for him to come home from a lively and fascinating day and cook dinner for him. She thinks this is a terrible way to end fifteen years of straight As, but she knows itÂ’s the life of a wife because thatÂ’s how Buddy WillardÂ’s mother lives.

She remembers seeing Mrs. Willard braiding a rug of wool one day. It took her weeks to complete it. It was full of beautiful colors. When she was finished, she didnÂ’t hang it on the wall as Esther would have done. She put it on the kitchen floor where it became indistinguishable from a dime store mat that would cost under a dollar. She thinks that no matter how many roses and dinners a man gives a woman before marriage, after marriage he really only wants her to flatten out under his feet like Mrs. WillardÂ’s rug. EstherÂ’s mother had told her that when she and EstherÂ’s father left Reno on their honeymoon, he had said, "Well, thatÂ’s a relief, now we can stop pretending and be ourselves." After that, EstherÂ’s mother "never had a minuteÂ’s peace." She also remembers Buddy telling her that after she has children she wouldnÂ’t want to write poetry any more.

Constantin wakes up. ItÂ’s three in the morning. As they get up to dress, he touches her hair. She feels good at the touch. Then he says something mundane about it and the moment is gone. He drives her home. In her hotel room bed she hears the rain and she feels the dull ache of an old break in her leg. She thinks of how Buddy Willard made her break it, then she corrects herself and tells herself that she broke it on purpose.

Notes

Her hope that Constantin will "see through all that stuff to what I really am" indicates her need for affirmation. She can only imagine getting affirmation about her self worth from the outside.

Esther recognizes the ideal of chastity as the patriarchal control of women. In the older manifestations of patriarchy, womenÂ’s sexuality was stringently guarded as a control of whose baby she had. Since patriarchy works on patrilineal lines (the father passes on the name), the control of the womanÂ’s body had to be taken from her to ensure that she had only her husbandÂ’s baby and his name went to the legitimate offspring. In modern times, this patriarchal control of the womanÂ’s body is less directly tied to patrilineal descent. It has become more diffused in its aim so that it is a general means of social control of women. Nevertheless, it is a clear reason why menÂ’s sexuality is never as urgently guarded as womenÂ’s.

EstherÂ’s introduction to marriage has been at the voice of Mrs. Willard, her mother, Buddy Willard and magazine articles urging chastity. She cannot imagine marriage as anything but domestic drudgery, the parceling out of only two roles: one is exciting and outside the house and the other is dull and inside the house. In light of such descriptions, itÂ’s no wonder Esther feels fearful of marriage and imagines that it means subsuming her talents and goals for a senseless dullness, just as Mrs. Willard wove something beautiful and then used it in a way that made it dull and ugly when she could have just bought a rug for a dollar.

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