THE BELL JAR - CHAPTER SUMMARY WITH NOTES / ANALYSIS

CHAPTER 9

Summary

"I’m so glad they’re going to die." Thus the chapter opens on Hilda’s words about the Rosenberg executions, the anticipation of the events with which Esther opened her narrative. Hilda is wearing a bile green hat, a color that the fashion magazine is promoting for the fall. As she walks with Hilda, she notices Hilda continuously checking herself out in the mirrors they pass "as if to make sure, moment by moment, that she continued to exist." When Esther tries to make conversation by asking "Isn’t it awful about the Rosenbergs" Hilda responds by exclaiming "Yes!" However, she then says how awful it is that people like the Rosenbergs should be alive. She yawns and then says she’s glad they’ll die.

Esther stands in front of a camera in Jay Cree’s office being urged to smile. She is the last of the twelve women to have her picture taken. She’s been hiding in the bathroom because she feels like she is about to start crying and she can’t figure out why. It is the last round of photographs before all the women go back home. They are being photographed with props to show what they would be. Betsy, for instance, held up an ear of corn to show she wanted to be a farmer’s wife. When they asked Esther, she said she didn’t know. Finally she said she wanted to be a poet. She stands in front of the camera holding a white paper rose and begins to cry. She feels great relief in the tears. After she finishes crying, Jay Cree comes back in with a pile of manuscripts. The manuscripts pile up every day at the magazine. She thinks of a manuscript with her own name on it. She had applied for a summer school course with a famous writer. She sent him a story so he could read it and see if she would do for the course. She hasn’t yet heard from him, but she feels sure she will get a letter of acceptance when she gets home to her mother’s house. She fantasizes about sending her manuscripts under a pseudonym to Jay Cree and then surprising her at lunch one day.

Doreen is trying to set her up on another blind date. She says the man is from Peru. Doreen wants her to go to a country club dance with a friend of Lenny’s. It is the last night she will be in New York and she has not yet packed. In the last days of her New York stay, she has found it very difficult to do anything. When she’s tried to pack, she’s pulled out all the "grubby, expensive clothes" and spread them out. Then she just stares at them, unable to do anything with them. Doreen helps her by stuffing all the clothes under the bed.

At the door, Doreen hugs Lenny. Esther looks at the other man in the room and tries to stay detached, telling herself she is just an observer. She sees a tall man who has dark hair and has a very bright stickpin. She is fascinated by the stickpin. Someone tells Marco to give her the diamond. He does so. She puts it into her evening bag. Marco takes her arm and says he is escorting her tonight and hints that he will perform some service that will win him the diamond back. He squeezes her arm so hard that he leaves bruises all around it. Marco points out the bruises to her and tells her she should see that he is quite serious. She decides Marco is a misogynist. He pays total attention to her all night only because she "happened to be dealt to him, like a playing card in a pack of identical cards."

At the country club, the band starts up and Marco reaches for Esther’s hand. She is drinking a daiquiri and enjoying it, so she doesn’t want to dance. She also tells him she doesn’t know how to dance. He tells her not to be stupid and pulls her to the dance floor by force. He tells her she doesn’t have to dance because he will do all the dancing. He dances with her and she realizes what he said was true. She only needed to let herself be maneuvered around. She realizes why women haters make such fools of women. They act as if they were gods, totally full of power. During an interval in the music, Marco leads her outside into the garden. It is very dark outside. Marco smokes and she asks him who he is in love with. He says he loves his cousin, but that it is impossible to marry her because she is his first cousin and she is going to be a nun. She tells him he will love someone else someday and he knocks her down. When she tries to rise, he pushes her back down into the mud. He lands on top of her and she thinks, "It’s happening. If I just lie here and do nothing it will happen." Marco tears her dress off her and calls her a slut. She fights him off, bloodying his nose. She tells him she wants Doreen. He just keeps repeating that women are all sluts whether they say yes or no to sex. He wants his diamond back. She refuses to give it back. It’s in her purse in the bushes and she plans to retrieve it the next day. He threatens to break her neck if she doesn’t tell him. She tells him it’s in her bag somewhere in the muck and walks away. She cannot find Doreen. She asks one driver after another until one agrees to give her a lift back to Manhattan.

She is standing on the roof of the Amazon. She is in her bathrobe. She drags a folding chair to the parapet and begins to throw all her new clothes off the roof.

Notes

Her experience with Marco demonstrates for Esther the more brutal side of patriarchy. She imagines herself as a card. She says, she "happened to be dealt to him, like a playing card in a pack of identical cards." In this, Plath is getting at a central element of patriarchy. The woman’s position in patriarchy is essentially an empty slot which can be filled by any woman. A good way to see this concept is to examine the way names are given. In a patrilineal naming system, a woman gets her father’s name and then when she gets married, she changes her name and takes her husband’s name. She will be called something like Mrs. Harry Smith. If she divorces this man or dies, he can remarry and his new wife will have her identical name: Mrs. Harry Smith. For Marco, Esther has no identity of her own. She is valuable only insofar as she fills a slot for him.

Esther is nearly raped in this chapter. It’s telling that her first response is to lie passively and let it happen, thinking perhaps that she will get it over. Esther is unaware that she has been trained in such passivity, readied, as it were, for accepting rape as her initiation into sexual life. She is only spurred to action by Marco’s violence.

Why does Esther respond to the attempted rape by trying first to keep the diamond and second by throwing all her clothes away?

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