The Bell Jar

Confined By Expectation
“The main point of the article was that a man's world is different from a woman's world and a man's emotions are different from a woman's emotions and only marriage can bring the two worlds and the two different sets of emotions together properly...This woman lawyer said the best men wanted to be pure for their wives, and even if they weren't pure, they wanted to be the ones to teach their wives about sex.” (Pg. 44-45) Esther feels confined because the principles of society are forcing her into preconceived notions about sex that every “respectable” woman should abide by. This claustrophobic effect of forced ideas is shaped by Esther’s individual way of looking at things, and the division in Esther’s mind of the entire world between virgins and non-virgins.
Esther views sex in a couple different ways, but most prominently she equates sex with motherhood. After seeing the childbirth with Buddy, she is terrified of having to go through something so seemingly torturous for something so “insignificant” as a baby. “I stepped from the air-conditioned compartment onto the station platform, and the motherly breath of the suburbs enfolded me…it smelled of babies. A Summer calm laid its soothing hand over everything, like death.” (Pg. 113). She does not view motherhood in a very positive light, relating it in one way to the suburbs, and the stench of babies, and then with death. She also views motherhood as if it was all a conspiracy to keep women in this sort of “brainwashed” state due to epidurals and other surrounding lies of bliss. She is also very afraid of the commitment because it seems like such a daunting possibility in risking premarital sex-the commitment of possibly having an unwanted child. She is only free of these confined thoughts later in the book when she is fitted for a diaphragm, allowing her to finally experience sex with “freedom from fear, freedom from marrying the wrong person, like Buddy Willard, just because of sex, freedom from the Florence Crittenden Homes where all the girls so who should have been fitted out like me, because what they did, they would do anyway, regardless…” (Pg. 223).
Her view of sex also separates the world into two categories: virgins, and non-virgins. Esther wants to be a virgin when she gets married but when she finds out about Buddy’s affair, she decides that if they were to get married, then she would have to get even by having sex with someone else. “ Ever since I’d learned about the corruption of Buddy Willard my virginity weighed like a millstone around my neck. It had been of such enormous importance to me or so long that my habit was to defend it at all costs. I had been defending it for five years and I was sick of it.”(Pg. 228). Esther is constantly trying to lose her virginity, but when she finally does, she feels like she is dying because she is bleeding so much. This could be a sign that a part of her wishes she did wait until marriage to have sex. She is also confounded by the lack of change she was prepared for, a change in character or something more dramatic...but nothing happens and she is left bleeding in wonder as to whether she was still a virgin or not.
Esther’s thoughts concerning society’s very constricting views about sex is not only due to the fact that she is mentally ill. Society has twisted the interpretation of exactly how a woman should approach sex by lying to women about how making babies was the most pleasant and desirable purpose a woman could experience in her life. She says, “I thought it sounded just like the sort of drug a man would invent...she would go straight home and start another baby, because the drug would make her forget how bad the pain had been, when all the time, in some secret part of her, that long, blind, door-less and windowless corridor of pain was waiting to open up and shut her in again.”(Pg 25). Due to epidurals, and other drugs, women wouldn’t even remember the pain of childbirth and go right back to making babies. Engrained in most women’s minds is the idea that they are meant to grow up, go to college, and then completely disregard those years to become the perfectly brainwashed virgin wife, and make lots of babies with her sometimes more “experienced” husband. Esther is only freed mentally from this notion of inescapable motherhood in the end when she is finally fitted for a diaphragm, and can experience sex safely without having to involve long term commitments.