Power Struggles in The Bell Jar

During a class discussion about The Bell Jar the other day, we talked about what could be wrong with Esther Greenwood and why she feels negatively about a lot of things. I think much of what Esther dislikes about Buddy Willard is the idea that women don't have much power in marriage or medicine. Esther is bothered by Buddy's comment in Chapter 5 that Esther's poems are nothing but pieces of dust that won't matter in the long run. She gets the sense that Buddy doesn't care about what she has to say and that she won't be able to do what she loves--writing poetry--if they get married.

Another section of the novel that contributes to Esther's feelings that women have very little power or control over their lives is when she and Buddy witness a child birth. Mrs. Tomolillo, the woman having the baby, is very passive throughout the scene. She is put in the hands of a male medical student who has never delivered a baby before and fears he will drop the baby. Esther's description of this event associates doctors and medical students, who have never had babies themselves, with incompetence and apathy toward patients. On page 66, Plath writes:

"I thought it sounded just like the sort of drug a man would invent. Here was a woman in terrible pain, obviously feeling every bit of it or she wouldn't groan like that, and 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, doorless and windowless corridor of pain was waiting to open up and shut her in again."

Esther is uncomfortable with how the baby is delivered because the doctors seem to treat Mrs. Tomolillo in a way that limits her choices as a patient so that they don't have to more thoroughly interact with her. An interesting parallel to this scene is to Esther's other observations about men and sexuality. From both her own experiences and what she has seen occur with Doreen and Lenny, Esther is under the impression that women are entirely under the control of men. Toward the beginning of Chapter 2, Doreen says she wants Esther to stay with her at Lenny's apartment, alluding to the fact that Doreen would be pretty helpless if Lenny tried anything on her.

Similarly in Chapter 9, Esther's date with Marco bolsters her feeling that women are relatively powerless when interacting with men, and she is deeply bothered by that. She says Marco is an "invulnerable woman-hater," and the language she uses to describe the scene ("I didn't know where I was," and "the ground soared and struck me with a soft shock") add to the idea that Esther is powerless against Marco's manipulating physical strength.

These parts of The Bell Jar make me think that one of Esther's primary issues with others is that women lack control when it comes to both sex and child birth. She has witnessed numerous men who abuse and take advantage of women sexually, and her presence at the hospital during Mrs. Tomolillo's child birth rounds out the sense that women don't have much say in anything sex-/pregnancy-related. It will be interesting to see more examples of this in the upcoming chapters of the book and how Esther is affected by them; it already looks like these feelings have played a role in Esther's disgust with Buddy and their relationship, so there are a number of ways this theme could influence Esther's decisions later on in the novel.