Esther Greenwood Character Analysis

Appearances are everything. In today’s society, it seems as though all things are taken at face value: who is dating who, who has had plastic surgery, what outfit celebrity XYZ wore on a midnight run to the convenience store. Americans are obsessed with gossip, infatuated with technology, and extremely opinionated. This proves to be a deadly combination; opinions spread quickly and soon evolve into societal norms. These standards are then forced upon the younger generations. Nowadays, girls grow up viewing stick-thin celebrities on their televisions and believe that their bodies are abnormal if they do not look the same. Eating disorders, body dysmorphia, and plastic surgery are at an all time high. Generations of women are burdened with depression,

The majority of the women that Esther finds herself surrounded by are spot-on representations of the domestic woman that Esther loathes. Because of this, Esther is frustrated by the picture-perfect women that she cannot bear to become. Dodo Conway, the prim and proper mother of seven that lives around the corner, is one such woman. Dodo is content to spend her days pushing strollers and cooking dinners while her husband is at work, and Esther cannot see why. She questions of herself, “Why [am] I so unmaternal and apart? Why [can’t] I dream of devoting myself to baby after fat puling baby like Dodo Conway?” because if she had to “wait on a baby all day, [she] would go mad” (Plath, The Bell Jar 222). Esther cannot understand how the women in her life are happy with being mothers when she is not. It seems to Esther as though she is the only woman who is not comfortable with conforming to the stifling societal standards of motherhood. On the other hand, if Esther were to give in to the pressures of motherhood she would still not please everyone. When she tells a colleague that she “might well get married and have a pack of children someday,” the poet stares at

During the time period in which Esther lives, it is normal and encouraged for a woman to get married to a wealthy man and bear his children. There are “few, if any, roles available to women beyond those of dutiful wife and mother” (Kuhl 1). A woman is expected to be a servant to her husband, a domestic housewife who lives to please. Esther struggles immensely with this expected role. Any men who show her interest are met with coldness because Esther fears she will be forced into becoming domestic. She is “afraid of getting married” and wishes to be “spared from cooking three meals a day [...] spared from the relentless cage of routine and rote” (Plath, Letters Home 23). Buddy Willard, a young doctor who is in love with her, is evaded by Esther. She dreads his every visit and laughs off his incessant marriage proposals because she knows that “in spite of all the roses and kisses [...] a man shower[s] on a woman before he marrie[s] her, what he secretly want[s] [... is] for her to flatten out underneath his feet like Mrs. Willard’s kitchen mat” (Plath, The Bell Jar 85). Esther cannot agree to marry Buddy because she knows that he will want to mold her into something she is not, a doting and servile wife who will cater to his every whim. She breaks his heart and leaves their relationship because she cannot bear to become the domestic woman that society hopes her