The Bell Jar: Chapter 7 Summary & Analysis

Constantin arrives to pick Esther up from the Amazon and is not the disappointment she thought he would be. They bond over their mutual dislike for Mrs. Willard. Sitting in Esther’s convertible en route to the UN where Constantin works as a simultaneous interpreter, Esther realizes she hasn’t felt so happy since she was a child running on the beach with her father before he died. Esther reflects how strange it is that she’s never realized this before, that all through the lessons and achievements of her youth, she’s never actually been happy.

At the UN, Esther watches a Russian girl interpreter at work and wishes she “could crawl into her and spend the rest of my life barking out one idiom after another…one more little pebble of efficiency among all the other pebbles.” Esther makes a mental tally of all the things she can’t do: cooking, dancing, singing, balancing, horse-riding, skiing, speaking other languages, shorthand (which her mother keeps urging her to learn in order to be hirable as a secretary after college, but which Esther avoids since she “hated the idea of serving men in any way. I wanted to dictate my own thrilling letters.”). Esther realizes she’s “been inadequate all along,” she just hasn’t realized it in the past. Her one talent, she thinks, is “winning scholarships and prizes, and that era was coming to an end.”

Esther sees “my life branching out before me like the green fig-tree in the story” she’d read. Every branch grew a different future like a ripening fruit: being a poet or a professor or an editor or a world traveler or an athlete or having a host of exotic lovers. Esther sees herself “sitting in the crotch of this fig-tree, starving to death, just because I couldn’t make up my mind which of the figs I would choose,” since choosing one meant losing the rest.

Constantin takes Esther to an exotic restaurant and she feels better after eating. She wonders if her vision of the fig-tree of her life might simply have been caused by “the profound void of an empty stomach.”

During dinner, Esther decides to let Constantin seduce her. She has wanted to sleep with someone ever since she’s heard about Buddy’s affair, so that they’d be even. She accompanies Constantin up to his apartment and, as they sit listening to music and drinking wine, Esther calmly recalls warnings from her mother and the female lawyer who wrote an article called ‘In Defense of Chastity’ that there is no sure way to avoid a baby and that a girl should thus stay abstinent till marriage. The woman lawyer insisted that “a man’s world is different from a woman’s world and a man’s emotions different from a woman’s emotions” and only marriage could unite the two. The woman lawyer assured her readers that, no matter what men said, they would “lose all respect for” any girl that slept with them before marriage.

Esther reflects that the article didn’t consider “how a girl felt” and thinks how unfair it would be to stay pure for someone who wasn’t pure himself, like Buddy. The world Esther sees is one in which “pureness was the great issue…I saw the world divided into people who had slept with somebody and people who hadn’t.” Esther imagines she’ll be transformed by sex, that she’ll be able to see a tiny replica of the man she slept with in her eye in the mirror.

Esther says she’s tired and goes to lie down on Constantin’s bed. He follows her and lies down too. She watches him, finding him utterly beautiful. But she wonders whether he, like all the other men she’s gotten to know, would seem to lose their beauty once she got to know him. They fall asleep. When she wakes, she looks at Constantin sleeping and imagines how unglamorous it would be to be married to Constantin, as to any man: she’d be stuck cooking and cleaning and slaving away, just as her mother and Mrs. Willard—who was educated and had once been a teacher—had been stuck. She recalls watching Mrs. Willard laboriously braid an elaborate rag rug to throw on the kitchen floor and thinking how, if she had braided the rug, she’d hang it on a wall. Esther thinks how getting married and having children is “like being brainwashed” into being “numb as a slave in some private, totalitarian state.”

Constantin wakes up and drives Esther home. She lies in bed, listening to rain and feeling an ache in her shin from an old leg-break. She thinks Buddy made her break it, then corrects the thought, thinking she broke it herself by being so stubborn.