Behind every successful man there is a woman

Intelligent, handsome, and athletic, Buddy Willard is described as the perfect man in Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar. At first, Esther believes this herself. She “adored him from a distance for five years before he even looked at me”, but eventually “he was looking at me more and more I discovered quote by accident what an awful hypocrite he was” (52). It is through Buddy that Esther is first presented with the conventional idea that a woman’s role is society is to help the man, and not herself. This idea makes her confused, troubled, and isolated, as she feels that she is the only one who sees through these gender stereotypes.

Esther, or in fact any well-educated middle class girl at the time, is expected to do nothing more in life than find a husband. She hears this when Mrs. Willard explains to Buddy “What a man is is an arrow into the future, and what a woman is is the place the arrow shoots off from”. This quote reminded me exactly of the quote “behind every successful man there is a woman”, which implies that a woman’s role is to support her husband and nurture him so he can fulfill his ambitions. A woman should, according to these quotes, strive to help their husband rather than work towards their own goals. This societal norm disturbs Esther, who has worked her whole life for herself. She has achieved such a status and intelligence that to throw it all away for a man doesn’t make any sense to her. She realizes that she cannot work towards a marriage and career because marrying someone would mean she would have to let go of her writing career.

The worst part of Esther’s case is that her path to marriage seems to be already decided: everyone around her already sees Buddy as her perfect match. In reality, Esther knows his limitations. She first sees it when Buddy tells Esther what a poem really is: “a piece of dust”. But this wasn’t what he thought when he read the poems of doctor. When Esther writes poetry, Buddy doesn’t think it’s serious, but when he reads the works of a man doing the same thing, suddenly poems are valid. He believes his occupation to be superior and patronizes her. Just like what his mother tells him, Buddy seems to be looking for a woman that will devote her life to him; which is not what Esther is looking for.