The Bell Jar: Chapter 6 Summary & Analysis

After graduating Yale, Buddy went on to medical school and Esther recollects visiting Buddy there and discovering he was a hypocrite. She was very curious about the “hospital sights” and spent a day with Buddy going about his studies. She saw cadavers and deformed fetuses preserved in formaldehyde, and remembers being proud of “the calm way I stared at all these gruesome things.”

After lunch, Buddy took Esther to go see a baby being born. Will, the med student scheduled to deliver the baby, mutters to Esther beforehand, “You oughtn’t to see this…You’ll never want to have a baby if you do. They oughtn’t to let women watch. It’ll be the end of the human race.” Esther and Buddy had laughed it off. Then, Esther was horrified by the birthing table the woman (Mrs. Tomolillo) had to lie on, which looked like a kind of “torture table.”

Buddy explained that Mrs. Tomolillo, who was making a continuous “unhuman whooing noise,” had been drugged so that she would forget the pain she had. Esther was horrified, thinking the drug was “just like the sort of drug a man would invent. Here was a woman in terrible pain, obviously feeling every bit of it…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.”

It was a difficult birth and the doctors had to cut open Mrs. Tomolillo’s vagina open to deliver the baby, but the baby was born intact and Mrs. Tomolillo got sewn up properly. Yet when they told her that the baby had been born, Mrs. Tomolillo was too drugged to understand and lay there unresponsive. Esther was appalled, having always felt that the most important thing about giving birth would be seeing “the baby come out of you yourself and making sure it was yours.” She thought that it would be better to stay conscious if one had to be in so much pain anyway.

Back in Buddy’s room, Buddy had Esther read him a poem and explain the value of it, a ritual he’d initiated so that he might understand the worth of poetry and its importance to Esther.

After hearing the poem, Buddy asked Esther if she’d ever seen a man naked and if she’d like to see him. She said she hadn’t and she would. She thought how her mother and grandmother had been hinting to her “what a fine, clean boy Buddy Willard was...how he was the kind of person a girl should stay fine and clean for.” Esther was unimpressed by Buddy’s penis. She declined to undress in reciprocation, saying “’Oh, some other time.’” She compared getting naked in front of Buddy to having “my Posture Picture taken at college.” Buddy dressed.

Combing her hair in front of her face, Esther asked Buddy from behind the curtain of hair whether he’d ever had an affair. She’d expected him to say he was a virgin saving himself for marriage, but Buddy blushed and confessed to a summer-long affair with a waitress, Gladys, who seduced him while he was bussing tables in Cape Cod. Esther was blown away and inwardly furious, though she didn’t let on. She thought how all through their courtship, Buddy had hypocritically acted like she was “much more sexy and experienced” when all along he was just pretending to be innocent. She observed how typical it was that “someone had seduced Buddy…it wasn’t really his fault.” She wasn’t annoyed that Buddy had had sex, she was annoyed that he wouldn’t own up to that experience in public, claiming instead to be so perfectly innocent.

Esther asked Buddy what Mrs. Willard thought of his affair, since she knew he was very close to his mother and that Mrs. Willard was obsessed with virginity. Buddy was always praising his parents’ marriage and quoting to Esther Mrs. Willard’s conservative maxims about marriage, such as “a man is an arrow into the future and…a woman is the place the arrow shoots off from.” Buddy said he had told his mother off, but Esther knew he was lying. Back at college, she asked other girls what they’d do if they found out about a boy’s promiscuous past, and the girls shrugged it off saying “most boys were like that and you couldn’t honestly accuse them of anything until you were at least pinned or engaged to be married.”

In the weeks after the visit, Esther decided to break up with Buddy, but just when she’d made the decision, he called distraught to tell her he’d contracted TB and was going to a sanatorium. He wanted Esther to promise to write and visit frequently, and she promised. She thought how he’d always been so proud of his good health and had attributed Esther’s sinus ailments to “psychosomatic” causes. Esther had always “thought this an odd attitude for a doctor to have and perhaps he should study to be a psychiatrist instead.” Esther thought Buddy’s TB “might just be a punishment for living the kind of double life Buddy lived and feeling so superior to people.”

Esther was secretly relieved that Buddy had TB as she was saved the trouble of telling everyone at college that she’d dumped him. She told everyone instead that she was waiting for Buddy to recover. For the rest of the year, Esther studied all weekend undisturbed by the other girls, who pitied her and assumed she was studying “to hide a broken heart.”