The Bell Jar: Chapter 9 Summary & Analysis

One morning, Esther is stuck walking alone with Hilda, another contest winner who is a talented hat-maker but seems psychologically shallow, Esther tries to break the awkward silence by bringing up “how horrible” the Rosenbergs execution is. She thinks she’s inspired Hilda’s compassion but Hilda in fact remarks “It’s awful such people should be alive.” Esther thinks Hilda’s voice sounds like a dybuk (a possessing spirit). When Hilda yawns, Esther stares intrigued by “the blind cave behind her face.”

On her last day in New York, Esther feels she is going to cry, though she doesn’t know why. She is forced to sit in Jay Cee’s office for a last fashion shoot with the other contest winners. Each girl has to hold something to represent the career they aspire to but, when the photographers ask Esther what she wants to be, she says she doesn’t know. “She wants to be everything,” Jay Cee tells them. Esther says she wants to be a poet, but then can’t manage to smile as the photographer’s urge. She bursts into sobs and everyone leaves the office. When Esther sits up, she is alone and feels “limp and betrayed, like the skin shed by a terrible animal. It was a relief to be free of the animal, but it seemed to have taken my spirit with it.” In her compact mirror, her face appears to be the face of someone beaten up in jail, staring out between bars.

Jay Cee returns and hands Esther fiction submissions to read through. Esther thinks of her own fiction manuscript, which she has sent to apply to take a famous writer’s course later that summer. She is certain she’ll find her acceptance letter waiting for her at home. She thinks of sending Jay Cee stories under a pseudonym and of Jay Cee accepting them and scheduling lunch with the writer, who would turn out to be Esther.

Later that day, Doreen convinces Esther to come to a country club dance as the date of someone Lenny knows. Esther had been reluctant, having been unable to get her packing done. “It was becoming more and more difficult for me to decide to do anything in those last days,” she recalls. She’d “stared at [her clothes], utterly perplexed.” Doreen snowballed everything together and pushed it under the bed.

Doreen takes Esther to an apartment where she is introduced to Marco, her date, an immaculately dressed man with a diamond stickpin that entrances Esther. Esther walks in by “[putting] one foot in front of the other” and stares at the stickpin, which onlookers tease Marco into giving Esther. The others’ faces, Esther sees, are “empty as plates, and nobody seemed to be breathing.”

Marco says perhaps he will “perform some small service” for Esther that night that will be worth a diamond. He puts his arm around Esther and squeezes so hard she bruises. He reminds her of a snake she once angered at a zoo. He is “a woman-hater,” which Esther knows because, at the party, Marco ignores all the models and actresses to pay attention to her, simply because “I’d happened to be dealt to him, like a playing card in a pack of identical cards.” He decides what she should drink and forces her to dance the tango, instructing her to “pretend you are drowning.” Esther thinks about how “woman-haters could make such fools of women. Woman-haters were like gods: invulnerable and chock-full of power…You could never catch one.”

At a break in the music, Marco leads Esther into the garden outside the ballroom. Esther asks him who he’s in love with and he tells her: his beautiful first cousin. They can’t marry, and she’s going to be a nun. When Esther assures him he’ll love someone else eventually, he knocks her down in the mud and tears off her dress, calling her “slut” and getting ready to rape her: “he threw himself face down as if he would grind his body through me and into the mud.” Esther sees her own naked skin “like a pale veil separating two blood-minded adversaries.” Esther kicks and slams his nose and gets free from under him. “All sluts,” Marco murmurs, “Yes or no, it is all the same.”

Marco demands his diamond stickpin, drawing two lines of blood from his nose on Esther’s cheeks and saying he’s earned the diamond with his blood. Esther considers lying to him to conceal the diamond for herself, but then decides to tell him the truth that it’s in her purse fallen somewhere around them. She leaves Marco pawing in the dark mud. Back at the party, Esther tries to conceal her grass-matted, muddy back by standing close to the wall. She finds a place in a car driving back to Manhattan. Back at the Amazon, she climbs to the sunroof carrying the bundle of all her clothes and tosses each garment off the roof, watching it sail downwards. She “fed [her] wardrobe to the night wind….like a loved one’s ashes.”