Esther's Unease with Marriage

As I read the first several chapters of The Bell Jar, I was instantly intrigued by Esther Greenwood. She is so much less defined than Holden Caulfield and Stephen Dedalus who exude a tone of confidence in their convictions. We've already seen how drastically she changed her mind about Buddy Willard and Doreen. Or how she suddenly realizes that she doesn't know what she wants to do with her life after being certain for so long. And yet amidst this whirl of changing opinions, we see her forge her own unique ideas, apart from everyone else.

What really caught my attention was her perspective on dating, marriage, and sex. In a society with the double standard expecting women to remain virgins until marriage, she figures that because Buddy has already "known" a woman, she must "know" a man before being with him. This idea is contrary to everything her society has taught her. She describes an article from Reader's Digest which outlines the commonly held belief of the era that ideally a man and woman should both be chaste if unmarried, but if a man doesn't remain so, he should still expect purity from his wife.  In response to this article, Esther states, "I couldn't stand the idea of a woman having to have a single pure life and a man being able to have a double life, one pure and one not." Her feminist logic emerges, purely of her own thought, in a culture which wholly disagrees with her.

With regards to marriage, she perceives the institution as something daunting she wants to avoid. But when she does consider it as an option, she speaks very cynically of it:

Finally I decided that if it was so difficult to find a red-blooded intelligent man who was still pure by the time he was twenty-one I might as well forget about staying pure myself and marry somebody who wasn't pure either. Then when he started to make my life miserable I could make his miserable as well.

 Whereas the other girls around her seem to be building their futures around their plans to marry, Esther sees marriage as something that would only detract from her life.

The last thing I wanted was infinite security and to be the place an arrow shoots off from. I wanted change and excitement and to shoot off in all directions myself, like the colored arrows from a Fourth of July rocket.

Her fear of losing independence when marrying isn't without reason either, as Buddy has told her that once they're married, she won't be interested in poetry anymore, something she is very passionate about. She has also seen how dependent married women are on their husbands. In fact, her unusual views on marriage tie into her habit of constantly changing her mind and developing new opinions. She thrives on this amorphous style of thought, and she fears that getting married will constrict her to a stagnant state of existence.