Minor Men in The Bell Jar

Important Male Supporting Characters in Sylvia Plath’s Only Novel

Nov 10, 2009

To understand what happens in The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath you need to know how all the characters compliment or contrast with the main character Esther Greenwood.

Most of the men in Sylvia Plath’s novel, The Bell Jar, represent the American patriarchy of the mid-1900’s. Every man that Esther encounters betrays Esther’s hopes and desires to their own selfishness. Esther thinks about her relationship with one of her dates and realized that “as he came to like me he would sink into ordinariness, and if as soon as he came to love me I would find fault after fault, the way I did with Buddy Willard and the boys before him. The same thing happened over and over: I would catch sight of some flawless man off in the distance, but as soon as he moved closer I immediately saw he wouldn’t do at all.” (92)

As a result, each man and the incident attached with him in Esther’s memory reveals one more facet in the treachery of men in Esther’s life and mind.

Lenny Shepherd

Lenny Shepherd is an arrogant disc jockey. Lenny takes Doreen and Esther to his apartment, which is made up to look like something out of the west. When Doreen and Lenny start making out, Esther leaves.

Franky

Franky is the man that Lenny Shepherd has come along as a ‘date’ for Esther, while he seduces Doreen. Esther gives Franky the fake name of Elly Higginbottom so that nothing that happened could be traced back to her. When Esther refuses to dance with him he gets some money that he says Lenny owes him and leaves.

Constantin

Constantin is a simultaneous translator at the U.N. who Mrs. Willard (Esther’s boyfriend’s mother) introduces her to. They meet and Constantin takes Esther on a tour of the U.N. followed by a meal, and a night at his apartment. Esther plans to let him seduce her as a way of getting even with Buddy but they both fall asleep instead.

Eric

Eric is a man who comes to Esther’s school and finds that his date had eloped with a taxi driver. He shares with Esther how he lost his virginity with a whore and told her that sex was boring and appropriate only for animals. He decided that he didn’t want to marry a woman who, like an animal enjoyed sex. So the woman he loved would never have sex with him. He would have a whore for sex and “keep the woman he loved free of all that dirty business.” (88)

Esther considers giving her virginity to him until he says that he might be able to fall in love with her and then she realizes he would never go to bed with her and so she tells him she is engaged to her childhood sweetheart.

Mr. Willard

Mr. Willard is Buddy Willard’s father. Mr. Willard is a soft-spoken, gentle man. Esther doesn’t want to disappoint him. She feels deserted when he abandons her at the sanatorium with Buddy. His attitude towards Buddy in the sanatorium foreshadows Buddy’s response to the news that Esther was in an asylum. “His father simply couldn’t stand the sight of sickness…because he though all sickness was sickness of the will.” (102)

Marco

Marco is the last date that Doreen sets Esther up with before they leave New York. He is a cruel man and a woman-hater. He confesses to Esther that he loves his first cousin who is going to enter a convent. He gives Esther a diamond stickpin and later attempts to rape her. When Esther fights back; he wants the diamond back.

Dr. Gordon

Dr. Gordon is Esther’s first psychiatrist after her breakdown. Esther hates him the first time she sees him. At first he listens to her but does nothing for her. After several very expensive visits, Dr. Gordon sends her to his private hospital where he gives her electric shock treatments.

Cal

Cal is a boy that her friend Jody sets her up with. They double date with Jody and a boy named Mark. Cal is supposed to be very intelligent and cute. He and Esther discuss various methods of suicide.

Esther’s Father

Esther’s father died when she was nine. Esther liked her father more than her mother and was angry with her mother for neglecting his grave. She wishes that he had lived to teach her.

Irwin

Irwin is a professor of mathematics that Esther meets when on leave from the asylum. He is an ugly man with glasses and Esther decides that he will be the man with whom she will lose her virginity. She chooses him because he is intelligent and experienced. She also wants someone she doesn’t know and won’t want to get to know as the person to take her virginity.

The copyright of the article Minor Men in The Bell Jar in American Fiction is owned by Melissa Howard. Permission to republish Minor Men in The Bell Jar in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.