When I started this post a few days ago I was a little afraid that I'd waited to long to write about Buddy, given how far removed he seems from Esther's experience in the hospital, so I was weirdly pleased to see him return at the very end of the novel. Buddy strikes me as an extremely important character, if also a somewhat one-sided one. As the primary male figure in Esther's life, his failings seem to play into the specific form Esther's depression takes, even if she does assure him that he doesn't cause it. I'll get to that conversation and his return further down, but it's probably worth starting with his initial significance as the face of oblivious masculinity.
What Buddy represents is not just Esther's first love; he is the stand-in for men as they are meant to be, the husband promised by Reader's Digest. He appears to be everything that women in the 1950's were trained to want: kind and sexually innocent while still having the "masculine" traits of intelligence and physical fitness (as his beach push-ups are meant to indicate). His identity is wrapped up in being a caretaker, both of sick patients and the "weaker sex;" it's a role which he sees as loving and natural but which Esther comes to see as stiflingly authoritative. The "comes to" there is important, because at first Esther more than buys in to the Buddy Willard hype. She crushes on him from afar for years, and is absolutely thrilled when he asks her to the Junior Prom. This excitement quickly dissipates as he reveals himself to be an uninspiring kisser and less than engaging conversationalist. By the time Buddy reveals his "hypocrisy" while revealing himself, Esther seems bored by Buddy, to the point where his revelation may be a convenient dummy on which to blame her own flagging attraction.
The time during which Esther gets sick of Buddy also sees her begin to strain against the place of women in her society. While she still buys into the prescribed advice on things like dating and fashion, it is mostly because she fails to see any alternative. She commits minor acts of rebellion, such as refusing to learn shorthand or eating caviar the way she wants to, but is never able to remove herself fully from the fear of both marriage and spinsterhood. Sexuality is not the only expression of Esther's confinement by gender roles, but it is probably the starkest and (to Esther) most bewildering example. Trapped as she is between taboo sexual desire and the fear of childbirth, she not unfairly begins to blame men for their seemingly easy time navigating the sexual world without fear of repercussions. When Buddy admits his past sexual behavior, it doesn't just make him a hypocrite -- it confirms Esther's suspicion that men live totally different sexual lives than women, and therefore have no right to expect or prescribe anything. Men in this view keep women complacent through flattering lies about their own naivete, while giving them what amount to mind control drugs to make them think that childbirth is an acceptable consequence of sex. Buddy's carefully crafted identity as the friendly, knowledgeable doctor is shattered -- as is Esther's leg the last time she gives this character any leeway.
While much occurs between Esther's visit to Buddy's hospital and his visit to hers, whatever lessons she learns cohere and allow her to finally clear up her position with the "sick doctor." Having had significantly more experience with bad doctors by the time of this visit, she feels no respect for Buddy's position. Esther's time sick has, if nothing else, diminished Buddy's importance in her mind. His duplicity in dumping Joan as soon as Esther was available barely even registers as hypocrisy, the way this information would have if it had come earlier; Buddy just isn't that important any more. He's reduced to watching Esther shovel snow while needling her about if something is wrong with him; a significant role reversal in terms of both competence and authority. Now it is the patient reassuring the doctor, who can only sigh and dream of being taken to a Junior Prom.
(For what it's worth, I think this blog post is overly harsh on Buddy; I actually kind of feel for him as a character who's possibly even more dominated by his gendered place in society than Esther is, even if he does have a cushier position. But unfortunately this post is more about his role in Esther's mental journey, during which he kind of has to get thrown under the bus.)
I've had plenty of fun with old Buddy over the years, recounting Esther's version of his "seduction technique" to awkward laughter in class, and he sure does come across as something of a bonehead in the novel. And Plath gives us so much to work with there--he is a comical figure, and a great satire of 1950s masculine ideals. But he's also pretty hard to hate, I agree. He means well. He really has no idea what's going on with Esther, he's never heard of a "nice girl" like her going through anything like this (and significantly, his medical training has taught him nothing about psychology, or women, for that matter), and he is even more strongly influenced by his mother's gender ideology than Esther is. He represents the unthinking embrace of privilege, perhaps--while the unthinking part is less than ideal, the real villain is the privilege, which isn't really Buddy's fault.
ReplyDeleteLike Esther, when he appears again at the end, his car stuck in the snow (relying on *her* to do the traditionally "manly" job of shoveling him out), and he has his unintentionally hilarious line about "driving women crazy," it's hard not to like him. The big lug.