Dodo Conway and the "American Dream" Esther Never Wanted
Dodo Conway is barely in The Bell Jar, but I think she might be one of the most important characters in it. Even her name feels deliberate. Plath seems to have quite literally named this woman after an extinct bird, and not just any bird. The dodo was flightless, studied and catalogued by scientists like a specimen before it went extinct, defined almost entirely by its biology and its inability to go, quite literally, anywhere. Plath naming this character Dodo doesn't feel like a coincidence. She lives next door to Esther's family, and every time she appears, she is pregnant, pushing a baby carriage and trailed by "two or three small children…wobbled along in the shadow of her skirts" (Plath 116). She is not presented as miserable or trapped. She is devoted to her life, almost radiant in it, and that is exactly what makes her so unsettling to read. Plath doesn't use Dodo to argue that domesticity is a trap for all women. She uses her to show that it doesn't ma...