Every February, love is packaged as something aspirational, desirable, and easy to buy. We have grown used to being flooded by influencers running sponsored ads recommending the latest Lindt chocolates or rose-scented hand cream – presented as Valentine’s Day “must-haves” to show your partner how much you care. Valentine’s Day capitalises on an image of love as romantic and desirable. But in two of today’s most widely read novels, The Bell Jar and The Vegetarian, this image is dismantled. Love is instead presented as suffocating, performative, and deeply entangled with gender expectations.
Love as Performing a Social Script
The Bell Jar, published in 1963, is a semi-autobiographical novel that follows Esther Greenwood as she navigates the uneasy transition into adulthood in 1950s America. We watch her increasingly disengage from her surroundings as she attends glamorous parties and goes on a series of awkward, emotionally shallow dates. Alongside this social performance, she reflects on her relationship with Buddy Willard, to whom “everybody” assumes she “would marry.” Buddy appears to embody the ideal mid-century suitor: intelligent, respectable, and eager for marriage. Yet Esther hesitates, unsettled not only by his hypocrisy but by his dismissal of her literary ambition. When he suggests that after marriage she “wouldn’t want to write poems any more,” he reveals a cultural ideal in which a woman’s creative drive is expected to be usurped by domestic duty.
Esther’s uncertainty is described through the fig tree metaphor, in which she articulates her mental paralysis. One fig promises a conventional future, a “husband and a happy home with children”; another offers the possibility of becoming “a famous poet.” Other figs gesture toward freedom and adventure: a “string of lovers” or an “Olympic lady crew champion.” Yet as she sits unable to choose, the figs begin to “rot.” The image captures a historically gendered anxiety: the fear that choosing to have a family necessitates the loss of a career. Though such tension now resonates for many women as the pass through their twenties and thirties, it was especially acute in the 1950s, when marriage and domesticity were framed as a womens destiny rather than decision. Esther, like many of us today longs to inhabit multiple futures at once, but her world insists that she select only one. For her, Buddy represents the gravitational pull of societal expectation, and romantic love appears less as fulfilment than as the quiet sacrifice of her ambition.
While The Bell Jar explores the confinements of marriage through Esther’s doubts about accepting that future, The Vegetarian, first published in South Korea in 2007 and set in contemporary Seoul, examines what happens after that choice has already been made. Written by Han Kang, the novel traces the unraveling of a seemingly ordinary and dull marriage after Yeong-hye abruptly decides to stop consuming meat, a contraversial act in 2007 South Korea. Kang immediately defines Yeong-hye’s identity as tied to her domestic duties by introducing her through her husband’s narration, where she is referred to only as “my wife.” He admits that he married her because she was “completely unremarkable in every way,” revealing a union founded not on passion but on convenience and compliance. Intimacy is replaced with duty. Yeong-hye performs her daily chores according to her husband’s “expectations” and is praised as a “completely ordinary wife.” Here, ordinariness becomes a measure of success – not evidence of love, but proof that she fulfils the role assigned to her. When she begins to change, refusing to cook or consume meat, he complains that she is “no longer the docile wife” he married and subsequently divorces her, exposing how conditional his version of love has always been.
Together, The Bell Jar and The Vegetarian reveal that when love is structured around conformity, it ceases to be a refuge and instead becomes another oppressor, erasing female ambition, individuality and ultimately identity.
Love as Control Over the Female Body
Both novels describe how romantic love can function as a means of controlling the female body. In The Bell Jar, this is presented through Esther’s anxiety over virginity, reflecting a culture in which female sexuality operates as moral currency. She resents the expectation that she must remain “pure” while men are granted sexual freedom. She uses the words “purity” and “virginity” almost synonymously, separating the world into two groups: “people who had slept with somebody and people who hadn’t.” Her obsession is reinforced by the women around her who instruct young women to remain virgins until marriage – an idea that represents not only a cultural barrier but also a physical one, as the risk of pregnancy is emphasised to scare women into remaining “pure.” Esther’s interactions with Buddy push her to challenge this double standard. His expectation that she remain “pure” contrasts sharply with his own sexual experience, exposing the hypocrisy embedded within patriarchal ideas of love. As a result, Esther loses respect for Buddy, branding him as a ‘hypocrit’ and vowing not to marry him. In turmoil over her desire to lose her ‘virginity’ and fear of the societal implications after doing so, Esther in an act of defiance goes on birth control and chooses to lose her virginity, disrupting societal expectation and re-claiming authority over her own body and future.
In The Vegetarian, the consequences of female autonomy are explored through Yeong-hye’s refusal to eat meat. Kang makes it clear that her decision has “nothing” to do with her husband, reinforcing it as individual and self-directed – something that conflicts with the “passive” image he has constructed of her. Even in her physical and mental decline, she continues to be objectified and sexualised by her husband, who describes her deterioration through the appearance of her breasts. Before she becomes vegetarian, he describes them as “shapely,” then as “little more than a pair of small bumps,” and finally, once she is hospitalised, as “emaciated.” Measuring her health and value through the appearance of her breasts reinforces her role as a sexual object within marriage. Furthermore, as her husband loses interest in response to her defiance, her brother-in-law becomes increasingly obsessed, fixating on her “Mongolian mark.” Through his perspective, her nonconformity becomes aestheticised and eroticised.
He is drawn to her fragility, which contrasts with his wife’s strength and independence, suggesting that vulnerability itself becomes desirable. Rather than respecting Yeong-hye’s withdrawal from conventional roles, or being concerned over her declining health, he reframes her as a muse. Her emaciation, her silence, and her passivity transform her into a persona he watches and fantasises over rather than the sister-in-law he has known.
Ultimately, both texts show that when women assert autonomy over their bodies, love does not accommodate that independence – it responds by trying to contain, reinterpret, or reclaim it.
Conclusion
Both novels expose what happens when love is entered out of expectation rather than desire. It rewards obedience and resists female autonomy. Valentine’s Day may celebrate an image of love as idealised and meaningful, but The Bell Jar and The Vegetarian remind us that love shaped by expectation can quietly erode identity. What remains is not romance, but the unsettling realisation that intimacy, without equality, can become another form of confinement.
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