Mrs. Willard

Mrs. Willard is Buddy Willard’s mother and a forceful presence in Esther Greenwood’s understanding of courtship, sexual purity, and women’s futures, although she is often encountered through the language and memories of others. Her domestic advice promises security through marriage, but Esther sees that promise as inseparable from a double standard: Buddy has a sexual past while the woman is expected to preserve a single, “pure” life. Later, Joan Gilling’s affection for Mrs. Willard complicates Esther’s view of her, presenting her not only as the voice of convention but also as a generous maternal figure.

Identity and Domestic Influence

Mrs. Willard is closely involved in Buddy’s life and supplies much of the vocabulary he uses to explain relations between men and women. Esther recalls that he repeatedly quoted his mother’s maxims, making her ideas present even when Mrs. Willard herself was absent. Her influence thus reaches Esther less through sustained direct conversation than through the rules Buddy carries into their relationship and the assumptions Esther reads in his family life.

Mrs. Willard also appears as a practical-minded hostess. When Esther recognizes the familiar invitation to have a bite to eat, she remembers that Buddy had once stayed in the home of a family that opened its house to foreign visitors, in an arrangement of reciprocal hospitality. Esther interprets the invitation in New York as Mrs. Willard having exchanged that earlier open-house hospitality for a meal with her. The familiar phrase does not feel like spontaneous intimacy to Esther: it recalls the social obligations and domestic conventions that Mrs. Willard represents.

Marriage, Sexuality, and Advice

Mrs. Willard’s most consequential influence is expressed through Buddy’s repeated account of her teachings. He tells Esther that his mother said a man wants a mate and a woman wants “infinite security,” and that a man is an arrow into the future while a woman is the place from which the arrow is launched. The paired images assign the man motion and purpose, and the woman a supporting, anchoring role. Esther grows tired of hearing them, in part because the tidy formulation leaves little room for a woman’s independent ambitions or account of her own desire.

The contrast between the ideal and Buddy’s behavior sharpens Esther’s distrust. She knows Mrs. Willard is a committed advocate of virginity for both men and women, and remembers Mrs. Willard scrutinizing her at their first supper as if assessing whether she was a virgin. Yet Buddy has had an affair with Gladys, a waitress, and Esther doubts that he would speak to his mother as rudely or candidly as he claims to have done when defending Gladys. His sexual history and his evasiveness make Mrs. Willard’s professed standard appear less like an equal rule in practice than an ideal that does not prevent a man from leading a double life.

Esther’s response develops beyond anger at Buddy’s affair. She objects to the arrangement in which a woman is expected to remain pure while a man can possess both a respectable public identity and sexual experience. At nineteen, she treats “pureness” as a central problem and imagines refusing the unequal bargain: if she cannot find an intelligent man who has remained pure, she may abandon the requirement for herself rather than accept a standard that restricts only women. Mrs. Willard is not the sole source of that social code, but her scrutiny and maxims give it a recognizable domestic voice.

Reproductive Risk and Women’s Choices

The marriage ideal also meets the material question of pregnancy. Esther recalls an article her mother sent from Reader’s Digest, written by a married woman lawyer and titled “In Defense of Chastity.” It argued that men and women belonged to different emotional worlds and that marriage joined them properly; it warned that there was no completely reliable way to avoid having a baby. Although the article is not identified as Mrs. Willard’s writing, its argument belongs to the same wider counsel of chastity and marriage that Esther associates with the older generation’s advice.

Esther resists that counsel because it gives little weight to how a girl feels and makes the consequences of sex fall unevenly. The prospect of a baby appears to her as a constraint on a woman’s freedom, not simply as an abstract warning in an argument for virtue. Later, she tells Doctor Nolan that she hates the thought of being under a man’s thumb and describes the baby as a threat that could keep her in line. Her reflections connect the language of security and marriage to the bodily risks women bear, and to the limited choices available to them.

When Esther goes into town for a fitting, she rejects the appealing cover story that she plans to marry a sailor and simply answers yes when the doctor asks whether she wants the fitting. She thinks of the appointment as a step toward freedom: freedom from fear, from marrying the wrong person merely because of sex, and from the fate of poor girls who might become pregnant without the protection she is seeking. This episode does not show Mrs. Willard directly controlling Esther’s decision; it shows the reproductive pressure surrounding the marital advice Mrs. Willard represents. Esther’s choice is a practical answer to a risk that ideals of chastity and security cannot remove.

Joan’s Attachment and Mrs. Willard’s Double Aspect

Joan Gilling offers a different account of Mrs. Willard. When asked whether she had liked Buddy, Joan says it was his family she liked, particularly Mr. and Mrs. Willard. She remembers them as nice and happy, unlike her own parents, and says she visited them often until Esther came into the picture. In Joan’s recollection, Mrs. Willard’s household has been a source of belonging rather than merely a school for conventional rules.

Joan later says she hopes Buddy may bring his mother when he visits, calling Mrs. Willard a wonderful woman who has been a real mother to her. Esther pictures Mrs. Willard in heather-mixture tweeds and sensible shoes, accompanied by the wise maternal maxims she associates with her. The image folds warmth and prescription together: Joan remembers an accepting mother, while Esther sees the figure who taught Buddy to define women through security and supportive roles. Mrs. Willard’s significance lies in that unresolved doubleness. She can be loved as a substitute mother and still stand for a social ideal that Esther resists because its assurances of protection come with unequal demands on women.