In the story, the banquet, which Esther attends, is held by Ladies’ Day magazine staff. The connection here can be made that it is a celebration of women, and for Esther this means she can enjoy herself and eat all of the luxurious food she wants without worrying about the price because she is at a banquet.
“There was eleven of us girls from the magazine, together with most of our supervising editors, and the whole staff of the Ladies’ Day Food Testing Kitchens in hygienic white smocks, neat hairnets and flawless makeup of a uniform peach-pie color”
Ladies’ Day from Wikipedia :
In the western liturgical year, Lady Day is the traditional name of the Feast of the Annunciation of the Blessed Virgin (25 March) in some English-speaking countries. It is the first of the four traditional English quarter days. The “Lady” is the Virgin Mary. The term derives from Middle English, when some nouns lost their genitive inflections. “Lady” would later gain an -s genitive ending, and therefore the name means “Lady’s day.”
That’s an interesting find! How does it illuminate The Bell Jar for you? I think the reference is more specifically to a magazine like Women’s Day that we would still find published today. It would be interesting to know if it was an actual magazine, or if Plath was altering the name of an existing women’s magazine to create a fictional one.
That is very interesting how you brought that term to life. I probably would have not thought to research that piece of information. That term , is celebratory and reminds me of “Ladies Night”. Which is similar in that women get together to speak about things that “ladies” would speak about. We tend to drink whatever we live to drunk, eat whatever we like, and so on. Do those two terms mean the same thing? If that was the name of a magazine it must have been a very interesting one.