1. What is this thing she is trying to kill? Where does it come from?
2. Chapters 12, 13, and 14 show Esther’s rapid descent deeper and deeper into her illness. The writing has become a choppy stream-of-consciousness of nonsensical thoughts strung together. She seems to be withdrawing farther into her own mind, or perhaps her sickness is growing and consuming her; either way the world has become a blurry mess of colors and shapes and people who aren’t really human. She is angry and violent and cruel—breaking the mirror, kicking the “negro”, smashing the thermometers. The Esther of chapter 14 seems nothing like the Esther at the beginning of the novel. Is there a way out? Do you see a path towards recovery for Esther or is she too far gone? Will her life end in a successful suicide or will she continue to live in an institution or will she make it out? And why? What have we read about her past, what do we know about her personality, that leads you to your conclusion?
3. Which moment from the reading struck you as the apotheosis of Esther’s devolution, as the epitome of her insanity as we see it so far? (a quote would be nice)
Just because I'm posting this for Nell (thank you, Nell): here is an image of the first edition of the novel, attributed to Victoria Lucas.
ReplyDelete1. I think she is trying to kill the feelings her depression (i’m not sure if that’s the right term) are creating. Her body and the world around her seem almost irrelevant at this point. She doesn’t want to “kill” her material body. She wants to escape from the life and world she is trapped in. What is tearing Esther apart is the doubt, confusion, isolation, and sadness that her mental illness is creating. She wants to end her life to escape from those feelings because they are making her life unbearable. All those feelings are much more intangible than her skin or pulse.
2. I think that there is a way for Esther to recover. However, the treatment she has received so far have been extremely unhelpful. She needs different kinds of help. Shock therapy and locking her away will only increase the fear and isolation she already feels. She needs someone to talk to her and try to understand the root of her spiral into illness. So far, doctors seem to be trying to cure her, but they don’t even know what is wrong. I know that she is likely extremely difficult to talk to at this point, but before her condition had worsened to this extent, nobody tried to understand why she was having the emotions and moods she was experiencing. I think Esther is a driven and intelligent woman. From the description of her college years, we can see that she is able to set her mind to a task and work towards accomplishment. I think if someone could find a way to get Esther to focus on simple things that could help her feel slightly less uncomfortable each day, Esther could regain some of that determination and work towards wellness. All of this said, I don’t know if esther will receive this sort of medical help, and if she doesn’t, it seems she would likely die very soon.
3. One moment that showed the strangeness of Esther’s reality was when she thinks Mrs. Tomolillo is imitating her mother. After her mother refutes the idea that Mrs. Tomolillo is imitating her, Esther says Tomolillo, “cast a black, mocking look at me”. This revealed to me how esther felt the world was conspiring against her. She feels so alone that she can trust no one, and she starts to fabricate actions that others have done to create a story of them attacking her. All the fears that she had earlier in the book about how she fit into society and how she compared with others, now become her reality. She thinks others are judging and mocking her outwardly.
1. I have this passage underlined in my book. "What's she want to kill? Something inside herself." That's what I wrote in the margin. Her sickness? The part of her she knows is destroying herself? "I moved in front of the medicine cabinet. If I looked in the mirror while I did it, it would be like watching somebody else, in a book or a play." We know she is suffering from disassociation; that she so often is outsider herself looking at herself. She must feel that even more so now as "somebody else" is urging her to obliterate herself.
ReplyDelete2. Great question, Nell! I know what happens—as does Emma and Mira, both of whom have read the book—but even as I read it for the sixth or seventh time I get so sucked into it that I don't think about the ending. I was struck—for the umpteenth time—how she "howled into the cold salt rain" while laying her face against her father's gravestone. She still feels. That, I think, is a path for a possible recovery for her.
3. So many moments. Her actual suicide attempt, of course. But I always feel the worst for her, feel so sad and helpless about her, when she's with these other young people at the beach and she is barely, barely holding onto normalcy. And her matter-of-fact recounting of how holding onto her hot dog and not dropping it into the fire is a major accomplishment for her—but then, when no one is looking, she "buried it in the sand." Victory followed by defeat. For me, as I think back to the first time I read this, I knew she was so far away from stability here—and followed by her questions about ways to commit suicide, I knew her path was set.
1. I think Esther feels an immense, gut-wrenching dissatisfaction with her life, one that disappoints and depresses her so much that she feels the need to escape, and that escape is the only solution to feeling all right again. At the same time, Esther never says this out loud and she never explicitly states why she does want to kill herself. I think Esther becomes disappointed with so many aspects of her life because she builds up these unrealistic expectations in her head. She has all of the figs on the trees, so many figs to choose from, but she is so overcome with ‘what if’s’ that she regrets making choices before she actually makes them. Esther’s mind is always churning and she is always thinking and planning ahead so much so that she preemptively trips herself up.
ReplyDelete2. One thing that stuck out to me in this reading was when Esther said “[…] I must be just about the only person who had stayed awake for a solid month without dropping dead of exhaustion” (186, but my pages are different from everyone else’s). Esther spends so much time in her own head that she is blind to the realities of the world. She has convinced herself she is the “only person” who is going through her struggles, and that nobody else has gone through something similar. This must mean that no one understands her, not doctors or her mother or her friends. This belief combined with Esther’s later statement “Only my case was incurable” (189) makes me think that she is completely resistant to help and to the option of recovery. I, personally, don’t think that just because she thinks she is “incurable” means she actually is. As we know, Esther spends a lot of time in her own head, so her perspective may not completely match reality. That said, I also believe that this mentality that Esther has is extremely unhealthy and does inhibit progress, but I don’t think she is as “incurable” as she believes herself to be.
3. “Then I saw that my body had all sorts of little tricks, such as making my hands go limp at the crucial second, which would save it, time and again, whereas if I had the whole say, I would be dead in a flash” (189). Just before this, Esther referred to her continued living, that is her inability to kill herself, as “being all right again” (although, she could just mean that in the purely physical sense). This passage really intrigued me. As opposed to thinking that some part of her may not want to commit suicide, so she ‘involuntarily’ loosens her grip or pushes herself out of the water, Esther seems to think that she is not in complete control of her life or her mind. The only solution she considers is death, but she can’t even bring herself to do the act. Esther talks about wanting to trick her mind into killing herself, as if her whole mind does not belong to her. It’s interesting to me that, being ‘in’ Esther’s mind, we never hear her own honest reasons for killing herself. Esther likes to hide the truth because she is distrustful of nearly everybody and everything around her. She refuses to talk to the doctors about how she feels, and now she believes that she has to lie to herself.
I believe she's trying to kill whatever is keeping her from being happy - her feelings, her lack of feelings, her illness. In a world full of opportunity and setbacks, she has screeched to a halt and finds herself unable to really process either. What she's trying to do is cut out whatever is taking her experiences and making them seem bland and terrible and overwhelming - Esther can't process the world around her like everyone else is. What should be terrifying - like her encounter with Marco - is numbed and seems unimportant, and what should be exciting - her acceptance and attendance of the New York program - is similarly numb and unimportant. She eats raw hamburger meat, stares at the clock, and doesn't want to get out of bed because nothing makes her happy, and everything makes her tired. Esther is trying to kill herself, or to cut out her illness, so that she either processes her world like she wants to, like she knows everyone else does, or so that she wont have anything to process at all.
ReplyDeleteEsther is falling apart and no one can help her. Hypothetically, Esther could recover with enough emotional support and a strong enough care system, but with what she has now that doesn't look like it's going to happen. Her psychiatrist was useless, her doctors electrocuted her, and when she left the sanatorium intent on never letting them shock her again, her mother congratulates Esther by saying, "I knew you'd decide to be all right again" 146. Her support system is a train wreck, and it's only harming her - every time she reaches for help she gets ignored, misunderstood, or hurt. Esther has a pretty intense work ethic, but it's one without a whole lot of passion. She does what she's told to an exceptional degree, shown by her academic history of As and honors and extracurriculars, but had no real motivation to get these grades: she was told she needed them, and worked until she got them. Her notions about what she WANTS to do are fuzzy and fluid, and deteriorate the more she thinks about them. She's capricious and flighty, changing her mind, launching into things headfirst despite dangers (like her time on the ski slope) and later backing out of perfectly safe and exciting things (like her invitation to spend the summer with friends). Esther has lost her direction, and resorted to isolation to the point that she's actively afraid to speak with people for too long because she'd end up telling them why she was upset. She's determined, if not passionate, and that becomes dangerous when a person is intent on ceasing to exist.
I'd have to say that her basement suicide attempt was really the most extreme example of her illness. She decided to block herself into a hole in her basement and kill herself - I can't think of a more stark example. Yet her behavior leading up to it was also an incredibly important factor - her inability to harm herself at first was written off as a physical reflex, rather than any desire to live. "But when it came right down to it the skin of my wrist looked so white and defenseless that ai couldn't do it," 147. Slitting her wrists is removed from the idea of Esther - she's not afraid of hurting herself, she assures herself, it's just that the skin looks defenseless. Then she says that, "If I looked in the mirror while I did it, it would be like watching somebody else, in a book or a play. But the person in the mirror was paralyzed and too stupid to do a thing" 148. And later remarks that her body had "all sorts of little tricks" to keep her alive - as though Esther thinks she is somehow removed from her body, as though the only thing keeping her alive is her skin and if she had her way she'd be dead in moments. I don't think that's true - I think that much of Esther really wants to live - but the fact that Esther was willing to believe so is an indication in of itself - she was actively imagining, practicing, trying to hurt herself, and decided than any factors that made her hesitate were impersonal, and not something to even consider.
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ReplyDelete1. I think Esther is trying to kill the inadequacy that she feels is a part of her identity. We see this perception of inadequacy develop throughout the book thus far; she constantly is comparing herself to the other contest winners and to abstract concepts of what a woman can and should be doing. She feels that she should learn shorthand, but she just can’t bring herself to do it. She feels that she should write a novel, but she gets stuck. She wishes she were shorter, prettier, more graceful. She’s been used to countering this insecurity with outside recognition and validation, so not being selected for the writing course nearly undoes her. Well, actually, it completely undoes her. Anyway, she wants to punish herself for these shortcomings, to kill the part of her that keeps failing. But when she looks at her wrist, she realizes that slitting it wouldn’t punish the part of herself that she feels has fallen from grace. She wants to hurt herself more deeply, to sort of exact revenge on herself in a more appropriate way.
ReplyDelete2. So far, all we’ve seen is Esther’s steady decline, from relative sanity to total instability. However, we know that she lived her first 19 years in presumably good, or at least decent, mental health. I realize that mental illness can take a long time to present, but it seems that, since she was stable for so long, there’s a greater chance that she’ll be able to reach that baseline once again. However, you could also argue that everything in Esther’s life thus far has just been leading up to her breakdown, and that there’s no turning back. It’s hard to say at this point. The only thing that gives me some deal of hope for Esther at the present is her belligerence. She’s highly combative with the doctors, nurses, staff, and her mother. From this behavior, at least we know that she’s not totally detached and unfeeling. I think it would be worse if she were totally withdrawn and passive, lying in bed all day without any regard for what happens to her. At least she has some fight left in her.
3. This is hard, because there are so many moments that exemplify her insanity. But the moment that stood out most to me was her inner dialogue at the beach with Jody, when she keeps thinking about how “I couldn’t read and couldn’t write and how I must be just about the only person who had stayed awake for a solid month without dropping dead of exhaustion”(157). She’s lost three of her most basic, foundational abilities: reading, writing, and sleeping. The inability to sleep is especially disconcerting, since sleep is basically our only reprieve from the trials of life. Sleep allows us to heal and reboot, so not sleeping must just drain her more and more every day. Prolonged sleep deprivation is a common method of torture, and it can lead to hallucinations, physical pain, and severe depression.
1. Esther was trying to kill something that “wasn't in that skin or the thin blue pulse that jumped under my thumb, but somewhere else, deeper, more secret, a whole lot harder to get at.” (147). What she wanted to kill was her feelings and her thoughts. I would argue that she wanted to shut off her brain in order to escape her illness. I think what she so desperately wants is to come out of her current state, but she doesn't know even know what it is let alone how to do so.
ReplyDelete2. I think that Esther is able to recover mainly because she's in her head more than she needs to be. She's a very intelligent woman and it can be hard to not overthink things, but she in way knows that that is part of the problem. We see that she is very opinionated and is not one lye down and take things from the very beginning of the book, but she wasn't able to apply her ferocity to things that mattered to her life. She is however starting to change that and voicing her opinions more instead of holding back. If she continues to do so and finally let her thoughts out, I think she could recover.
3. One moment that stood out to me as a sign of her mental illness was when she started questioning whether her doctors were actually doctors: “some of them looked so young I knew they couldn't be proper doctors, and one of them had a queer name that sounded just like Doctor Syphilis, so I began to look for suspicious, fake names…”(179). It's one of the more recognizable signs of paranoia to think that the people around you are somehow either trying to destroy you or are not who they say they are.
I believe that Esther is trying to kill the feeling that something is expected of her. Immediately before she talks about her suicide attempt, she “summoned [her] little chorus of voices. Doesn't your work interest you, Esther? You know, Esther, you've got the perfect setup of a pure neurotic. You'll never get anywhere like that, you'll never get anywhere like that, you'll never get anywhere like that” (146).The voices haunt and torture her by reminding her that she's wasting her skill and potential, that she should be working harder. This would explain Esther's sudden loss of happiness when she turned nine and started attending a number of camps and classes because suddenly she was expected to perform well academically. It would also explain her desire to marry a menial laborer, where the only thing she would have to do would be have kids:
ReplyDeleteI was thinking that if I had the sense to go on living in that old town I might just have met this old prison guard and married him and had a parcel of kids by now. It would be nice... [150]
This would also explain her extreme anxiety over her future, for so much is expected of her in so many different academic areas, from being an honors English major to learning four languages to rowing to marrying and having kids with a clean man. Esther wants to end all of these constant demands on her time and energy, and an immediate and obvious pathway to do so would be to kill herself.
Esther's current predicament is the fault of the utterly incompetent psychiatrists, psychologists, and doctors around her. Dr. Gordon didn't even bother to listen to her, he just condemned her to shock therapy like he usually does for anybody too abnormal. If she went to a more concerned psychiatrist, like the one who she imagined would actually listen to her and try to talk her through her troubles, she probably would have felt better. And when she went to the mental ward in the Boston hospital, again, the doctors merely glanced over her with fake smiles and a small checkup. She will only make it out of the institution if she receives actual help from a concerned doctor.
At the end of the last chapter, when she is put into a separate cell. The Negro's face in the moon rises up at her window while she “smiled at the silver globe tucked in [her] palm” (183). Here, Esther has completely let go, noticing people where they aren't and obsessing over a small droplet of mercury.
1. I think she's trying to kill the unknown. She knows there's something wrong but she doesn't understand all that comes with this mental illness. She's aware that she's no longer motivated, and that she no longer values the things she once did, and that she has this level of uncertaintity hanging over her and she wants this all to go away. But she just feels so trapped and unable to escape. She has no sense of reality and of social norms and I think she wants to kill off this cloudy weirdness and get her feet back on the ground.
ReplyDelete2. I don't think there's much hope for Esther. Society at this time in conjunction with the lack of knowledge about mental illness at this time will only make her worse. Society pressures her with expectations and limitations of who she can and can't be and what she can and can't do, and the scientific community regard her illness as a decision. We see Esther's mother say to her, "I knew you'd decide to be alright again," (146) as if mental illness is a decision. That quote alone shows the lack of sympathy they have for her and how much they don't know about what's going on. Esther isn't getting the support she needs and I think this quote, coupled with all the other shit she has to deal with, is only pushing her deeper into this state of mind. And while we do finally see her feeling "alright" with her child and possibly a husband, we know that there must be something still going on, maybe not as severe as now but I just don't believe she can ever be rid of her illness during her time period with all the pressure and lack of support.
3. I think it's when she's carrying around the blades, the articles, and all the other weird stuff she decided to collect. It's really her infatuation with death that solidifies that something else is going on. She's constantly talking about it and analyzing the death of others and how they should've gone about killing themselves or describing how they look dead now. It's all really strange I think this marks the place where she falls off.
1. She’s trying to kill what makes her different from everyone else. She feels so completely alone in everything she’s going through and the way she sees the world. She sees all these women content with the life they’re leading, on the road to marriage and baby-making, but she doesn’t want that. This cookie cutter life of her mother, Mrs. Willard, Dodo Conway, and so many others won’t make Esther happy, and I think it’s that sense of separation from everyone around her that’s a big contributor to her worsening mental state and deeper collapse into herself. What will make Esther happy, I don’t actually know, though. Academic work has lost its urgency; she has lost confidence in her writing; and the idea of love the way we see it today just didn’t really seem to exist. What I mean is she hasn’t really seen the kind respect and adoration that I consider love and have seen exhibited between my parents, my aunts and uncle, my friends and their boyfriends, in movies and books, and between Michelle and Barack Obama. We see romantic love all over the place whereas Esther merely sees love in the transactional sense. Give some to get some. Give up your freedom for security in exchange for security. Maybe it’s just that valentine’s day is next week or I’ve been watching too many lovey-dovey movies, but I think that if there’s anything that could save Esther, it’s love in the modern sense.
ReplyDelete2. I have a hard time not remembering the fact that Esther has a child later on and using that fact as a little beacon of hope in her possible survival. Also, though, even more than that tid-bit of trivia she gave us earlier on, I think that Esther being the intelligent, hard-working, unconventional woman that she is, I have to have hope for her, because if I don’t…if she doesn’t make it, then what hope do any of us less driven women have? If she can’t beat this, then surely when I’m faced with these what-am-I-doing-with-my-life blues, I won’t be able to either. I have to believe that she’ll lead an important and happy life, because she is far more entitled to one than I am.
3. Like many others, I think Esther’s actual attempt at suicide to be the most dramatic example of her deepening illness, and I suppose I shouldn’t, because we all knew she’d get there eventually, but there’s something about how simultaneously logical and illogical she sounds in this scene that really gets to me. Her description of blood “like fruit” (148) and her reflection in the mirror as being like “a book or a play” (148), I mean, she seems so detached from reality, but then she talks about how she can’t go through with it because her mom is almost home so she bandages herself up, puts away the blades, and heads out to the bus stop, and it sounds like the most reasonable thing ever. I think the absurdity of this juxtaposition is what really frightened me, because while I could see just how sick and lost she is, there’s also something so rational about her behavior that makes it hard for me to simply write her off as a loon. She’s almost too real.
1. Before I answer the question, I think its important to acknowledge that while its easy to characterize Esther as solely hating the world she lives in, relishing its flaws and becoming depressed as a result, I think that we need to take a step back. There are also several instances where she seems bursting to succeed in this world; the writing class, imagining various futures with herself married to the sailor or the prison guard, her desire to keep going in the publishing world, her feelings (despite herself) that certain men are very handsome. So I think while there is a ton of disillusionment in her, there is a tension between that and her remaining affection for the world in which she lives: she knows and sees all the problems of the world, better than most others, yet she still wants to live in it. I think these two polar opposite feelings are trapping her into complacency. Like Jay Cee says "wittily," she wants "everything" -- but yet she wants nothing at the same time. Furthermore, she knows choosing a future will be an irreversible loss of innocence, as epitomized by the fig story. Ultimately, I think Esther is trying to kill the complacency in her - how she has the whole summer, but just "sits back and lets it run through her fingers like water." She can't stand feeling trapped in hopelessness and without a future forever -- and she doesn't see another future emerging on the horizon. She's so perceptive to society's problems that she's able to tease out the issues in everything, undermining the decision making process.
ReplyDelete2. I think my answer for 1 will pivot nicely into this; there IS a way out, as long as she finds a future that she is okay with. This will only happen if she lets herself not see her world's numerous impracticalities. I have not seen any indication that this will happen so far, in fact, I think she's only getting worse. I think this is partially because all she's seen for the past couple weeks is the ugly underbelly of our modern society; the mental healthcare system. Something she can call a "torture chamber" isn't going to let her stop her disillusionment.
3. "Dr Pancreas" was pretty bad. Before this point, I'd seen her make some pretty harsh judgements, but she had never gone so far as to obscure reality so much that we can't even get basic facts like names. I think, like Nell said, it really shows how her mental processing has changed. No longer does she simply see society's problems/her problems and brood about them, she has taken the problems to heart so much that it causes her day to flash by in little bits and pieces of consciousness, not really sewn together by a cogent stream of thought.
1. She wants to kill her own sadness. More than that though, she wants to be happy. Despite all the horrible, painful stuff going on in her head, Esther keeps failing to kill herself. She doesn't just want to make the pain go away, and that is what makes it difficult. She can't quite make herself cut her own skin, and just drops the razor on her leg. She tries to choke herself but is physically unable to follow through. She can't drown herself and just floats up. To some degree she still doesn't want to die. She just is unable to see a satisfactory future. Esther is trying to kill her own pain.
ReplyDelete2. I think Esther could recover, but the institution we see her in now is not going to help. She needs someone who has a totally different approach to her mental illness than we see here. She does seem interested in improving. She looks for abnormal psychology books to try to cure herself. Though this doesn't work, her desire to return to who she was gives some hope. We also know that she talks about a baby while narrating the story, so I believe she will get out of the hospital. She still seems to believe things that she did while ill though. For example, despite some time having passed, Esther still seems to think she went totally without sleep for a time. This makes me think she will never fully recover. That said, the combination of the little we can tell about future Esther through the narrator and her seeming desire to change and to leave her mental illness behind give me hope.
3. The depth of her illness is best demonstrated during her failed suicide attempts. We see not only her misery but her mistrust of the world around her and even her own body and instincts. She blames her failure in dying on anything but her mind. First, "the person in the mirror was paralyzed and too stupid to do a thing" (148). Later, her "flesh winced, in cowardice, from such a death" (153). When she decides to drown herself, Esther plans ahead and doesn't swim out to the rock, knowing that her "body would take that excuse to climb out and lie in the sun, gathering strength to swim back" (160). But even then, "the water spat [Esther] up into the sun" (160-161). She can't hang herself due to having the wrong ceiling, so Esther tries to choke herself. However, she says that as soon as she gets the cord tight enough, "my hands would weaken and let go, and I would be all right again" (159). This is not only a horribly depressed woman, but a woman who feels disconnected from her own body. She feels so out of control in her life, and now she can't even have the whole say in whether she lives or dies. She's trapped. She feels unable to escape the future planned out for her, even when she tries to die.
1. Esther is in a tortured state and its natural that she wants to stop being tortured so a possible solution to ending the torture is killing what is torturing her. What is torturing her is her mind so she wants to kill her mind.
ReplyDelete2. Esther seems really far gone to me but I think that if she received the proper treatment or met a positive role model (something that seems impossible at this point because she’s not exactly open to meeting new people). However, I don’t think these two things are likely to happen for Esther because of the world she lives in. A world where the preferred treatment is to be sent to a sexist and useless psychologist who sends her to get shocked after two meetings does not seem likely to provide a cure to Esther’s troubles. Yet I’m holding onto the tiny hope that maybe I’m wrong and there is another way for Esther to climb out of her situation, or that times change fast enough for attitudes towards her situation start to change enough that she is viewed differently and in a way that helps her more. To summarize, I’m very pessimistic at this point and see little way out for Esther.
3. The way Esther talks about hanging herself seemed to stick out for me. She’s sad about the fact that her house is not good for hanging herself because the ceilings are too low and there are no light fixtures or beams. “I thought with longing of the house my grandmother had before she sold it to come and live with us” (158). This hit me really deeply because of her use of the word longing. That one word helps me understand what she’s feeling much better and I found it disturbing and insane that wanting to kill yourself can be a “longing”.
1) Esther does not want to kill herself, it's not her physical self that causes her so much pain. She wants to kill something internal. That's why the only suicide attempt she was able to go through with was the one that attacked the inside (the pills). She wants to get rid of the mental block that's preventing her from being happy. It's her depression, it's her mental illness. Unfortunately, she doesn't know it's an “illness” that she can heal because there is no support system for her. Mental illness was not researched or treated as seriously in 1954, and money-greedy doctors like Gordon certainly aren't helping. If someone were just able to identify her depression, it wouldn't be so “deep,” “secret,” and “hard to get.”
ReplyDelete2) Normally, I'd feel sure that the main character would make it out alive and well, as plot armor would get them through all of their struggles. But with Esther’s case, I genuinely don't think she can make it out of this. Not because she can't do it, but because there is literally no one else to help her. She shut out the Willards, her mother doesn't know how to help, and Doreen is across the country. Gordon’s shock therapy is about as useful as a knife in a gun fight, except this knife cost 45 dollars an hour. Im not an expert on the subject, but I don't think mental illness is solved alone, you have to have a support system with you along the way. Just like a cancer patient needs a staff to save them, so does a depressed person. I do have hope that Constanin will come back into the story and help her. He's one of the most noble characters we have seen so far, so he definitely has the potential. Ill try to say this in the least patriarchal way possible, I think Esther needs a man in her life. More and more I'm starting to think Esther’s depression was caused by her father’s death, and she says she hasn't been happy since her father died (when she was nine years old). What made Esther happy was running along the beach with her father without a care in the world. I don't think it's a coincidence That the next time we see her happy is when she's “sitting there side by side [with Constanin] flying down the streets in the open sun.”
3) “I hadn't slept for twenty-one nights.” Just when you start things may be getting better (she was able to leave Gordon and her mother was optimistic), Esther hits us this simple statement. She says it so matter-of-factory that it's unnerving. Plath really is writing this brilliantly. There was no hint that things were getting worse, much much worse. The way that Plath makes things seem so normal as Esther is free falling down a mental cliff makes Esther’s mental state that much scarier.