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“I imagined Buddy saying, ‘Do you know what a poem is, Esther?’
‘No, what?’ I would say.
‘A piece of dust.’
Then just as he was smiling and starting to look proud, I would say, ‘So are the cadavers you cut up. So are the people you think you're curing. They're dust as dust as dust. I reckon a good poem lasts a whole lot longer than a hundred of those people put together.’”
The above exchange never really happens—Esther actually answers Buddy’s flippant joke about poetry with a meek “I guess so.” Here, Esther is imagining what she should have said to Buddy. Her swallowed response showcases that she has been trained to censor herself around men and defer to their opinions. Esther’s imagined response is clever, much cleverer than Buddy’s dismissive joke, but social mores have taught Esther to hold her tongue. This anecdote about Buddy is further significant because it demonstrates how incompatible Esther and Buddy are. Buddy is openly mocking something that Esther is passionate about, and the reader is able to catch a glimpse of Esther and Buddy’s hypothetical marriage: Buddy would make patronizing comments, and Esther would be forced to endure those comments in silence.
“I thought how strange it had never occurred to me before that I was only purely happy until I was nine years old. After that -- in spite of the Girl Scouts and the piano lessons and the water-color lessons and the dancing lessons and the sailing camp, all of which my mother scrimped to give me, and college, with crewing in the mist before breakfast and blackbottom pies and the little new firecrackers of ideas going off every day -- I had never been really happy again.”
This epiphany comes to Esther towards the beginning of the novel, while she is visiting the UN with Constantin. It is an essential quote for our understanding of Esther’s character because it suggests she has clearly been battling with mental illness for the majority of her life. Characters like Esther’s mom claim that Esther simply had a breakdown after not getting into a writing course at her college. However, moments like the one in the above quote prove that Esther has actually been suffering and struggling for a very long time.
“I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn't quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.”
This is arguably the most famous passage in the entire book. Here, Esther is having an existential crisis because she does not know what she is supposed to do with her life. In one of Plath’s most iconic metaphors, Esther likens each of her dreams to a fig on a tree and claims that she is slowly starving beneath it because she cannot choose which fig to eat. Esther continues on to say that the longer she waits, the harder it will be to make any of these dreams come true, and she worries that each dream will shrivel and die like an overripe fruit that was left on the tree for too long.
“That's one of the reasons I never wanted to get married. The last thing I wanted was infinite security and to be the place an arrow shoots off from. I wanted change and excitement and to shoot off in all directions myself, like the colored arrows from a Fourth of July rocket.”
Esther is referencing one of Mrs. Willard’s life philosophies: “What a man is is an arrow into the future and what a woman is is the place the arrow shoots off from.” As Esther explains in the above quote, she does not want to get married because she wants to chart her own path instead of simply supporting her husband from the sidelines. Esther is not interested in a conventional 1950s marriage; she wants to make a name for herself by becoming a successful writer and traveling the world.
"I am climbing to freedom, freedom from fear, freedom from marrying the wrong person, like Buddy Willard, just because of sex, freedom from the Florence Crittenden Homes where all the poor girls go who should have been fitted out like me, because what they did, they would do anyway, regardless…”
Esther recites the above mantra to herself at the end of the novel while she is being fitted for a diaphragm—a popular birth control method in the 1950s. Esther is nervous about the fitting because birth control was (and remains) a controversial issue. However, Esther knows that she is making the right choice. Her repeated use of the word “freedom” suggests that birth control liberates Esther from her fear of becoming a wife and a mother. Esther is not ready to be tied down to a family at this point in her life and the diaphragm allows her to move through the world without the threat of forced motherhood hanging over her.
