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“Later Buddy told me the woman was on a drug that would make her forget she'd had any pain and that when she swore and groaned she really didn't know what she was doing because she was in a kind of twilight sleep. I thought it sounded just like the sort of drug a man would invent. Here was a woman in terrible pain, obviously feeling every bit of it or she wouldn't groan like that, and she would go straight home and start another baby, because the drug would make her forget how bad the pain had been, when all the time, in some secret part of her, that long, blind, doorless and windowless corridor of pain was waiting to open up and shut her in again.”
Esther has the above thought after Buddy takes her to see a woman giving birth. Buddy seems unfazed by the drugs that the woman is given but Esther is horrified that someone would invent a drug that could make women forget how painful and traumatic it was to give birth. Esther is particularly horrified that male doctors are willing to take advantage of women so that they keep having children. To Esther, this drug is just one of the many ways that women are stripped of their autonomy in a patriarchal society that does not view men and women as equals.
“It might be nice to be pure and then to marry a pure man, but what if he suddenly confessed he wasn't pure after we were married, the way Buddy Willard had? I couldn't stand the idea of a woman having to have a single pure life and a man being able to have a double life, one pure and one not.”
Here, Esther reflects on the unfair double standards that are generated by the patriarchy. Society is willing to overlook a man’s sexual transgressions as long as he eventually marries a nice girl and starts a nice family. Women, on the other hand, are not allowed to be promiscuous and are expected to remain pure for their future husbands. Esther is especially enraged that men like Buddy have the nerve to assume a persona of false purity in order to attract a wife. Esther feels restricted by 1950s social mores because she is not afforded the same sexual freedom as her would-be husband.
“I tried to imagine what it would be like if Constantin were my husband. It would mean getting up at seven and cooking him eggs and bacon and toast and coffee and dawdling about in my nightgown and curlers after he'd left for work to wash up the dirty plates and make the bed, and then when he came home after a lively, fascinating day he'd expect a big dinner, and I'd spend the evening washing up even more dirty plates till I fell into bed, utterly exhausted. This seemed a dreary and wasted life for a girl with fifteen years of straight A's, but I knew that's what marriage was like, because cook and clean and wash was just what Buddy Willard's mother did from morning till night, and she was the wife of a university professor and had been a private school teacher herself.”
Esther has just gone on a date with Constantin and she imagines what it would be like if the two of them were to get married. She likes spending time with Constantin but the illusion is shattered when Esther contemplates the restrictive role of a conventional housewife. Esther knows that, if she were to marry, she must devote herself entirely to her husband. She feels that this is a complete “waste” of her potential. Esther is clever, and accomplished, and she is full of ambitious plans for the future, and she knows that becoming a wife would put all of those plans on hold forever.
“I also remembered Buddy Willard saying in a sinister, knowing way that after I had children I would feel differently, I wouldn't want to write poems any more. So I began to think maybe it was true that when you were married and had children it was like being brainwashed, and afterward you went about numb as a slave in some private, totalitarian state.”
Here, Esther recalls a concerning comment from Buddy in which he claimed that Esther would not want to write anymore after she had children. She compares becoming a housewife to getting brainwashed because it strips a woman of her individuality. Esther feels that a woman is no longer her own person once she gets married—she simply becomes a conduit for her husband and children. Esther does not desire such a grim fate and she is desperate to avoid the institution of marriage entirely, which she characterizes here as a “private, totalitarian state.”
“I'm here on account of my French-Canadian mother-in-law… My husband knows I can't stand her, and still he said she could come and visit us, and when she came, my tongue stuck out of my head, I couldn't stop it. They ran me into Emergency and then they put me up here… along with the nuts.”
This quote is delivered to Esther by another woman in the psych ward shortly after Esther is admitted for trying to kill herself. The unnamed woman explains that she was locked up because she could not stop herself from taunting her mother-in-law. The woman’s story is concerning because she appears to have been sent to a mental hospital simply for arguing with a family member. Plath uses this passage to illustrate the ways in which women had so little agency in 1950s America that they could be effortlessly cast aside by their male family members without their consent, for nonsensical or completely arbitrary reasons.
