Summary: Chapter 11
Esther visits Dr. Gordon, a psychiatrist. She has not
changed clothes or washed her hair for three weeks, having decided
such chores are silly, and she says she has not slept for seven
nights. She hopes that Dr. Gordon will help bring her back to herself,
but she immediately distrusts him because he is good-looking and
seems conceited. On his desk he keeps a picture of his attractive
family, which makes Esther furious. She thinks he keeps the picture
there to ward off her advances, and assumes such a handsome man
with such a lovely family could never help her. Esther tells Dr.
Gordon that she cannot sleep, eat, or read, though she does not
tell him of her difficulty writing. That morning, she had attempted
to write a letter to Doreen, but could not write legibly. He asks
her where she goes to college and comments on how pretty the girls
were when he worked there during the war. When Esther tells her
mother that Dr. Gordon expects to see her the next week, Esther’s
mother sighs because Dr. Gordon charges twenty-five dollars an hour.
Esther flirts with a sailor on the Boston Common, pretending
she is Elly Higginbottom, an orphan from Chicago. She thinks she
sees Mrs. Willard approaching, but is wrong. When the sailor asks
what has upset her, she says she thought the woman was from her
orphanage in Chicago. The sailor asks if the woman was mean to her.
She says yes and cries, momentarily convinced that this horrible
woman caused everything unhappy in her life.
During her second visit to Dr. Gordon, Esther tells him
that she feels the same and shows him the torn-up letter she tried
to write to Doreen. He does not examine the scraps of paper, but
asks to see her mother, and tells Mrs. Greenwood that Esther needs
shock treatments at his hospital in Walton. Esther starts thinking
about suicide while reading a tabloid account of a man prevented
from jumping off a ledge. She finds she can read tabloid papers,
because their short paragraphs end before the letters start jumping
and sliding around. The next day Dodo Conway will drive Esther and
her mother to the hospital for the shock treatment. Esther considers
running away to Chicago, but realizes the bank will close before
she can withdraw bus fare.
Summary: Chapter 12
Esther goes to Dr. Gordon’s hospital for her shock treatment.
The hospital waiting room looks like part of a summer hotel, but
the inhabitants sit listlessly. They remind Esther of store mannequins. On
the way to her treatment, Esther encounters a woman who threatens
to jump out of the window, which she cannot do because bars across
the windows would prevent her. A nurse wearing thick glasses hooks
Esther up to the shock machine, and a jolt shakes Esther “like the
end of the world.” She wonders what awful thing she did to deserve
this punishment. The treatment reminds her of the time she accidentally
electrocuted herself with her father’s lamp. Dr. Gordon again asks
her what college she attends, and again remembers the nurses who
were stationed there during the war. Esther feels dreadful, and
tells her mother she is through with Dr. Gordon. Her mother says
that she knew Esther was not like those people at the hospital and
feels sure she would decide to get better.
Later, Esther sits in the park, comparing a picture of
herself to a newspaper picture of a starlet who has just died after
lingering in a coma. She thinks they look the same and imagines
that if the starlet’s eyes were open, as hers are, they would have
the same “dead, black, vacant expression” as her own. She decides
to sit on the park bench for five more minutes, and then go and
kill herself. She listens to her “little chorus of voices,” which
repeats critical remarks that people such as Buddy and Jay Cee have
made to her. That morning, she had tried to slit her wrists, but
could not bring herself to harm the fragile skin of her wrist and
practiced on her calf instead. After failing to slit her wrists,
she took a bus to Deer Island Prison, near her childhood home. She
talked with a guard and imagined that if she had met him earlier
and married him, she could have been living happily with children.
She went to the beach and again considered slitting her wrists,
but realized she did not have a warm bath to sit in afterward. She
sat on the beach until a small boy told her she should move because
the tide was coming in. She considered letting herself drown, but
when she put her foot in the water, she could not bear its frigid
temperature, and went home.
Analysis: Chapters 11–12
Esther’s illness becomes more severe. She cannot read,
because the letters appear to literally slide and dance when she
focuses her eyes on them. She seems to become delusional, instantly
hating her doctor and crying about the stranger in the park as if
she actually believes the unknown woman caused all of her problems.
