I feel there was a big shift in Esther’s personality from the first seven chapters and the rest of the book. In the first half, though she seems to have an exception to many of her thoughts, she seemed quite confident and interested in her life. In the second half she gets beat up by the ‘woman-hater’ Marco, and finds out she was not accepted into the summer school writing course, she is lost and begins to second guess herself on all of her thoughts. In the second half of the book she begins to come so complex in her ideas and thoughts it became hard for me to follow when events were taking place. I was confused if going to see Buddy and going skiing happened at the same time, or if there was time between the two, like she was having a flashback.

The scene at the end of chapter nine when she tosses all of her nice clothes out the window can be viewed as another example of purging in the novel. We discussed this in class with her interest in vomit in the first couple chapters but in doing research for my Plath presentation, I read something about how Plath herself saw purging anything as a way of fighting sin and letting things go. By purging her clothes out the window the same night she is tossed around by Marco, signifies that the whole Ladie’s Day experiences was not really all it was cracked up to be for Esther. All of the free stuff she was given did not satisfy her emotionally and so she got rid of it.

Once Esther finds she is will not be attending summer school, nothing seems to be good enough for her. This is where the complexity of her character really opens up and I think the way she puts everything around her down is an expression of her feelings toward herself; she was not good enough to get into the summer school course so if she is not good enough, everything around her is below the bar as well.