Most blog posts that have dealt with Plath's novel have dealt both with Esther's obsession with death and whether we as readers should sympathize with her. I personally believe that these concepts are intertwined, and I cannot feel sympathy towards Esther's character.
First of all, Esther always focuses on the most negative possible outcomes in her daydreams. Every situation she dreams up becomes too dull for her to actually consider pursuing. Then, when she gets to the next one, she finds something wrong with it. This is most obvious when she is considering dropping down to regular English and then switching colleges. She automatically focuses on the assumed fact that anyone in those programs would be more knowledgeable than her. She completely fails to realize, however, that she is extremely knowledgeable about Dylan Thomas. Instead of having some knowledge about a vast array of information, she has intense knowledge of one subject. Esther always seems to focus on the negative, though. She refuses to believe that there is anything good in her life, which seems to be what leads to her obsession with death.
While she is at Doctor Gordon's office, Esther tells us that she thought "everything people did seemed so silly, because they only died in the end." This certainly seems to fit in with her negative attitude. Since she is always looking for the negative, it should come as no surprise that she views everything that people do as futile. It seems that, for her, nothing is good. Thus, nothing really matters. This is why I have trouble sympathizing with her. While I would be inclined to feel some sort of empathy towards her overall bleak picture of the world, I feel that everything that is "ailing" her is self-created and that she is smply wallowing in her own self-pity, waiting for someone else to "diagnose" her problem and make it all better. She takes no action to better her situation herself and does not expect that she should have to. In this way, Esther parallels Rachel, but she is also much more Waverley-like in that she takes absolutely no agency and takes no action or responsibility for her own situation. I feel like I've been a bit harsh in my analysis of Esther, but it is only because I want to see some gumption and she seems to be just a lame-duck so far.
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That's a difficult topic to deal with, and yet it's key to our understanding of the novel. From the beginning Plath makes clear that Esther is not intended to be an entirely sympathetic character--her callous reference to the Rosenbergs, as if the latter's death were merely a clinical matter; her treatment of Doreen; the way she takes advantage of Mr. Manzi etc. But then there's the problem of how to deal with someone who is mentally ill. Can she be blamed for what she can't help? I think a fruitful way of approaching the novel would be to read it as a study of the pitfalls of sympathy. We want to feel sorry for Esther but can't. And yet we also feel we must.
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