Word: esther
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...ESTHER H.M. POWER Cincinnati...
...Esther Greenwood in Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar stands on the sun roof of the Amazon Hotel for single girls and lets fly with her forty dollar city dresses into the New York City night. She and cloven other college girls had won a month with a well-known women's fashion magazine, and now they were all going back home. For Esther it was home to her mother and a New England suburb for the summer. She was quitting the city and she hadn't even found a drink she liked, "My dream was ordering a drink...
...then it was three weeks later and she hadn't yet changed her clothes or washed her hair or slept any. She envied the Barnard girl down the street who married the Columbia architect; they were Catholic and she was ever pregnant behind her ratty baby carriage. Esther tried writing a novel about herself and that didn't work. And then she tried different ways of killing herself and one way worked better than the other so they put her away. As Sylvia Plath says in her poem "Daddy," "They pulled me out of the sack, And they stuck...
...leave death alone is her inability to find the kind of joy she had known when she was "nine and running along the hot white beaches with my father before he died." In her novel she remembers "that I had never cried for my father's death." At nineteen Esther can cry and unharbor the funeral she never attended. Like a magnet to its opposite, the daughter need not follow from her life into her father's death. In her own life, though, the mourning was too persistent; Sylvia Plath could find nothing to hold her, no wit or skill...
...American Bergman, her realm is purely psychological, obsessed with blockage in relationships. Like Bergman, too, externalities are sucked into the personal in such a way as to become a metaphor for the personal. Her book opens with the electrocution of the Rosenbergs; the newspapers are hungry for their execution. Esther imagines how it would be to be burnt up all along her nerves. In the asylum she is given shock treatments as cure for her insanity. "I'm stupid about executions." she says. In the way that the Vietnam war figures in Bergman's Persona, the Extermination figures in "Daddy...