Sylvia Plath Research Paper

In the 1950’s a proper women was to be pure, stay at home with the children, always have dinner ready, and listen to her husband. If a woman did not conform to these standards, she was sent to an asylum where she would learn how to be a proper woman. Furthermore, the idolized life for a woman was to go to secretary school where she would learn shorthand in order to work for a successful firm where she would find a well off man to marry before she had his children and moved to the suburbs. However, for Sylvia Plath this was not the type of life she idolized. She did not want to learn shorthand, which her mother taught at Boston University, and she did not want to be a mother. Instead, Plath wanted to be a poet. She was an exceptional student

Buddy was Esther’s first boyfriend which she swooned over until she realized he was a hypocrite. While she was visiting him, Buddy asked Esther “How would you like to be Mrs. Buddy Willard?” to which Esther replied “I’m never going to get married” (Plath 92-93). Immediately, Buddy calls Esther crazy because during that time it was every girls dream to be married to a good clean man like Buddy Willard. To prove her point, Esther asks Buddy about a previous conversation where the two debated where they would like to live best, the country or the city. She said that she would like to live in both the city and the country, because she could not choose only one, to Buddy this idea is neurotic. Esther claimed that “If neurotic is wanting two mutually exclusive things at one and the same time, then I'm neurotic as hell. I'll be flying back and forth between one mutually exclusive thing and another for the rest of my days”. (Plath 104).Within this conversation the country and city resemble Esther’s two mutually exclusive life choices, poetry and motherhood. Esther does not want to give up one in order to have the other. She is considered neurotic for wanting to be a poet and a mother where being a mother should be her top priority. Similarly, Esther can be seen in the dilemma earlier in the novel when she compares her life choices to figs on a tree. Each fig on the tree is a

She discards her clothes in such a way to symbolically resemble her first suicide (Whittier 135). Not only does Esther separate from her uncomfortable clothes, she also separates from the part of her that liked New York. Esther ends her time in New York by killing the part of her that she did not like. When she returns home she is wearing Betsy’s clothes, which for her is a costume of an “innocent country girl”, paired along with the blood from Marco on her face (Whittier 135). The streaks of blood from Marco are a symbolic badge for Esther; moreover, they symbolize her countercultural interaction with Marco where she refused to be raped. She did not subdue to his actions and let him rape her; instead she shoves him and kicks him showcasing how she is different from other women. The train ride home from New York represents Esther’s transition of “American Girl who caves into Crazy Girl” (Whittier 130). When Esther returns home she prays that she has been accepted into a summer writing program, indicating her escape from a summer in the suburbs, one of the things she dreaded the most. While staying with her mother Esther has a hatred for her neighbor Dodo Conway. Dodo is a symbol for the perfect women since she “was a Catholic who had gone to Barnard and then married an architect who had gone to Columbia and was also a Catholic. They had a big, rambling house up the street from us, set behind a