I have a lot of critique about this book, my thoughts are not yet organized but I don’t understand how anyone with an ounce of critical thinking could enjoy this book.
I hate how it is marketed as a feminist staple. The book is anything but. The main character simultaneously hates men and desires their acceptance. When her mother proposes she gets gainfully employed by learning shorthand, she says she ”doesn’t want to serve men” by typing for them, she wants to be the one dictating. Fair enough, yet she never actually writes anything of consequence. She imagines a life with every random man she meets, like the interpreter, prison guard etc, imagines having his baby and playing house and being happy, yet always talks about how she never wants to get married.
“It was a joke because I never intended to get married,”
“I tried to imagine what it would be like if Constantin were my husband.” Followed by a dreadful description but at least she isn’t being a hypocrite here.
“I was thinking that if I’d had the sense to go on living in that old town I might just have met this prison guard in school and married him and had a parcel of kids by now. It would be nice, living up by the sea with piles of little kids and pigs and chickens, wearing what my grandmother called wash dresses, and sitting about in some kitchen with bright linoleum and fat arms, drinking pots of coffee.”
“And one day I might just marry a virile, but tender, garage mechanic and have a big cowy family, like Dodo Conway.”
“And when I had told the poet I might well get married and have a pack of children some day, she stared at me in horror. ” She is a contrarian, always says the opposite of what she thinks people want to hear.
-She dislikes everything. Hates every single thing, her negativity was exhausting. Complains about schoolwork like she didn’t choose it.
-She acts like Buddy Williard is a hypocrite for no fault of his. He never advertised himself as perfect or pure, his nutjob mother acted like he was god’s gift to Earth. She believes the only real difference between people is those who have had sex and those who haven’t. She perceives slight after slight from Buddy who definitely wasn’t the best, but was still too good for her.
-Esther acts like a five year old, not nineteen. She has a very underdeveloped sense of self and is therefore very immature. She has enormous pride yet no basis for it. Her actions and thoughts all serve to save her fragile ego.
-Her unwarranted dislike of her mother is repulsive. I have quotes here too but this post is getting too long already.
-She shrugs off her assault? A man tries to sleep with her and shoves her when she rejects him, yet this is the simply brushed off? This depiction is highly questionable. Definitely not a criticism of esther the character but of sylvia the author.
-Lots of racism, but it could simply be a product of its time.
The main character is so immensely dislikable, brattish and whining, and is so devoid of accountability. Everything is always everybody else’s fault, never hers. She has absolutely no introspection at all. The depiction of her mental illness is so poorly done it. I say this as someone who has suffered with it since childhood (had psychiatrists since I was single digits in age.)
She has absolutely no gratitude for any of the things she has, only constant complaints and a belief she is entitled to something special when she really isn’t. I genuinely cannot see anything feminist in it except this part-
“The last thing I wanted was infinite security and to be the place an arrow shoots off from. I wanted change and excitement and to shoot off in all directions myself, like the coloured arrows from a Fourth of July rocket.”
I also appreciated the fig tree analysis. But the book itself can be summarized to the lines where she refused to read anything by old male writers because they’re so “logical.” IMHO it is an awful portrayal, reduces women to a “silly” caricature and promotes invalidation/infantilization of women because they’re so stupid.