The Warsaw High School Times

Graphic by Zoja Wasilewska

Graphic inspired by work by Marina Abramović

The nineteen-year-old Esther Greenwood, the central character in Sylvia Plath’s partially autobiographical novel, is absorbed with issues of purity and impurity throughout the book. She reflects on both the immaculateness of the body and the purity of the mind; often referring to them as a spiritual transcendence that can be achieved through the crossing of bodily boundaries.  

From the outset of the novel, Esther is fascinated by clarity – she envisions that drinking vodka will cleanse her soul, aspiring to be like transparent water, “I’d seed a vodka ad once, just a glass full of vodka standing in the middle of a snowdrift in a blue light, and the vodka looked clear and pure as water (…).” On the same night, feeling spiritually tainted and sad, Esther takes a long bath. While her actions (drinking alcohol, witnessing Doreen kissing, going to Lenny’s apartment) are not as rebellious as Doreen’s, Esther believes she has deviated, perhaps excessively, from her secure habits of caution, mistrust of men, and abstinence from alcohol. She reflects, “I lay in that tub on the seventeenth floor of this hotel for-women-only, high over the jazz and push of New York, for near onto an hour, and I felt myself growing pure again.” The bath serves as a form of spiritual catharsis, allowing her to recover: “The longer I lay there in the clear hot water the purer I felt.” 

Examining her celebrated numerous baths, it is challenging to resist the impression that Esther confuses “abstract” purity with “bodily” purity. The issue is that the character seeks a spiritual innocence that she cannot precisely define. Perhaps this inability leads her to an obsession with virginity, particularly fixating on purity in the context of sexuality. Virgins, referred to as “pure individuals,” have traditionally been contrasted with women who engage in premarital sex, explaining the protagonist’s fixation (women pursuing physical pleasure are usually portrayed negatively). However, Esther cannot reconcile with the blatant inequality in the treatment of women and men: men are allowed sexual desires and can satisfy them outside of marriage, while women are expected to maintain “purity” until marriage. The words “purity” and “virginity” are used in culture as tools of oppression, limiting women’s sexual independence, suppressing them, and oppressing them. 

From the article “The Defense of Virginity,” received from her mother, Esther learns that “a man’s world is different from a woman’s world and a man’s emotions are different from a woman’s emotions and only marriage can bring the two worlds and the two different sets of emotions together properly.” However, the differences between women and men are not presented positively: the article’s author, a “married woman lawyer with children,” argues that the world of men is too challenging for women to comprehend. She emphasizes that “the best men wanted to be pure for their wives, and even if they weren’t pure, they wanted to be the ones to teach their wives about sex.” From the context, it can be inferred that in Sylvia Plath’s time (mid-20th century), sex was a taboo subject for women. Esther’s lack of awareness of her own body and sexual orientation is evident in her reaction after her first intimate encounter: “I wanted to ask him if I was still a virgin.” 

“Of course they would try to persuade a girl to have sex and say they would marry her later, but as soon as she gave in, they would lose all respect for her and start saying that if she did that with them she would do that with other men and they would end up by making her life miserable,” the author of the article argues further. This passage reveals another issue addressed by Sylvia Plath: the newspaper text portrays sexuality as solely a matter of biological or psychological difference between men and women; there is no mention of love, passion, romance, or even mutual attraction. Due to double sexual standards, friendship or intimate closeness seems almost impossible between genders separated by societal norms. 

In the first half of the book, Esther believes that losing virginity before marriage signifies a significant change (“I saw the world divided into people who had slept with somebody and people who hadn’t, and this seemed the only really significant difference between one person and another. I thought a spectacular change would come over me the day I crossed the boundary line.”) She uses the concepts of “purity” and “impurity” to understand and organize the world around her, perceiving sex as something leaving a visible mark of “dirt.” Such stigmatization could have been another way to prevent women from engaging in sex and control them. However, Esther completely changes her mindset after discovering that the “fine and clean” Buddy who “was the kind of person a girl should stay fine and clean for,” had an affair. 

Enraged by his hypocrisy, Esther is burdened by her virginity: “my virginity weighed on me like a millstone. For years I had had to content with the feeling that I had no right to despise the rituals of life, to be indignant at the incurable dishonesty of the world, to keep screamingly silent at the sight of all the futility and hopelessness around me.” Her subsequent words express deep frustration and anger at the hypocritical standards of societal expectations: “I couldn’t stand the idea of a woman having a single pure life and a man being able to have a double life, one pure and one not.” Esther is determined to abandon her virginity and experience sexual freedom (which she achieves when she buys a diaphragm and has sex with Irwin). 

Throughout the novel, Esther confronts various challenges that prompt her to make decisions for herself, rather than conforming to societal expectations. While fulfilling the role of the “ideal” woman, she feels emptiness and strongly prefers to express and control her sexuality as she sees fit. This motif, thoroughly depicted in the book, serves a critical examination of discrimination against women in the intimate sphere. It illustrates how cruel and unjust the expectations of women were, keeping them in a cage. The book was published in 1963, as the second-wave feminist movement was beginning. Second-wave feminism dealt with workplace equality, abortion issues, and female sexuality – all of which are strongly addressed in the novel. Therefore, the motif of purity in Sylvia Plath’s book plays a crucial role in conveying a societal message and is an essential voice of the author in the fight for change. Her voice, like that of Betty Friedan, inspired the second-wave feminist movement but also revealed the tragedy of women’s societal conditions.