Fear is the main reason why we can’t do what we want. It stops us from achieving what we want, good or bad. Fear of getting laughed at, fear of pain, fear of getting hurt, fear of anything and everything. It is the root of discouragement. In the reading “Components of Gender,” Laura Frank’s explains that very well, “the fear is the worst before the fact” (Frank 51). She describes that almost everything we are afraid of, we get over it after we make the attempt and know how it feels. We’re only afraid of something until it happens. And then the “pit in your stomach” (Frank 51) gets smaller and smaller and then gone. Nothing lasts forever and nothing hurts forever, “Now I know that even broken bones don’t hurt forever” (Frank 51). I agree to that because once we feel what scares us, it doesn’t scare us anymore, the fear is just an illusion in our heads. She doesn’t want to play the gender games, meaning she doesn’t want to do what society expects of her but rather do the things that she’s fears. People are afraid to be laughed at and to get hurt, that’s why they act in the gender role. They do what society expects them to do instead of what they actually want to do. For example; a gay person wouldn’t want to be laughed at, that’s why they would not be open about it rather hide it and act normal within the society. Not now days but if we look back a couple of years, there was no freedom for them to be open about it.
Esther goes back and forth in playing the gender role. After she got back from New York, she became suicidal. She tried several different ways to kill herself, cutting herself with a blade in a bath tub, drowning, hanging herself, and finally taking pills, “then, one after the other, I lugged the heavy, dust covered logs across the hole mouth” (Plath 169). She took the pills and ended up in the hospital and then asylum. It’s affected her mother, she was upset and almost cried. A woman is not suppose to give up even if she feels depressed and confused, but Esther did and that shows how she didn’t fit into her gender role. Her trying to commit the suicide made her seem crazy. It affected herself negatively and everyone around her.
I also really like your interpretation of what you got out of Luara Frank. I hope Esther could have read this, in the book she struggles and falls into depression all because of her fear of humiliation im guessing.
You bring up an interesting aspect of the novel here, but what, exactly, do Esther’s suicide attempts have to do with fear? Is she brave to attempt suicide? Is death a way to escape fear? If so, what is she so afraid of?
Esther is afraid of not having everything she wants, as she spoke about the fig tree. If she takes one, she loses all the rest. For example, if she chooses to be a house wife, she cannot have a career or anything else she wants in life. So to get rid of that fear she attempts to commit suicide, maybe death is easier for her rather than all these hard choices in her life. It’s not a brave thing to commit suicide, and she is not brave for that choice either. She has a mother and a brother who care for her, she doesn’t think of them. They are distant, but it is still selfish of her to put them through the pain of her own death.