Esther Greenwood's Distorted Sexual Views

The narrator also shares Esther Greenwood’s distorted sexual views. She too is not much interested in sex. Part of the reason may be because she had failed in love with her ex-husband, who had urged her to have an abortion rather than keep the child. Her divorce and unwanted abortion and her compliance in the act had left a deep scar on her psyche. “I have to behave as though it doesn’t exist, because for me it can’t, it was taken away from me, exported, deported. A section of my own life, sliced off from me like a Siamese twin, my own flesh cancelled. Lapse, relapse, I have to forget.” (64-65) She felt as though she was emptied and amputated and death was planted in her like a seed.
He said I should do it, he made me do it; he talked about
it as though it was legal, simple like getting a wart removed. He said it wasn’t a person, only an animal; I should have seen it was no different, it was hiding in me as if in a burrow and instead of granting it sanctuary I let them catch it. I could have said no but I didn’t that made me one of them too, a killer… Since then I carried that death around inside me…(210) Because of this reason she could not fully enjoy her life with Joe. “I’d rather have him around than not; though it would be nice if he meant something more to me. The fact that he doesn’t make me sad: no one has since my husband. A divorce is like an amputation, you survive but there is less of you.”(55-56)
Another reason for the disturbed state of the narrator’s mind is that she was always guilty of the fact that her parents never forgave her. They could neither understand the divorce nor her marriage, which wasn’t surprising as she herself did not understand it. They were upset because she had run away from home to do it and then got into such circumstances but never returned to them or informed them clearly. “Leaving my child, that was the unpardonable sin; it was no use trying to explain to them why it wasn’t really mine. But I admit I was stupid, stupidity is the same as evil if you judge by the results, and I didn’t have any excuses, I was never good at them.”(35)
She also has a strange sense of insecurity at all times-she was fearsome of somebody watching her back. On one instance when she had gone inside the store to collects essential items before they went to her father’s island she felt like she “would like to back out the door, I don’t want them staring at me from behind; but I force myself to walk slowly, frontwards.” (31)
She was also fearful of her father watching them continuously. “Fear has a smell, as love does” according to her. It seemed to her that he was lurking somewhere in the horizon ready to attack them for intruding in his privacy, which left an imprint of fear on her.
… the island wasn’t safe, we were trapped on it. They didn’t realize it but I did…The sense of watching eyes, his presence lurking behind the green leafscreen, ready to pounce or take flight, he wasn’t predictable, I was trying to think of ways to keep them out of danger; they would be alright as long as them didn’t go anywhere alone. He might be harmless but I couldn’t be sure.(108-109)
On another instance we see that she tells Paul that her father was alive.
When he inquires if her father had come back, she replied that perhaps he was on a trip and would return soon. “For all I could tell he might have been listening to us at that moment, from behind the raspberry canes or the burn heap.” (136-137)
The “watching” is also apparent when the narrator was washing the dishes on the rock. She could see part of a tent, among the cedars at the distant end of the lake. She felt as though they had “Binoculars trained on me, I could feel the eye rays, cross of the rifle side on my forehead, in case I made a false move.”(170)
She also had a very irrational sense of fear for doors and closed spaces. She even felt insecure inside the cottage which was her own home. Perhaps this hidden fear later emerges and leads her to lead a wild life out in the open air amidst Nature. “Inside I hook the door shut, it’s doors I’m afraid of because I can’t see through them, it’s the door opening by itself in the wind I’m afraid of. I run back down the path, telling myself to stop it, I’m old enough, I’m old.”
(254-55)

She was also very interested in uncommon things from her childhood like the amputated hand of the Madame of the only store. Her arm, devoid of a hand was for the narrator a great mystery “… almost as puzzling as Jesus. I wanted to know how the hand had come off( perhaps she had taken it off herself) and where it was now, and especially if my hand could ever come off like that; but I never asked, I must have been afraid of the answers.”(32)
On another instance, while all of them were fishing in the lake and none were able to catch anything, she took out the little frog and hooked it on securely while it squeaked. At this, Anna remarked that she was “cold-blooded”. The narrator seemed to be devoid of any feelings and did her work mechanically.
She was also attracted to grotesque images of blood. There are many instances in the narrative where she recurrently refers to the image of blood. Some of them are: When they first arrive at the island they find it full of mosquitos, the narrator would wait for the mosquito to have its fill of blood before popping it with her thumb like a grape. Also when Anna and she was weeding the garden her hands were “green with weed blood.”(110)
The narrator was obsessed with toilets and outhouses and would often use them as tools of escapism. It was she who had gone and dug the toilet hole for their stay and we see that she would often take recourse to hiding there when she wanted to avoid company.
At one point of time the narrator found it very difficult to converse with others as language seemed to fail her; such was the extent to which she was disturbed. When David followed her to the garden and asked her about what she was pre-occupied with, she had to struggle very hard in order to give him a reply.
I had to concentrate in order to talk to him, the English words seemed imported, foreign; it was like trying to listen to two separate conversations, each interrupting the other.
“A mushroom,” I said. That wouldn’t be enough, he would want a specific term. My mouth jumped like a stutterer’s and the Latin appeared. “Amanita”
Towards the end of the novel, when the narrator and Joe have sex out in the open, and she has a strange feeling of her aborted child surfacing within her. She seemed to be in a reverie and wanted to give birth to her child and not allow anyone to be near her unborn child. This time she wouldn’t tell anyone for the fear of being put to the “death machine” or rather “emptiness machine” with secret knives wrenching out her child.
This time I’ll do it by myself, squatting, on old newspapers in a corner alone; or on leaves, dry leaves, a heap of them, that’s cleaner. The baby will slip out easily as an egg, a kitten, and I’ll kick it off and bite the cord, the blood returning to the ground where it belongs; the moon will be full, pulling. In the morning I will be able to see it: it will be covered with shining fur, a god, I will never teach it any words.
(238)
These lines clearly indicate the absolutely disturbed state of her psyche. She wants to deliver her baby not in a hospital but rather by squatting on newspapers and leaves like an animal. She would bite of the umbilical cord like a wild animal rather than allow humans to conduct her delivery. These lines clearly indicate her turn towards savage life and distance from civilized life. For her, civilized society is the reason for the murder of her unborn child and Nature would provide solace and shelter to both of them now. She even refuse to make her child a civil being, she would never teach the baby any human words