Well in this book, for chapters one through seven, I've notice the color white a couple dozen times, at least once a page. I'm sure everyone here too has noticed it. Here are a couple notes I have written to try and understand the purpose/ meaning of this:
1) We all know that white typically symbolizes purity and innocence and goodness (for lack of a better word),
a) (The word "pure" is also repeated several times)
2) however, the color white has some pretty negative associations, which is the opposite of white should do.
a) For Esther, white symbolizes a taint in this idea of purity. She believed Buddy to be pure and a virgin, and to be a wholly honest person. However, when she discovers his affair, not only is this idea innocence lost because she discovers he's not a virgin, she also loses her trust in him.
i)Notice how this happened after the baby was born, as Esther described. Babies being born should symbolize new life and purity, but for Esther, she associates this with Buddy's loss of innocence. She also describes the birth to look like torture, and to Esther, "whiteness" is a sort of torture because of what she associates it with.
ii) Also, Buddy had "white teeth" and a "white turtle neck."
b) Another bad association that I discovered is when she became ill from the crabmeat. This theory of mine is a little more far-fetched than the above one and a little harder to recognize, but I think it is plausible and relevant to the book. At this point in the book, there again are very many uses of the word "white." Also notice that what made her sick was the crabmeat, which was made with mayonnaise, which is white. Something about whiteness is not good for Esther. Crab meat is also is a symbol of wealth, because only the rich people eat it. We discussed on Wednesday that Esther is not very fond of this idea of wealth. Altogether, she has a "bad taste in her mouth" about wealth, which is associated with white,
i)and the reason I say wealth is associated with white is because many of the wealthier other women are described with images of whiteness. page 10 "[Doreen had] white hair and white dress she was so white she looked silver."
ii) There is also darkness to the whiteness and silver, as shown in this quote: "The same silver glow on them at the front and the same black shadow on the back of them." There are other examples of this too. ". . . stiff blond hair fell from [Doreen's] dark roots." This happened right after she was drinking and threw up in the hotel.
So I don't know. I could be right, I could be wrong. To me, it seems like something is going on with this "white" and "purity" and wealth thing. Are my outlined ideas far-fetched? or do you guys agree with me? What do you think?
If anyone has evidence to counter or corroborate this idea, you can put that too.
ReplyDeleteI definitely agree with your assertions about how Esther uses the color white very much in the novel. One thing I thought was interesting was how you think that white can be used as a symbol of wealth. I totally agree with this and in fact, I see it in other works such as in The Great Gatsby. In this novel, I remember that the wealthy class and the women especially were wearing white in order to show their wealth. The white resembled a sort of angelic and godlike symbol, showing that because they were wealthy, it was as if they were also superior. Additionally, as I kept reading through, I noticed an interesting passage when she was skiing with Buddy that I thought was worth noting. In chapter eight when Buddy takes Esther skiing, she notices the color white twice. First she says, “The great, gray eye of the sky looked back at me, its mist- shrouded sun focusing all the white and silent distances that poured from every point of the compass.” She also says as she was skiing down the mountain, “I was descending but the white sun rose no higher.” In these two lines, it almost shapes the entire passage by giving the atmosphere a blanket of “white.” I can envision her skiing down a mountain, surrounding by whiteness, a sign of purity perhaps. And to connect it to what we were talking about in class today in regards to unattainable things that Esther has in her life, maybe this sense of purity is unattainable in the sense that she was disappointed that Buddy was not “pure” in her mind.
ReplyDeleteEvery time I read this book I see white! Even in our last class when we were looking for passages I couldn't get it out of my head. Instead of white symbolizing purity, I feel like Sylvia views white as a very negative thing at times. She talks about white when she is referring to pregnancy, and her original idea of it.But this image she portrays is very gruesome and tainted. There is a loss of hope when she refers to it. I want to keep looking into this subject with you because it is such a symbol that is not hidden at all. Maybe it refers to her time spent in the insane asylum, where everything she saw was white. I really can't form a solid hypothesis at this point. What I think so far is that white symbolizes an unrealistic hope that Sylvia has for happiness.
ReplyDeleteI completely agree that white is a very substantial symbol in the novel, although sometimes I am confused by its appearance. It wasn’t until I reread this post (I read it earlier this week and then again before I wrote my response) that I realized something I initially thought was an unimportant detail might have meaning. I thought this scene was so irrelevant that there wasn’t even an annotation marking the page, so I had to leaf through the book until I found it.
ReplyDeleteAt the beginning of Esther’s stay in the asylum, she was always wrapped in the white blanket. However, when she was walking to get shock treatment in chapter seventeen, she dropped the blanket. I saw this to symbolizes yet another one of Esther’s transitions. After shock treatment, she began to feel better and it was the beginning of her recovery. At this point we see Esther starting to make progress. I think Plath did this intentionally using the color white, and having Esther shed this white blanket, to foreshadow her later recovery. I’m still a little unsure of why she used white here, other than to show the transition. It is highly probable that the white blanket had other significance, but I cannot figure that out.
I definitely agree with you when you say that white is bad for Esther. In the book, everything is described with a bleak color. It's white, but not the pure kind. It's fake and sometimes even contains dark colors within the white. It's like the truth behind purity. As children, we all start out with pure, naive thoughts in our head about love, childbirth, and many other things. But as we get older and learn more about the world, we find that many things are actually a lot darker than we think they are, and I think that's what Esther is seeing. She is seeing the real truth behind the purity and that things and people that may seem pure are actually dirty and dark.
ReplyDeleteI also like how Plath uses the purity of white to show how imperfect and debased the situation really is. Like in chapter 4 when she says "The sickness rolled through me in great waves... the glittering white torture chamber tiles under my feet and over my head and all four sides closed in and squeezed me to pieces." The cleanliness and purity of the white "glittering" tiles is juxtapose with the image of Esther getting sick. Also because the scene is so pure I feel like it puts more of an emphasis on her personal impurities and not the impurities of her situation that she is in. The fact that she gets sick after she leaves the gala and goes to a movie premiere reflects the impurity of her life. Esther is trying to live life at both extremes, by sometimes living in the fast lane like Doreen and sometimes being wholesome like Betsy.
ReplyDeleteThe light motif permeated throughout this book does cause readers to ponder its meaning. It's obvious, through Plath's writing, that her views on the color white and everything else seen as light and happy are tainted and viewed as dark and dreary. As Nicole stated above, in most novels, such as The Great Gatsby, the color white or cream always stood for purity and innocence. It is clear that Sylvia must have had many unfortunate and difficult things happen in her life that now cause her to view things in a very different perspecitve than how others view life. It is not necessarily a bad thing, it is just different, and almost refreshing. From Plath's take on the color, she challenges the reader to figure out her outlook on whiteness. She intrigues the reader by not giving him or her an easy way of decoding her messages. Otherwise, we would all just easily classify her usage of white as everything pure, and not work hard at disecting who she is as a person and who her character stands for in society. I do find it interesting how Esther provides us with a paradox between the significance of the colors that are permeated throughout the book, which, in my opinion, causes her character to automatically be very complex. However, from the crabmeat to Buddy's white teeth, Esther never ceases to keep her readers interested and intrigued in order to decode her intended meanings.
ReplyDelete