If she never gave herself to mourning, as her mother never did (according to Plath's accounts of the tearless funeral), Plath, like a narcissistic person, never even gave herself wholly to her youthful desires. Thus, there is a thinness to even her own preoccupation with herself. We never find out just exactly what Esther can't stand about Buddy Willard, except that he is a hypocrite — by her terms.
Perhaps it is this immaturity that causes the youthful Plath to leap into the various stages of her life before coming to terms with the previous ones. Note that she throws herself into her academic work but does not give up her childhood feelings. Then she takes off for New York City before she has been able to absorb her college experiences. After her breakdown, she finishes college and is off to England. Before we know it, she is married and working on her writing and her career. Then quickly she has two children, and then she is separated from her husband. And we learn that while she was in the United States in 1958, she was seeing her psychiatrist again. All this is done very much like a child skipping from one rock to the next, never stopping for long. It is no wonder, therefore, that Esther was never able to make up her mind about which "fig" to choose. Plath, in a similar way, was always too busy taking bites out of each fig to settle on one particular fig.
A work that gives us keen insight into the competitive nature of the women of Plath's place and time is Jane Davison's The Fall of the Doll's House. Davison's work is a social history of women in relation to their homes, their domiciles. What we learn from her about Plath is instructive, and, important to her study, Davison was a peer of Plath since they shared a dorm at Smith. Davison, in telling us about the women of the 1950s — the ambitious, privileged ones who went to the "seven sister colleges" — paints a picture of young girls who wanted to be "tops" in everything. They wanted success in their careers, homes, and for themselves personally. They wanted to be bright and beautiful and rich. Davison tells us how Plath pored over women's magazines in an effort to write pieces that would sell. She quotes a letter in which Sylvia is writing home from England to her mother and begging for old copies of Ladies' Home Journal because she misses them so in London. Thus, we see that Plath didn't want to be just a good writer; she wanted to be a kind of perfect female who could decorate a house stunningly. And, of course, she could not fill all those roles. No wonder she became bitter at times. If society was lacking, so was Plath's idea of her place in it. How exhausting.
