What we see again in these four chapters is that Esther's symptoms are being treated rather than her disease. Just as Esther's mother had urged her to go to school or do volunteer work or take up shorthand, and just as Jay Cee had urged her to do her editing tasks, and just as the old-style feminist professor had urged Esther to pursue a "career," now her liberated female psychiatrist has given her "humane" shock treatments and the latest insulin treatments. And now she has sent Esther off for the best contraceptive available. All this may help Esther to live, on the surface, more comfortably, but Esther's real dilemmas and real troubles are never confronted.
The reader sees that there are only two short chapters left for Esther to find herself, for Esther to grow up, for Esther to begin to be well. Can she do it? Where are the resources to aid her in this task of coming back from a deep underground cocoon to life?
In these four chapters, Esther's problems become more clearly defined, and we see the help that various people are trying to give her, however limited. Mrs. Guinea is paying for the best psychiatric care available but is also complaining that it is not doing Esther enough good. It is to be wondered, here, if money and privilege are really that advantageous. Are these treatments helping Esther that much?
Esther was living in a fog, in her "bell jar," for some time before her suicide attempt, and we see that she had problems with disorientation. She was perceiving her existence in warped ways, and she was unable to function. But would she not have come out of this state as well by herself, as with the insulin and the electro-shock treatments? Did these treatments not prolong her dependence on institutions that did not understand her and increase her alienation? In any psychiatric situation, treatments that do not promote self-sufficiency are to be questioned. In addition, to believe that solutions to the problem are outside the individual rather than an internal process should also be suspect. Why was Esther not allowed to rest, just rest, after her suicide attempt?
