First, Sylvia/Esther, or Esther/Sylvia, is obviously suffering from a lack of helpful supportive institutions and structures. There are no good support systems in her life, systems directed at the individual and the person that she is. Her mother does not understand her; her father is dead. The character of Mrs. Willard offers Esther only out-of-date platitudes. The character of Mrs. Guinea offers her a successful but slick and superficial view of life. The character of Jay Cee offers her professionalism, but at what cost? What young girl wants to become competent but emotionally sterile? In short, Esther/Sylvia has no attractive role models to follow. She does not want to learn shorthand and thereby follow her mother's role. She sees the inadequacies and hypocrisies of the other roles presented to her. This young girl has no idea how to become herself and everyone is pressuring her to choose one of the inadequate role models. Esther would like to branch out in many directions, but she is told in subtle (and also in direct) ways that that route is not possible.
Besides the lack of support from an incomplete family (and certainly it is no one's fault that her father dies when Esther is nine years old), plus the lack of social support (it is too bad that Sylvia was not born twenty years later when the women's movement would have been supportive of her), Esther/Sylvia does not get much help from the professional world (Jay Cee doesn't really try to help her find a good job in New York City, nor do her college professors give her adequate guidance). In addition, Esther's treatment by her doctors and by her psychiatrists shows us how often the health professions fail people. The horror of imagining Esther being treated, first with insulin treatments and, then, electro-shock therapy is monstrous. The insensitivity of Esther's supposedly sensitive doctor who has promised her no electro-shock therapy without a discussion of it first is frightening. Esther's release from therapy before she has clearly defined herself and her problem points to poor medical practice. One reads in Plath's journal that, unable to sleep the last winter she lived in London, she was prescribed sleeping pills by a British doctor. Considering her history, that seems quite irresponsible. Of course, the early 1960s (Plath died in 1963) were times of a pill being a cure-all for everything.
