Purity vs. Impurity Theme Analysis

Esther remains preoccupied by questions of purity and impurity throughout the novel, framing them in different terms at different points in her development. She thinks about purity of body as well as purity of mind. Indeed, Esther often speaks of purity as a kind of spiritual transcendence that can be accessed through transcendence of the body. At novel’s start, she admires the clearness of vodka and imagines that drinking it into her body will purify her spirit. Later that night, she soaks her body in a hot bath to feel spiritually cleansed. Esther also flashes back to the feeling that she might be rendered “saintly” by racing down a ski slope towards the sun.

Yet even though Esther considers purity in multiple arenas of experience, she considers it most frequently in terms of sex. There, ‘pure’ is synonymous with ‘virgin.’ Esther’s obsession with the sexual purity of those around her and her angst about her own virginity dominates Esther’s thoughts on female sexuality. “When I was nineteen,” Esther reflects, “pureness was the great issue…I saw the world divided into people who had slept with somebody and people who hadn’t…I thought a spectacular change would come over me the day I crossed the boundary line.” Contemplating losing her virginity to Constantin, Esther thinks she would wake up the next day and look in the mirror to “see a doll-size Constantin sitting in my eye and smiling out at me.” Through these thoughts, Esther not only uses purity and impurity to organize the world around her, but also conceives of sex as something that leaves a visible mark—an impurity—in the form of an image on a person’s eye.

Even as Esther is attracted to the transcendent, spiritual purity mentioned above, she is resentful of and frustrated by her sexual purity. She feels stifled by the double standard of social expectation, constantly reiterated by women like her mother and Mrs. Willard, which instructs young women to remain virgins until marriage while allowing young men to engage in sexual experimentation without seriously tarnishing their characters. After discovering that Buddy has had an affair, Esther grows furious at his hypocrisy (pretending to be ‘pure’ while in fact being ‘impure’), which echoes the hypocritical standards of the social expectations surrounding her. Esther becomes determined to abandon her own virginity and embrace sexual freedom, which she eventually manages by buying a diaphragm and having sex with Irwin.