Name: __________________________________ Date: ___________________ Period: ______
Close Reading Organizer - Chapter 1
Directions: Read each summary entry and think about which themes listed in the Themes Key apply
to it, then color in those themes in the Theme Tracker. Next, write a few sentences of Analysis to
explain how the themes you chose apply to each summary section.
Themes Key
1
Mind vs. Body
2
Purity vs. Impurity
3
Women and Social Expectations
4
Personal Ambition
5
Medicine
Summary
Esther Greenwood begins her
reminiscence of the summer of 1953
when she won a contest to live in
New York for a month as the guest
editor of a fashion magazine. Though
Esther knows she should feel
accomplished and grateful for the
opportunity to work in New York, she
instead feels numb and detached
from her own life. She is obsessed
with the electrocution of the
Rosenbergs (a married couple
executed for being Soviet spies). She
feels all her college achievements
have “fizzled to nothing” in New York
and that she is “very still and very
empty, the way the eye of a tornado
must feel.”
Theme Tracker
1
2
3
4
Your Analysis
5
The conflicts between Esther’s past
success and her current failure in
New York contributed to this theme.
As mentioned earlier, she claimed to
be top and academically successful
than most other girls back in college.
However, after being invited to New
York, her self-esteem was being
reduced by a large degree due to
the way of living she encountered
with the rich white girls. She
dreamed of being renowned and
financially successful and thought
herself smarter and better than the
other girls, but the truth is that the
other girls can make a living easily in
New York and are free from financial
anxieties. Her ambition for becoming
successful was being illustrated
through her nostalgic feeling toward
the past, and was being emphasized
by her uneasiness and resentment
toward the present. She is obsessed
and dishearten with her current
living, both spiritual and financial
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Name: __________________________________ Date: ___________________ Period: ______
ways, and contributed to her numb
and detached feeling.
Esther lives with the eleven other
contest winners in the Amazon, a
women-only hotel otherwise
inhabited mostly by wealthy girls
Esther’s age working as secretaries
in New York while they wait to get
married. Her best friend among the
other contest winners is Doreen, a
cynical, witty, sexy rule-breaker who
tries to talk Esther out of doing her
work for Jay Cee, her boss at the
fashion magazine. Betsy, a
wholesome, all-American girl from
Kansas, continually invites Esther to
hang out with her and the other girls
“as if she were trying to save me in
some way,” Esther reflects.
For a magazine-hosted party tonight,
Esther rejects Betsy’s offer to share
a cab in order to go with Doreen,
who says they’ll just go for a little
while before heading “out on the
town.” Doreen criticizes all the young
Yale men she expects will be at the
party. “They’re so stoo-pit!” she
says. Esther reflects, “Buddy
Willard went to Yale, but now that I
thought of it, what was wrong with
him was that he was stupid,” in spite
of his good grades. Esther hears
what Doreen says “like a secret voice
speaking straight out of my own
bones.”
1
1
2
2
3
3
4
4
5
As being mentioned in the summary,
girls at that time were being valued
by biology rather than spirit. Girls
were deemed as achieving rewards
by being secretaries or marrying nice
man, which circumcised girls’
potential of performing in vital
positions in society or pursuing their
careers. It is being reflected that the
society required the girls to be
passive and dominated by man,
expecting women to be virtually
supporting males but not actively
helping. Also, it seems a norm for
the wealthier girls like Betsy to
participate in balls and dinners which
are places for date and finding
matching them to men they never
acquainted before. This daily routine
and common phenomenon imply
that they are being restricted by
society and are unable to discover
their full potential and interests.
5
Betsy symbolizes the mundane part
inside Esther, longing to blend into
the who society and be normal and
ordinary. Doreen represents the
spiritual and holly part of her soul,
longing to be herself and to be an
distinctive and extraordinary
individual. Betsy is the like body,
arousing superficial satisfactions in
Esther, where as Doreen is like the
spirit, arousing true pleasure and
freeing Esther form social norms
preventing her to be herself. The
contrast between mind and body
also implies about the conflict
between Esther’s pursuit for
superficial pleasure and her
consciences mind about being
different and being herself. Also,
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Name: __________________________________ Date: ___________________ Period: ______
Buddy Willard symbolizes the
pleasure from the body, as well as
the dominance of man of woman in
the society. He is shallow and never
understand Esther’s life pursuit for
poems and publishes. He’s mind
contrast with Esther’s mind, having
different norms, principles, and
priorities. He loves her because of
her superficial attractions to him. His
rude and hilarious arrogance
infuriated Esther. His gesture’s
arrogance was being catalyzed by
the society, in which men took
intrinsic dominance over women,
marking them as shallow minded
and inferior.
3
Name: __________________________________ Date: ___________________ Period: ______
In a cab stuck in traffic on the way
to the party, Esther and Doreen
are approached by the dapper,
smiling, disc jockey Lenny
Shepherd, who convinces the girls
to abandon the cab and join him and
his friends in a bar. Esther, with her
yellowing tan, skinny figure, and
unbecoming dress, knows that Lenny
is attracted to Doreen’s voluptuous
beauty, but she is excited to see
another side of city life and doesn’t
care. Indeed, Lenny immediately
pawns Esther off on his squat,
squeaky-voiced friend Frankie in
order to dote on Doreen.
Sitting in the bar, Esther thinks, “I
felt myself melting into the shadows
1
2
3
4
5
The way Doreen was being
introduced to Lenny is particularly
similar to the way a prey was being
detected and designated by a
predator. Lenny detect Doreen,
attracted to her prettiness, and
thought of these women in the
society to be tools complementing
his own wills rather than as
individuals having equal rights and
potentials. The relationship between
women and men aligns with the
relationship between preys and
predators, indicating men’s absolute
dominance over women. They
simply deem women as different
choices of body pleasure and though
of them as easily approached,
mainly served to please men.
Women’s biological values were
being overvalued over their virtual
potentials. Women were being
required to be docile and serving for
men.
1
2
3
4
5
She deemed vodka as pure, as the
sense from the lightness and
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Name: __________________________________ Date: ___________________ Period: ______
like the negative of a person I’d
never seen before in my life.” She
orders straight vodka to avoid
exposing her ignorance about
cocktails, and because she
remembers an ad in which vodka
“looked clear and pure as water.”
Drinking it, she finds it tasteless but
feels it makes her “powerful and
god-like.” She tells Lenny and
Frankie that her name is Elly
Higginbottom and she’s from
Chicago, so as not to have “anything
I said or did that night…associated
with me and my real name and
coming from Boston.” Lenny tries to
get Doreen to come home with him
and Doreen says she won’t go
without “Elly.” Esther says she’ll go
too and thinks she “liked looking at
other people in crucial situations,”
like “a road accident or a street fight
or a baby pickled in a laboratory jar.”
dizziness for being stoned makes her
escape from the real world.
Comparing to alcohol which renders
her experiences of emptiness and
periods of rest from chaotic views
from herself, her chaotic state of
mind-wavering between mind and
body as well as blending in and
standing our-is considered as
impure, having different views from
different perspectives.
5