Esther Greenwood—her father

Esther Greenwood’s relationship with her father is shaped by a loss she has never properly mourned: his death has seemed unreal since childhood, yet the grief she discovers at his grave gives that absence a forceful presence. The bond is also imagined as an inheritance of knowledge and identity. As the novel places her private bereavement alongside the news of the Rosenbergs’ execution, her father’s death becomes one of the losses that return to consciousness when the life she expected no longer holds together.

Childhood Absence and an Imagined Inheritance

Esther’s father died in a hospital when she was young, and her mother did not allow the children to attend the funeral. The exclusion left the graveyard, and even the fact of his death, unreal to Esther. The gap in her knowledge is not merely a missing funeral memory: it has left her without a familiar practice of mourning or a settled way to feel her father’s absence.

She remembers herself as her father’s favorite and feels a belated desire to make amends for years of neglect by tending his grave. Her proposed act of care carries an implicit reproach: she believes her mother had not undertaken the mourning that Esther now wants to assume. Visiting is therefore both an attempt to establish a relationship with the dead and a response to the family’s earlier silence around his death.

Esther’s thoughts about what her father might have taught her reveal the relationship’s unrealized possibilities. Because entomology was his university specialty, she imagines learning about insects from him; she also imagines that he could have taught her German, Greek, and Latin. These lessons never took place. Their imagined transmission gives her father a place in the intellectual life Esther values, while making clear that the connection she longs for must be constructed after his death.

His religious history offers a second possible inheritance. He had been a Lutheran in Wisconsin, became a lapsed Lutheran after moving to New England, where Lutheranism was out of fashion, and was later described by Esther’s mother as a bitter atheist. Esther wonders whether, had he lived, she might have become a Lutheran. This speculation makes religious identity part of the lost future she associates with him, not a certainty about what her own life would have been.

The Grave and the Delayed Mourning

When Esther finally visits the graveyard, she enters through its wrought-iron gates with her black veil drawn down to her chin. The graveyard disappoints her: it lies on low ground at the edge of town, like a rubbish dump, and the distant salt marshes smell stagnant. The old section, with flat worn stones and lichen-bitten monuments, is more acceptable to her, but she realizes her father must be buried among the newer graves, dated in the 1940s. The setting is practical and unceremonious rather than consoling, underscoring how little the place has previously belonged to her.

She finds his gravestone crowded head-to-head against another, as if the graves were packed together in a charity ward. The mottled pink marble reminds her of canned salmon; the stone bears only her father’s name and two dates separated by a dash. That spare inscription reduces a life to a name and a span of time, while the crowded placement makes even the grave seem to offer little room for an individual history.

Esther lays rainy azaleas, picked from a bush at the graveyard gate, at the foot of the stone. Her legs fold beneath her, and she sits in the wet grass, unable to understand why she is crying so hard. The decisive recognition follows: she has never cried for her father’s death. The scene thus makes grief belated rather than absent. The funeral she missed and the mourning she never performed return together in the physical act of sitting beside his grave.

She presses her face to the smooth marble and howls her loss into the cold salt rain. Her mother had not cried either; instead, she had said that death was merciful because Esther’s father would otherwise have been crippled and an invalid for life, a condition he could not have borne. Esther’s grief does not simply refute that explanation, but it makes visible what the practical language of mercy left unexpressed: the daughter’s loss, which had remained outside the family’s account of his death.

Loss Within the Novel’s Crisis

The father’s death is set against Esther’s account of the summer when the Rosenbergs were executed. The news is everywhere, in headlines and on the radio, and Esther dwells on what it would mean to be electrocuted. She describes the execution as having nothing to do with her, yet she cannot stop imagining its violence. The public event and her family bereavement are distinct losses, but the novel places them within the same field of thought: death becomes difficult for Esther to keep at a distance.

Her memory of seeing a cadaver intensifies this pattern of involuntary return. For weeks, the cadaver’s head appears in her mind behind her breakfast and behind the face of Buddy Willard, who had been responsible for her seeing it. The image becomes, in her description, something she carries on a string. This recurrence helps clarify the form of her relation to her father’s death: what was not faced at the time does not disappear, but can return as an image or a sudden bodily response.

At the novel’s opening, Esther knows something is wrong with her because she cannot stop thinking about the Rosenbergs, her costly clothes lying limp in her closet, and the college successes that seem to have come to nothing in the world outside Madison Avenue. She is supposed to be having the time of her life, but the expected happiness fails to match her experience. Her later visit to her father’s grave gives one of these inward pressures a concrete scene: she encounters a particular loss that childhood exclusion had left unreal, and discovers that its grief is still available to her.

The book’s retrospective frame connects these summer and autumn events in Esther’s life to the period of the Rosenbergs’ execution and the beginning of the Eisenhower presidency. Within that historical setting, the father-daughter relationship is not developed through scenes of shared life; it is reconstructed from missed rites, remembered facts, and imagined lessons. Its emotional turning point is Esther’s recognition at the grave that she has never mourned him. What she can do in the present is limited but tangible: bring azaleas, sit beside the stone, and give voice to a loss that had seemed unreal.