Doreen

Doreen is Esther Greenwood’s most alluring companion during the month in New York: a witty, fashion-conscious contest winner whose apparent ease with privilege, celebrity, and risk fascinates Esther. Their closeness gives Esther a glimpse of a life she desires, but Doreen’s drunken collapse prompts Esther to draw a moral boundary between them. Later, when Doreen returns to care for Esther, that boundary proves incomplete, and the novel’s shifting portrait of her unsettles any simple division between glamorous rebellion and respectable innocence.

Identity and Introduction

Doreen is one of twelve young women who win a fashion magazine contest by submitting essays, stories, poems, and fashion copy. Their prize is a month working in New York, with expenses paid, alongside an abundance of gifts and promotional opportunities. The arrangement dresses professional possibility in consumer glamour: the winners receive fashion-show passes, salon appointments, ballet tickets, and introductions to successful people in the fields they hope to enter. Doreen inhabits this world with a confidence Esther both notices and envies.

Her appearance makes an immediate impression on Esther. Doreen has bright white hair, arranged in a cotton-candy fluff, transparent-looking blue eyes, and a mouth set in an amused, mysterious sneer. Esther emphasizes that the expression is not simply nasty: it suggests that Doreen sees the people around her as faintly ridiculous and could expose them with a joke. The mixture of beauty, mockery, and apparent invulnerability distinguishes her from the other contest winners in Esther’s eyes.

Doreen singles Esther out at once. At the conference table, she sits beside her and whispers sarcastic observations about visiting celebrities, making Esther feel sharper than the other girls and giving her a private position inside the group. Her humor is not only entertainment; it creates an alliance. Esther is attracted to the sense of distinction Doreen lends her, and to the world her stories seem to open.

New York and the Life Esther Envyies

Doreen’s account of her Southern society college becomes one of Esther’s clearest images of luxurious, elaborate living. Doreen says that the students have pocketbook covers made from the same material as their dresses, changing bags whenever they change clothes. Esther is struck by this meticulous coordination. It suggests an existence organized around abundance and style, a life of elaborate decadence that draws her like a magnet.

That attraction grows against Esther’s disappointment in her own New York experience. She has come to the city as a contest winner and is expected to feel fortunate, yet she describes herself as moving numbly between the hotel, work, and parties. She envies girls who have traveled widely and feels that she is letting her own opportunity slip away. Doreen becomes one focus for that envy: not merely because she is fashionable, but because she seems to treat the rules of the surrounding world as material for amusement rather than as measures of success.

The contest’s glamour is itself carefully manufactured. Esther imagines a magazine photograph of herself in a silver-lamé bodice and white tulle, drinking martinis beside anonymous, handsome young men, a picture that would make readers believe she was having a spectacular time. In reality, the public image of the lucky young woman and Esther’s private numbness do not match. Doreen’s proximity draws Esther toward the glamorous performance, even as the performance fails to make Esther feel in control of her life.

The promotional abundance is tangible: Esther remembers a gilt makeup kit with brown mascara, blue eyeshadow, and three lipsticks, as well as a white plastic sunglasses case decorated with shells, sequins, and a green starfish. She later understands that the gifts advertise the firms that supplied them, though at the time she enjoys receiving them. Doreen belongs to this consumer world without being reduced to its prizes. Her wit lets Esther glimpse a way of inhabiting its surfaces with apparent irreverence, even while the contest’s publicity turns the winners themselves into part of the display.

Celebrity, Company, and the Night of the Collapse

Doreen’s social confidence appears in her encounter with the disc jockey Lenny Shepherd. When Esther asks him what he does in New York, he slowly draws his eyes away from Doreen and identifies himself as a disc jockey, adding that he is famous. Doreen cuts through the introduction by saying that she knows him. The exchange gives her an easy familiarity with celebrity and helps explain why Esther experiences her as someone who can move through social situations without the self-consciousness that troubles her.

That ease has a darker edge in the night when Esther brings the drunken Doreen back to the hotel. As Esther lowers her onto the green hall carpet, Doreen moans, pitches forward, and vomits onto the floor. Her head droops into the puddle, her blonde wisps touching it like roots in a bog, and Esther realizes she is asleep. The spectacle turns the glamour Esther has associated with Doreen into a physical, humiliating scene; Esther herself feels half-asleep as she stands over her.

Esther makes a decision in response. She will continue to watch Doreen and listen to her, but inwardly she will have nothing more to do with her; instead, she declares loyalty to Betsy and the innocent friends she believes she resembles at heart. This is not an uncomplicated break. Esther steps back into her room and shuts the door, but cannot bring herself to lock it. The distinction between withdrawal and total rejection survives even in the moment when she tries to make it firm.

The following morning, Esther opens the door slowly, still half-expecting to find Doreen’s body in the vomit as a grim witness to Esther’s own imagined contamination. Doreen is not there. At the next luncheon, her place remains empty, and Esther saves her place card: a pocket mirror bearing Doreen’s name, ringed with frosted daisies around the silver opening where a face would appear. The mirror turns absence into a small, pointed image of identity and display. Doreen is spending the day with Lenny Shepherd and has begun spending most of her free time with him.

Care, Ambivalence, and Narrative Role

Esther’s separation from Doreen never becomes a complete or stable judgment. In a later scene, as Esther drinks broth, she sees Doreen’s head silhouetted against a paling window, her blonde hair lit at the tips. Esther cannot make out her expression, but feels an expert tenderness in Doreen’s fingers. For an instant Doreen might be Betsy, Esther’s mother, or a nurse with a fern-like scent. The scene does not erase the earlier disgust or the deliberate choice to withdraw. Instead, it makes Doreen’s presence capable of care as well as danger, and reveals how uncertain Esther’s categories of loyalty and character have become.

Doreen’s importance lies partly in the contrast she generates. Betsy represents the innocent, respectable identity Esther tells herself she resembles; Doreen offers a witty, worldly alternative that Esther finds magnetically attractive. After the drunken collapse, Esther attempts to resolve that tension by dividing the women into opposing moral types. Yet the later tenderness, together with Esther’s inability to lock Doreen out, resists a clean separation. Doreen is not simply the bad influence Esther rejects, any more than Betsy’s imagined innocence can settle Esther’s divided feelings.

The contrast also sharpens the book’s scrutiny of media and social performance. At the magazine’s Ladies’ Day luncheon, Esther sees how carefully the glossy food photographs are staged: melting ice cream has to be propped up with toothpicks and replaced when it looks too soft. She dislikes the heightened artificiality of Technicolor, where actors appear in lurid costumes against intensely colored scenery. These manufactured images echo the contest’s promise of a spectacular New York life and the polished appearance attached to its young winners. Doreen’s cultivated style belongs to that visible world, but her irreverent humor briefly seems to offer a way to see through it. Esther’s fascination and recoil together show that seeing through an image does not necessarily free her from its pull.

Doreen therefore functions as both companion and counter-image to Esther: a source of intimacy, social access, and imaginative possibility, but also the occasion for Esther’s attempt to define herself against a life she fears. The novel lets neither response stand alone. The girl Esther turns away from in the corridor is also the figure whose fingers later seem tender at her bedside, leaving their relationship suspended between attraction, disavowal, and care.