Esther Greenwood—Doctor Gordon

Esther Greenwood’s relationship with Doctor Gordon is a concentrated encounter between a distressed patient and a clinician whose authority never becomes trust. Esther dislikes him from their first meeting; he elicits her account of her distress, recommends hospitalization and electroshock, and personally administers a treatment she experiences as violent and terrifying. When she later describes that experience to Doctor Nolan, Nolan says it was a mistake. Gordon’s role therefore marks a crucial distinction in Esther’s care: professional authority may determine what happens to her, but it does not by itself make treatment feel intelligible or safe.

First consultation and immediate mistrust

Gordon begins the consultation by twiddling a silver pencil and saying that Esther’s mother has told him she is upset. Esther sits in a cavernous leather chair across an imposing polished desk. His long, thick eyelashes and unusually perfect features strike her as artificial; she hates him as soon as she enters. Before meeting him, she had imagined a kind, perceptive man who would recognize the fear she could not easily explain. Instead, the actual doctor seems remote from the understanding she had hoped to find.

When Gordon asks Esther to say what she thinks is wrong, she turns the question over suspiciously. Her caution becomes a strategy: she believes that by choosing what to reveal and what to hide, she can control the picture of herself he forms. The interview thus begins with an imbalance. Gordon has the clinical position from which to assess her, while Esther tries to preserve a measure of control by managing her disclosure.

After she finishes speaking, Gordon asks which college she attended. Esther cannot see why it matters. He responds with a reminiscence about the college during the war, asking whether it had a WAC or WAVES station. Rather than offering the explanation Esther expects, he shifts to an anecdote about his own past. The exchange deepens her sense that he has not met her distress with the intuitive understanding she imagined.

Diagnosis, referral, and institutional authority

At a later appointment, Gordon asks how Esther feels that week; she answers that she feels the same. She brings scraps of a letter to Doreen and asks what he thinks of them. Instead of commenting on the handwriting that worries her, he says he would like to speak with her mother. Esther agrees, but dislikes the prospect and fears that he may tell her mother she should be locked up. She gathers every scrap before leaving, preventing him from piecing together her plan to run away.

Gordon speaks with Esther’s mother, who returns to the car crying. She reports that he thinks Esther has not improved at all and recommends shock treatments at his private hospital in Walton. His judgment therefore has an immediate practical consequence: it directs Esther toward institutional treatment. She responds with detached curiosity, as though she has encountered a frightening headline about someone else, and asks whether the recommendation means she must live there.

At the hospital, the ordinary appearance of the house initially unsettles Esther because she knows it contains patients in serious distress. The discrepancy between a familiar domestic setting and the treatment she is about to undergo sharpens her uncertainty. She follows Gordon upstairs toward a corridor of shut white doors; a woman’s shouting comes from somewhere ahead. When Esther tries to ask what the treatment will be like, no words come out. Gordon’s familiar, smiling face offers no explanation she can use to steady herself.

The first treatment

In the bare treatment room, Esther sees that the windows are barred and that doors, drawers, and the closet can be locked. She lies on the bed while a nurse removes her watch and hairpins. Gordon unlocks a closet, brings out a wheeled table bearing a machine, and positions it behind the head of the bed. The nurse applies grease to Esther’s temples, and Gordon fits metal plates to either side of her head, securing them with a strap that dents her forehead. Esther is given a wire to bite.

The procedure is not merely frightening in anticipation: Esther experiences it as an assaultive physical event. After a brief silence, something seems to seize and shake her; the machine shrills, blue light flashes, and jolts drum through her body until she fears her bones will break. She wonders what terrible thing she has done. The experience makes the gap between Gordon’s clinical control of the apparatus and Esther’s terror of its effects impossible to overlook.

Afterward, Esther is sitting in a wicker chair with a small glass of tomato juice. Her watch has been put back upside down, and her hairpins feel unfamiliar. The disturbed arrangement of these ordinary objects registers her disorientation after the treatment. Gordon later asks which college she attended, then repeats his recollection about a wartime WAC station. Esther’s mother waits with bone-white knuckles; when Gordon indicates that he expects improvement after a few more treatments, her face relaxes. His reassurance to her contrasts with Esther’s account of what the procedure felt like from the bed.

Retrospective judgment and narrative significance

At another hospital, Doctor Nolan asks Esther about Gordon and whether she liked him. Esther answers no, adding that she did not like what he did to her. When she recounts the machine, the blue flashes, the jolting, and the noise, Nolan becomes very still and says, “That was a mistake,” explaining that it is not supposed to be like that. The exchange supplies a direct professional contrast: Esther’s suffering is not presented only as an unavoidable feature of treatment, because another doctor identifies the way it was performed as wrong.

Gordon’s treatment continues to shape Esther’s expectations even after she has left his care. At Caplan, she watches patients who have received shock treatments arrive in the lounge quiet and extinguished, led by nurses after the others have eaten breakfast. Each morning, receiving her own breakfast tray brings relief because she knows she is not scheduled for treatment that day. She doubts that Doctor Nolan can know from personal experience what shock feels like and fears that a patient could appear asleep while still experiencing the blue volts and noise. Her distrust is therefore not confined to a judgment of Gordon’s personality; it extends to whether doctors can fully know what the patient undergoes.

When Esther later believes that Doctor Nolan has failed to warn her about another treatment, she experiences the omission as treachery precisely because she had trusted Nolan and relied on her promise. This later breach is not the same relationship as the one with Gordon, but its force is legible against the earlier encounter: Gordon’s treatment has made warning, explanation, and the possibility of consent central to how Esther understands medical trust. Under Nolan’s care, Esther is eventually led through basement corridors to the Electrotherapy room; Miss Huey speaks soothingly, applies salve, fits the electric buttons, and tells her she will be all right before the treatment begins. The contrast underscores how much the manner of care matters to Esther, even when electroshock remains frightening.

Gordon’s significance lies in this contrast between diagnostic power and therapeutic trust. He can assess Esther as unimproved, consult her mother, and arrange treatment, but Esther experiences his first procedure as a terrifying bodily ordeal rather than as help she understands. The later acknowledgment that something went wrong confirms the distance between the medical rationale offered around her and the event as she lived it. His episode becomes a measure against which Esther judges subsequent doctors: not simply by their authority, but by whether they explain, listen, and take her experience seriously.