Esther's Aborted Suicide Attempt at Deer Island

Esther's aborted suicide attempt at Deer Island is a decisive turn in her movement toward death: she goes to the shore with razors and a plan, but when the sea touches her, she cannot make herself enter it. She retrieves her pocketbook and walks back to her shoes. The retreat preserves her life without settling the conflicts that made death seem possible, including her fear that pregnancy and marriage could place her under a man's control.

Background and Pressures

The episode follows a crisis in which Esther has begun to imagine suicide as an action she can schedule. Sitting on a park bench, she tells herself she will stay five minutes by the clock on a nearby building and then go somewhere to do it. The measured interval gives her intention the form of a practical appointment, even as the thought of death remains set against the ordinary passage of time. She summons the voices in her head, including the question of whether her work interests her, but the scene offers no answer that turns her back from the plan.

Her fear is bound to the risks and restrictions surrounding women’s sexuality. Earlier, watching a woman give birth, Esther understands the pain not as an ordeal that ends with delivery but as something a drug might make a woman forget, leaving her vulnerable to being shut into the same corridor of pain again. She regards the logic of that forgetting as one a man might invent. The birth scene has sharpened her sense that women bear the bodily consequences while others may explain or regulate them.

The counsel Esther has received about chastity intensifies that pressure rather than easing it. An article her mother sent from the Reader’s Digest, written by a married woman lawyer and titled “In Defense of Chastity,” argues that men and women inhabit different emotional worlds and that marriage is what properly joins them. Esther has also been told there is no completely reliable way to avoid pregnancy. The prospect therefore hangs over sexual choice as a consequence she cannot fully control.

That fear becomes explicit when Esther speaks with Doctor Nolan. She says that what she hates is being under a man's thumb and describes the possibility of a baby as a stick held over her to keep her in line. When Doctor Nolan asks whether she would act differently without that worry, Esther says yes, then tells her about the married woman lawyer’s argument. At Deer Island, the private crisis takes place against this larger bind: the wish to escape imposed dependence and the belief that her choices carry risks she cannot reliably prevent.

The Shore and the Attempt

At the island, Esther looks out past a barred gate toward the narrow road, with ocean on both sides, leading to what had once been an island. The landscape offers a route outward but also confines it: the gate and water define the edge of the place where she has come to die. The red-brick prison buildings appear almost friendly, like those of a seaside college, and the guard points out pigs and chickens on a grassy rise. The ordinary details coexist with her intention, making the setting neither a remote wilderness nor an abstract scene of despair.

Esther imagines an alternative life in the town she left: marriage to the prison guard, children, a home by the sea, wash dresses, bright linoleum, and coffee. This domestic picture is not presented as a firm decision to live that life. It is a passing possibility she can envision, and its closeness to the prison makes the imagined home and the actual institution sit uneasily beside one another. The scene lets the prospect of conventional family life appear both available to the imagination and implicated in the restrictions she fears.

At the beach, summer development and traffic intrude on her private purpose. New blue, pink, and pale-green shanties have appeared on the sand during her ten years away, and jets now roar overhead where silver airplanes and blimps once passed. Esther stands out in a skirt and high heels; after taking off her patent-leather shoes, she pictures them on a silver log, pointing seaward like a compass for her soul after death. The shoes turn the intended end into an image she can observe from outside herself, while their presence on the beach also marks a place she will later return to.

She fingers the box of razors in her pocketbook, then recognizes a practical obstacle: she has the razors but no warm bath. Renting a room would draw suspicion because she has no luggage, and in a boardinghouse other people might need the bathroom before she could act. The plan is therefore shaped not only by a wish to die but by calculations about privacy, time, and means. The details make the attempt concrete while exposing how much its imagined completion depends on circumstances Esther cannot arrange.

The Reversal

At the water’s edge, Esther steps onto cold stones. A wave withdraws and advances to touch her foot; another breaks over her feet, and the chill grips her ankles with a mortal ache. She waits as if the sea could make the decision for her. That waiting transfers the decisive act from her intention to an encounter with her own body, but the water does not make the choice disappear: when the cold reaches her, her flesh recoils from this death.

The reversal is small in physical scale but decisive in consequence. Esther does not describe a new conviction or a resolution of the problems behind the attempt. She picks up her pocketbook and walks back across the cold stones to the shoes she had left watching in the violet light. The action reverses her movement toward the water: the objects first imagined as markers of her death become part of her return to shore. Survival comes through a bodily refusal at the point of contact, not through a sudden argument that erases despair.

Consequences and Significance

The aborted attempt marks a limit in Esther’s movement toward suicide, but not an end to the danger. Her return shows that she cannot carry out this particular plan under these conditions; it does not show that the fears driving it have been answered. The gap between intention and action is the episode’s central turn: Esther sets a time to die, brings the means she has considered, and then turns back when the cold becomes immediate.

That turn resonates with Esther’s later effort to make sexual choice less governed by fear. Philomena Guinea’s money, which Esther has been given as a get-well present, helps her obtain a fitting for a diaphragm. Esther understands the money as buying her freedom. At the doctor’s office she rejects an invented story about marrying a sailor and answers plainly that she wants the fitting; afterward, she thinks of the appointment as climbing toward freedom from fear, from marrying the wrong person merely because of sex, and from the homes to which unmarried pregnant women are sent. This later act does not cancel the Deer Island episode, but it makes clear what is at stake in the freedom Esther had earlier found so difficult to imagine: control over the consequences that could otherwise narrow her life.

Together, the shore and the fitting connect bodily survival with reproductive autonomy without making them the same choice. At Deer Island, Esther cannot force herself into the cold sea; later, she takes a practical step to reduce the power pregnancy holds over her. The first choice keeps her alive for the moment, while the second addresses one source of the fear that had made escape seem necessary. The episode’s force lies in this unresolved movement: Esther turns away from death, but the work of finding a life she can choose remains ahead.