United States Navy

The United States Navy enters the novel through a recruiting house and a sailor walking with Esther Greenwood on Boston Common. It is more than background: the sailor’s presence gives Esther a temporary stage for trying out a new identity as Elly Higginbottom, while their conversation exposes the distance between her imagined escape and another person’s actual ambitions.

Recruiting Presence on the Common

Esther sees sailors in such numbers that she compares them to the pigeons on the Common. Their apparent source is a dun-colored recruiting house, marked by blue-and-white “Join the Navy” posters on nearby billboards and across its inner walls. The military institution is conveyed not through an account of its organization or operations, but through this visible, everyday recruiting presence in a public Boston setting.

The scene turns that public presence into a private encounter. A sailor falls into step beside Esther, and she smiles; when he asks where she comes from, she answers that she is from Chicago under the name Elly Higginbottom. She imagines that Chicago might suit an unconventional, mixed-up person, and the assumed identity briefly loosens her connection to the Boston life she is trying to leave behind.

The Sailor and Esther’s Invented Future

The sailor puts an arm around Esther’s waist as they walk around the Common. He strokes her hip through her green dirndl skirt, while she smiles mysteriously and avoids saying anything that might identify her as someone from Boston who could meet Mrs. Willard or one of her mother’s friends on Beacon Hill or while shopping at Filene’s Basement. The Navy sailor’s companionship makes her disguise immediate and physical: for the length of the walk, she can act as someone whose past is unknown to him.

Esther extends the fiction into a possible life in Chicago. As Elly, she imagines being taken for an orphan with a sweet, quiet nature, loved without being pressed to read books or write long papers on the twins in James Joyce. She pictures a marriage to a virile but tender garage mechanic and a large family like Dodo Conway’s, then qualifies the fantasy with the freedom to choose it only if she happens to feel like it. The imagined future is thus both conventional and conditional: it borrows the appearance of domestic simplicity without surrendering Esther’s right to decide.

A Plan That Breaks the Fantasy

Esther asks what the sailor wants to do when he leaves the Navy, marking the longest sentence she has said during their exchange. He seems taken aback, pushes his white cupcake cap to one side, and scratches his head before answering that he might attend college on the G.I. Bill. Esther pauses, then suggestively asks whether he has ever thought of opening a garage. He says he has not.

That short exchange checks Esther’s projection against the sailor’s own stated plans. She has imagined that a garage mechanic could anchor the simple, affectionate family life of her Elly fantasy; he instead mentions college, and rejects the occupation she offers him. The encounter does not establish the Navy as a complete institution or provide the sailor with a larger personal history. Its narrative force lies in the contrast: Esther can invent a future around a stranger, but his answer interrupts the ready-made role she has assigned him.