Esther Greenwood's Distorted Sexual Views

The narrator also shares Esther Greenwood’s distorted sexual views. She too is not much interested in sex. Part of the reason may be because she had failed in love with her ex-husband, who had urged her to have an abortion rather than keep the child. Her divorce and unwanted abortion and her compliance in the act had left a deep scar on her psyche. “I have to behave as though it doesn’t exist, because for me it can’t, it was taken away from me, exported, deported. A section of my own life, sliced off from me like a Siamese twin, my own flesh cancelled. Lapse, relapse, I have to forget.” (64-65) She felt as though she was emptied and amputated and death was planted in her like a seed.
He said I should do it, he made me do it; he talked about
When he inquires if her father had come back, she replied that perhaps he was on a trip and would return soon. “For all I could tell he might have been listening to us at that moment, from behind the raspberry canes or the burn heap.” (136-137)
The “watching” is also apparent when the narrator was washing the dishes on the rock. She could see part of a tent, among the cedars at the distant end of the lake. She felt as though they had “Binoculars trained on me, I could feel the eye rays, cross of the rifle side on my forehead, in case I made a false move.”(170)
She also had a very irrational sense of fear for doors and closed spaces. She even felt insecure inside the cottage which was her own home. Perhaps this hidden fear later emerges and leads her to lead a wild life out in the open air amidst Nature. “Inside I hook the door shut, it’s doors I’m afraid of because I can’t see through them, it’s the door opening by itself in the wind I’m afraid of. I run back down the path, telling myself to stop it, I’m old enough, I’m old.”
“A mushroom,” I said. That wouldn’t be enough, he would want a specific term. My mouth jumped like a stutterer’s and the Latin appeared. “Amanita”
Towards the end of the novel, when the narrator and Joe have sex out in the open, and she has a strange feeling of her aborted child surfacing within her. She seemed to be in a reverie and wanted to give birth to her child and not allow anyone to be near her unborn child. This time she wouldn’t tell anyone for the fear of being put to the “death machine” or rather “emptiness machine” with secret knives wrenching out her child.
This time I’ll do it by myself, squatting, on old newspapers in a corner alone; or on leaves, dry leaves, a heap of them, that’s cleaner. The baby will slip out easily as an egg, a kitten, and I’ll kick it off and bite the cord, the blood returning to the ground where it belongs; the moon will be full, pulling. In the morning I will be able to see it: it will be covered with shining fur, a god, I will never teach it any words.