stages of a crisis of identity.

The people around her mainly seem to know who they are (in the sense that they have a strong personalities and a fixed sense of their own identities and desires). Esther lacks these qualities and so engages with people like Jay Cee and Doreen in ways that emphasize her state of seeking some firm sense of self. She always gives in, submitting to an authority derived from their self-assurance.

The characters that surround Esther underscore the expectation that troubles Esther most, which is the expectation that she will develop a singular sense of purpose that will guide the rest of her life. (This is how starkly and urgently she expresses the pressures she feels.) This sense of well-defined purpose is so closely associated with the idea of identity in the text that it is effectively the same thing. 

The pressure Esther feels internally to figure herself out is also echoed by her mother, a college professor, who urges Esther to learn shorthand to prepare for a practical job as a secretary or assistant. 

"The only thing was, when I tried to picture myself in some job, briskly jotting down line after line of shorthand, my mind went blank. There wasn't a job I felt like doing where you used shorthand."

The expectation of marriage and children is another aspect of the broader set of pressures for Esther to choose a path and follow it. Esther feels for a time that she is expected to maintain her virginity for reasons linked to marriage expectations, but she finds disappointment in her one romantic interest, Buddy Willard, when he unveils his secret. He is not a virgin. Even in the face of this, Esther is given what amounts to an ultimatum from Buddy -- to marry him.

When it is clear later that this will never happen, Buddy wonders who will marry Esther after she has been committed to a psychiatric facility, reinforcing the notion that the expectation of marriage is not just one that exists between this former couple. It is a larger social expectation in the mid-century so substantial that it amounts to a crisis for those who might fail to fulfill it or who may choose against it.  

The host of expectations Esther feels, again, can be seen as a single, significant existential expectation to find herself, define herself and become the "real" Esther Greenwood. This pressure to choose who that person will be is presented repeatedly in the text and is at one point expressed in the metaphor of a fig tree.

Esther imagines herself sitting in the crook of a large fig tree. The branches of the tree spread out above her with symbolic figs on each branch. 

"One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor [...] 

I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose." 

As the central preoccupation for this young narrator, the pressure to choose who to be in the world leads to a psychotic break. Navigating the field of choices and divergent ways of being that make up the landscape of her life proves to be too much for Esther. The figures that represent the various distinct pressures that Esther feels are eventually met head-on, but this is due in large part to the help of Esther's psychiatrist.

After counseling and after being given the choice to see (or not see) people like Buddy and her mother, Esther comes to assert a power over her own sense of identity. This power is precarious, to be sure, and is mediated by the fact that her doctors retain significant control over her life right up to her release. And even then, Esther wonders if she has any power over her mental state. 

One of the social expectations that Esther faces is that a woman's role is to serve men.  This social expectation often confuses how she sees men and how she sees herself in relation to men.  Buddy Willard, Constantin, Cal, Irwin, Eric, Marco, and others are seen "in mostly sexual terms, as candidates for Esther to lose her virginity to or potential husbands."  This helps to confuse her own sense of self and her own notion of how to relate to men.  Esther's demand of being independent from Irwin at the end of the narrative is significant because she completely activates her being apart from men.  The social expectation of being a woman which involves marriage, children, and subjugating career to domesticity without much in way of complaint or voice is one that dominates Esther's being in the world.

I think that another social expectation that Esther navigates is the social expectation of individual psychology.  Esther feels confined not only because she is a woman but because she is unable to authentically experience feeling and emotion.  Starting with her mother, the world in which Esther lives does not seem to validate emotional contact and true emotional connection.  Esther grieves at her father's grave later on in her life.  She grieves at Joan's funeral in a manner that is contrary to what others would expect.  She is finally able to activate her own psychological voice from having to silence it for so long.  These psychological expectations were imposed upon her and help to enhance the ending in which she has claimed more of her voice and seeks to authenticate her own notion of psychological self.