The Bell Jar Final Essay and Project

The book for this essay is the Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath. . I found some articles so far. If you find any others they need to be scholarly articles only, to build a strong thesis and essay.

these are my notes to aid the essay:

Article title and author:

Feminine Failure and the Modern Hero: Mad Women in Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar and Joan Didion’s Play It As It Lays

Article permalink:

http://proxymu.wrlc.org/login?url=https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=mlf&AN=202121008030&site=ehost-live (Links to an external site.)

Main argument:

Sylvia Plath develops through her protagonist’s experience of growing up female in modern America. The reason for which these authors chose woman heroes is the freedom of women from the social demand to display outworn military and business virtues and to pursue success in these terms.

List of scenes dealt with in article:

Esther’s search for identity leads her to encounter nothingness, evil and the absurdity of existence.

Topics covered:  feminism, power, metaphors.

Interesting readings:

Esther is a modern hero who, by throwing away the heroine’s traditional pose and role as love-object, dramatizes the human condition.

Combating silence and attempts to go beyond the reality of nothingness, rarely women are portrayed capable intellectually and psychically of undergoing the central drama of modern life; “at best they are treated as powerless victims of circumstance.”

Article title and author: Metaphors of Madness: Sylvia Plath’s Rejection of Patriarchal Language in The Bell Jar by Stephanie de VIllers

Article permalink. https://wrlc-mar.primo.exlibrisgroup.com/permalink/01WRLC_MAR/1g77ltd/cdi_crossref_primary_10_1080_00138398_2019_1685200 (Links to an external site.)

Main argument: Madness has been associated with women and defined by males throughout history. Sylvia Plath’s writings demonstrate her knowledge of patriarchal oppression. Plath reshapes the discourse landscape by inventing new madness vocabulary. The image of lunacy in The Bell Jar may be regarded as a reaction to and critique of patriarchal language and ideology. Because behavior that deviates from the male norm was frequently considered as ‘mad’ behavior, more women have been diagnosed with some type of madness than men – especially the kind of craziness that looks illogical or unreasonable. This article discusses the history of madness and how doctors believed that women’s reproductive processes made them more corrupt. Women were diagnosed with hysteria as a result of departing from their female roles — either by being overly sexual, which was viewed as detrimental to the female constitution, or by acting in ways thought unfeminine. Funny thing is, when men went to war and showed evidence of this so-called “madness,” they changed their minds and stated women have schizophrenia. Plath interprets madness as a result of patriarchal oppression, and how she reshapes the rhetorical landscape by inventing new madness languages to describe the experience of crazy.

List of scenes dealt with in article: According to the ideas back in the 50s, a woman’s first objective should be to marry a decent guy so that she may become a housewife and mother who can support her husband emotionally. Mrs Willard, the mother of Esther’s one serious boyfriend, Buddy, exemplifies this viewpoint in The Bell Jar. Mrs Willard does not appear in the novel, and we learn about her beliefs via Buddy’s recounting of her speeches and sayings, all of which are vehemently anti-feminist: ‘What a man is is an arrow into the future, and what a woman is is the site the arrow shoots off from’ (pg. 67). The majority of American culture in the mid-twentieth century held this view of gender roles, which asserted males as active and progressive and females as docile nurturers and carers.

Another scene in which the fashion editors are compared demonstrates patriarchal ideas of femininity. Esther would have to sacrifice social approval if she wanted to pursue an intellectual profession, according to the social acceptance back then.  Plath uses numerous female characters in The Bell Jar to show how patriarchal language silences women. Hilda is described as “moving like a mannequin” who is forced to gaze at her reflection in the glossy store windows.’ Women do not have the same level of expressive freedom as males.

Esther’s supervisor, Jay Cee, is portrayed as such a lady in the novel because, while she is married, she is not a housewife devoted to her husband’s needs. Instead, she is devoted to her profession, and Esther portrays her as a “strange old woman” (pg. 211) who is “ugly as sin” ( pg. 5). Jay Cee, according to Esther, “wasn’t one of the fashion magazine editors with the artificial eyelashes and crazy jewelry.” Jay Cee was smart, therefore her unkempt appearance didn’t seem to bother her’ ( pg. 5). Esther worries if Hilda, a fashion editor, could read because of the contrast to the fashion editors, revealing patriarchal notions of the feminine (pg. 26). The implication is that femininity and creativity are mutually incompatible, and that a woman who is creative, smart, or ambitious has violated the feminine norm by failing to pay care to her beauty.

Topics covered: Women being seen as “mad,” the language in The Bell Jar used to depict female “madness” as a result of patriarchal oppression, and feminism.

Interesting readings: Madness has always been associated with women and defined by males. Historically, more women than males have been diagnosed with mental illness, particularly unexplainable or illogical mental illness. This is due to the fact that behavior that deviates from the male standard is often considered as ‘crazy.’ In the Hippocratic Collection, Greek physicians associated with Hippocrates sought the origins of mental disease in the body, saying that sickness was the consequence of an imbalance in the four humors that purportedly made up the human body. Because of biological sex differences, women were considered as more prone to mental disorders as a result of the search for the origin of madness in the body. Women’s reproductive processes, according to these Greek physicians, made them more prone to corruption.