The Feminist Discourse of Sylvia Plath's the Bell Jar

College English Dec 1987

The Feminist Discourse of Sylvia Plath's the Bell Jar

E. Miller Budick

Abstract

The situation of women in the modern world is clearly a major concern of Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar (see Allen 160-78 and Whittier 12746). Less obvious is how the book might embody a feminist aesthetic, that is, how it might define, as a solution to the sociological and psychological problems of women, a language and an art competent to secure women, especially the female writer, against male domination. In her essay on “Women’s Literature,” Elizabeth Janeway suggests that to be distinct from men’s literature women’s literature must constitute “an equally significant report from another, equally significant, area of existence” (344-45). Hence, some of the major themes of women’s literature: madness, powerlessness, betrayal and victimization. Though not exclusively feminine, nonetheless these situations frequently arise from the situation of women as women (Janeway 346). Equally important to women’s literature, however, is a unique literary language and form. Marjorie Perloff’s “‘A Ritual for Being Born Twice,’” for example, focuses in Laingian terms on The Bell Jar’s “attempt to heal the fracture between inner self and false-self . . . so that a real and viable identity can come into existence” (102). It touches on many female issues. The title itself expresses a female motif. But it does not establish a specifically feminist context. As Erica Jong puts it, “the reason a woman has greater problems becoming an artist is because she has greater problems becoming a self” (qtd. in Reardon 136), which means not just integrating the masked self and the genuine self, but also, as Joan Reardon explains in her analysis of Jong, “in coming to terms with her own body,” expressing herself in her “own diction . . . images and symbols” (136). In her introduction to The New Feminist Criticism, and in her two contributions to the volume, Elaine Showalter describes how, in recent years, attention has shifted from the treatment of women in male fic-

Journal: College English
Published: 1987-12-01
DOI: 10.2307/378115
Open Access: Closed
Topics: multilingual writers