The separative self in Sylvia Plath'sthe bell jar

Abstract

Plath's novel The Bell Jar dramatizes the collusion between the notion of a separate and separative self (or bounded, autonomous subject) and the cultural forces that have oppressed women. The pervasive imagery of dismemberment conveys the alienation and self‐alienation leading to Esther Greenwood's breakdown and suicide attempt; the recovery which Plath constructs for her heroine merely reenacts the dismemberments obsessively imaged in the first half of the novel. This “recovery” denies the relationality of the self and leaves Esther to define herself unwittingly and unwillingly in relation to culturally‐ingrained stereotypes of women. Contemporary feminist theory has questioned the validity of the separative model of selfhood, but literary critics have brought to the novel the same assumptions about the self which inform Plath's book. Thus they have failed to recognize what the novel has to teach about the destructive effects — at least for women — of our cultural commitment to that model.

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