Bond And Bondages

This paper explores the relationship between mothering and the female self in Sylvia Plath's autobiographical novel The Bell Jar. By reinterpreting the mother-daughter relationship, it argues that the representation of mother-hate in the novel is in its essence the conflict between the daughter's yearning to be mothered and meanwhile to be independent as an individual.In the prevailing interpretation of the mother-daughter relationship in the novel, the mother figure is usually understood as possessive and manipulative, and the daughter as victimized and revolting. This interpretation is systematically deconstructed in this paper, which argues that the real mother figure is a silent conformer to the male standards of motherhood. The daughter's attitude towards her is ridden with ambivalence rather than sheer rejection and resentment. It is the mother's preoccupation with being a patriarchal good mother that estranges her from her daughter, who feels her authentic self unrecognized and unresponded to by mother. This maternal unresponsiveness partly causes the daughter's problems of identification and sense of inner emptiness.This paper also explores the daughter's infantilization. It analyses the daughter's monsterization of mother as the projection of her own infantile fear. The daughter is caught in two contradictory forces: that of individuation, to emerge out of the maternal realm, and that of regression, to mother's womb in various ways. While the symbolism of womb first looks like related to rebirth, it gradually turns into a dark, claustrophobic room that does not promise any development to the infantile self within. The hospitalization that the heroine goes through is also a metaphor for such a womb without real nurturance. The novel, though often considered to be a rebirth story, is nevertheless a story about the failure of rebirth.The theories this paper adopts mostly consist of feminist psychoanalytic theories, including Nancy Chodorow's study on the daughter's pre-oedipal attachment to mother, and Dorothy Dinnerstein and Jessica Benjamin's study on the omnipotent mother. It also greatly draws upon Adrienne Rich's cultural study on the alienation of mother from daughter in the patriarchal culture context.