Rebirth In Self-Destruction

Sylvia Plath,an extraordinary American confessional poet,builds her fame upon her excellent poems.Mostly derived from the writer's own personal history and experience, reflecting the chaos of her life,which is a combination of desires,loneliness,depression and fear,the poems touched our inner heart by their extreme sense of agony.Published in 1963,The Bell Jar,was her only autobiographical novel.The book truly records her personal experience as a guest editor of a women magazine in New York,during which time she attempted suicide after her ideals shattered and entered a mental hospital for treatment.The ending of the novel is not clear about the future the heroine Esther is stepping into,thus giving readers endless imagination.Some read a note of hope while others identify Esther with Plath herself,who had committed suicide as well,thus regard the ending as pessimistic.Literary criticism also varies,though mainly divided into two views:from the feminist perspective,it is a social fiction,a reflection of a talented young women in a patriarchal society who is doomed to be suppressed under the circumstances; from psychoanalysis,it is a confession of a mania patient.No matter what approach is taken,we all have to admit that the novel is an outstanding piece of confession.Sylvia Plath expresses her inner depression explicitly through the female protagonist Esther.The thesis will use Lacan's Mirror Stage Theory to explore Esther/Plath's efforts to forge a unified identity to bear the multi-mirroring relations with others,and try to reveal the link between Plath's final suicide and the open ending of the novel.It will point out that perfectionism is the cause for the experience of both the writer and the heroine.According to Jacque Lacan,babies of 6 to 18 months experience a mirror stage.In his opinion,a person's self-identity,the unity of his or her self-awareness is,first of all, built up through the mirror.By staring at the mirror,the baby gradually realises the existence of the self-image,in which there's possibility to build self-identity.Certainly, what really happens in the mirror stage is a mistake identification,the image which appears in the mirror is thought to be "self by the baby,however,it is not this baby but what is called by Lacan as "imago",which is always "other" than the child.Lacan further expresses the so-called mirror is not limited to real mirror,but also others around the subject.Though the mirror stage essay foregrounds the production of the illusion of autonomous identity,it persistently refers to the process by which that identity is precipitated as well.And Lacan also points out that the process of identification lasts long for the subject's whole life,guiding the subject to spend his or her whole life to pursue the establishment of an ideal identity.The thesis analyses The Bell Jar from Lacan's Mirror Stage theory to explore the heroine Esther(Plath)'s journey to forge a unified identity under multi-mirroring relations.The themes of desires and self-destruction coexist throughout the pages,which are determined by her pursuit for perfection.When her eagerness to put everything under control confronts the failure to meet certain needs,Esther/Plath will sacrifice her life to gain a second chance to establish a new identity.According to the process of establishing self-identity,the thesis divides the heroine's mirror stage into three phases as "chora of desires","self-destruction" and "desires in self-destruction",analyses representative symbols in different phases to reveal the heroine's psychological changes in different phases of her mirror stage.Plath's life story as well as her poems and journals will be referred to to support the argument of the thesis. Chapter 1 introduces Sylvia Plath's personal life,especially the time when she created The Bell Jar,and explains the feasibility of interpreting the novel with Lacan's Mirror Stage Theory.Chapter 2 analyses the protagonist's social and sexual desires.It points out that the fig tree is a symbol of her multi-faceted desires.Chapter 3 explores the process of the protagonist's self-destruction and argues that when her eagerness to put everything under control encounters the failure to meet certain needs,Esther/Plath will sacrifice life to gain a second chance to establish a new unified identity.Chapter 4 elaborates Plath's own view of death.With evidence from her journals and poems,we can perceive the inner cause of her seemingly unacceptable self-destruction:to be born twice to continue the pursuit of perfection.Chapter 5 is the conclusion,summarizing the paper as a tragedy of character due to her own perfectionism.The profound feelings released under Plath's pen touch the heart of every reader who is ready to identify with compassion the protagonist's misery with his or her own. The thesis adopts the Mirror Stage Theory to explore Esther's self-searching journey as well as Plath's personal life,interpreting the ending of The Bell Jar and Plath's death as apparent symptoms of perfectionism which requires a constant search for an ideal unified identity and regards death as a ritual for rebirth.