Female Narrative Of The Bell Jar

This thesis, taking Sylvia Plath's autobiographical novel The Bell Jar as the research object, explores the topics of loneliness, affection, love, freedom, and death in the novel. Combining with the narrative features of feminist narrative theory, it presents Plath's efforts to construct female authority and to achieve women's freedom in content and style and explores the possibility of "Esthers" moving towards a truly free liberation adding to the research results of The Bell Jar. This thesis is divided into three parts:introduction, body, and conclusion.In introduction, this thesis briefly introduces the former researches, analyzes the significance of the combination of feminism criticism and narrative and clarifies the research emphasis and methods of this thesis.Chapter one:Loneliness Utterance. The thesis analyzes the protagonist's lonely situation in family love, friendship and love and points out that loneliness is the psychological reaction of women deep down in life by analyzing the female personalization narrative, which is not only the special life experience of individuals but also the common dilemma of human encountering materialized era.Chapter two:Freedom Utterance. The thesis analyzes that the protagonist plays a femininity role against man, pursuing economic independence in contempt of all traditions on the way of freedom, but injured both in physical and mental and points out that women's freedom is not about women individually and the opposite of women struggling for freedom is not men, but the modern civilization alienation.Chapter three:Autobiographic Utterance. The thesis analyzes the narrative features of autobiographic and individuation and points out that it is the textual form of efforts of women narrating and confirming herself, giving the world the meaningful voice of female ego.In conclusion, the thesis analyzes Plath's contribution as a feminist and feminism in textual narrative and discusses the possibility of real freedom and liberation of women.