On Plath And Her "Mad Woman":a Foucauldian Interpretation Of The Bell Jar

Sylvia Plath is a well-known confessional poet in American literature in the middle of20th century. Her works, which are a combination of desires, depression, loneliness and fear, mostly derived from the writer’s own personal experience, reflected the chaos of her life, and touched our inner heart by extreme sense of agony. The Bell Jar is her only and posthumous novel. She committed suicide on February11,1963at the age of thirty-one, just after three weeks of the publication of The Bell Jar.From the feminist perspective, it is a social fiction, a reflection of a talented young woman in a patriarchal society who is suppressed under the circumstances;from psychoanalysis, it is a confession of a mad woman. Besides, many critics go into causes of Plath’s death by this novel and probe her understanding of the meaning of death. Sylvia Plath expresses her inner depression explicitly through the female protagonist Easter.The thesis initially briefs the story of The Bell Jar and the writer and then analyzes Foucault’s interpretation of madness. According to Foucault, madness is a usual method of rulers who push opponents out of the same utterance circle. Madness is not a natural disease, but a product of social civilization.Chapter One analyzes Ester’s madness from three aspects:social environment, family environment and identity puzzle of female. The absence of women model and the love from her father, as well as the prejudice society poses to women caused her madness. To Esther, madness is her haven, harbor and excuse of her distinctive behaviors.Chapter Two explores Plath’s madness from the same aspect. Easily to see, both Esther’s and Plath’s madness is not a natural disease but the outcome of patriarchal society. Only mad Plath can create similar mad Esther. Madness, as an extreme expression form, pushes forward the development of the plot to some extent. More importantly, madness is also the supporter of meaning except its usage in form.Chapter Three is a concrete text-based analysis which takes madness as a narrative strategy, and explores how Plath expressed Ester’s madness. Plath resists the press of the patriarchal discourse as a mad narrator, who challenges the hegemonic culture by unique narrative discourse.The entire thesis, under Foucault’s interpretation about madness and narrative strategy, indicates that Esther’s and Plath’s madness are not for personal reasons, but the product of complex power mechanisms. Instead of standing for victim in patriarchal society, madness become into a powerful weapon to their resist of the patriarchal press. No matter what suffering madness takes, it provides Ester the right of being herself and becomes the most workable way of hunting and liberating herself.