The Self-confinement Of A Perfectionist

As a brilliant and accomplished figure in contemporary American literary history. Sylvia Plath took her own life at too early an age. The Bell Jar was her last book published just a few weeks before her suicide, and it was also known as her only autobiographical novel. While the book won her critical acclaim and doubts as well, its stunning popularity among young people remains the same even fifty years after its initial appearance. The Bell Jar is included and studied in Critical Survey of Short Fiction, which anthologizes a large body of critical articles from different points of view ranging from social background, writing techniques to narrative skills. These articles discuss the heroine Esther’s agonizing experiences to establish an independent feminine identity in a patriarchal society. Little has been written about treating Esther madness as a release of energy after her failure to establish order in herself, though. The book is actually about the inevitability of Esther’s madness as a perfectionist. Henry Adams once says,"Chaos was the law of Nature; Order was the dream of man"(451).The thesis scrutinizes from the perspective of chaos the condition of Esther, a perfectionist whose idea of womanhood and identity collides with the norms of a patriarchal society and who thereby has to compromise with the social constraints by confining her inmost thoughts. This is her way to establish order, manage life and remain at peace. The history of chaos and literature’s being interrelated with each other can date back to an early age. The multiple meanings chaos has acquired through centuries of literature make the word embracing diverse significations. Literary theorists value chaos when they are preoccupied with exposing the ideological underpinnings of traditional ideas of order. They favor chaos for they view it opposite to order. Taking a close look at the Western tradition, one can find that chaos was associated with the unformed, the unthought, the unfilled, and the unordered. The Theogony (Hesiod28) depicts Chaos as formless and uses it as a backdrop against which the creation of form takes place in the narration of the birth of the world. The aforementioned tradition suggests that Chaos had existed even before the world took form. Such an identification of Chaos continues throughout the Renaissance. Slowly taking the place of this view of chaos is one that envisions it as an adversary of order. The popularization of thermodynamics during the1860s and1870s reinforces the antagonism between order and chaos. The ambiguity that once inheres in the concept of chaos is thus reconceptualized during the nineteenth century as a tension between a short-term release of energy and a long-term price paid for that release.This thesis adopts the contemporary usage of chaos to examine Esther’s madness. The introduction part introduces the background information of The Bell Jar and thus illustrates the significance of doing this study. Chapter1gives the etymology of the word "chaos". It elaborates the chaos theme in literature tradition and the evolution of chaos—its meanings vary in different periods of time, thus enabling the possibilities of approaching this novel with chaos terms. Chapter2analyses the protagonist’s unpredictable world and her perfectionism as an attractor to draw the whole system towards chaos. It points out that the protagonist’s madness is actually a release of energy after her failure as a perfectionist to establish order in her world and the novel suggests the inevitability of her sink into madness. Chapter3is the conclusion part, reasserting that protagonist’s intense and debilitating perfectionism is the fundamental cause of her madness.