A Foucauldian Reading Of Suicides In The Bell Jar

The Bell Jar (1963), the only novel written by American poet and novelist Sylvia Plath, isoften regarded as Plath’s fictionalized spiritual autobiography, as it is based on Plath’s ownmental breakdown and suicide attempts. The Bell Jar was composed during the Cold War erain America. The protagonist Esther finds social oppression and requirements for women in the1950s are as suffocating as a bell jar. Loneliness and despair drive her to adopt suicide as ameans of resistance against a male-dominated society.Most researchers tend to analyze the novel’s suicide motif from the perspectives ofpsychoanalysis and feminism, yet few researchers compare this novel with Michel Foucault’sreflections of suicides. This paper intends to collect, collate, analyze, and summarize scatteredreflections about suicides that Foucault left throughout his monographs, articles, interviewsand lectures. Then it will examine The Bell Jar from a Foucauldian perspective, exploring thenovel’s representation of suicide in light of the Foucauldian categories of fathomless pleasure,emancipation as well liberation obtained through suicide.This thesis is composed of five parts.The introduction begins with brief introductions to Sylvia Plath’s life and her suicidalattempts, and ends with literature review and the purpose of this paper.The first chapter attempts to restore Foucault’s thoughts on suicide. By reviewingFoucault’s suicide attempt, his writings, articles, interviews and lecture scripts, this paperfinds that Foucault’s suicidal thoughts can be summarized as follows: a carefully orchestrated,aesthetic suicide can bring temporary but fathomless pleasure; suicide is not only anindividual’s clean break from unbearable reality, but also a highly allegoric counterattackagainst bio-power, a term coined by Foucault, which relates to the practice of modern nation states and their regulation of their subjects.The second chapter analyzes how pleasure is obtained through suicide. Like Foucault,Esther is also against the conception preached by Christianity that suicides ought to becondemned. Instead, Esther advocates the possibility of passing away poetically: throughcareful planning and choosing sensory suicides can suicide become something that exists onlyfor the individual, therefore bringing the simplest yet most extreme pleasure.The third chapter reveals the positive meaning presented by literary suicide, a seeminglynegative phenomenon: liberation and emancipation. Plath, adopting a seemingly distortedperspective, uses suicide as a fictional metaphor, to reveal the concealed absurdity andirrationality of the1950s, for only through suicide can Esther get herself out of a desperatecorner, and free herself from a male-dominated world.Based on the above analysis and discussion, this thesis concludes that suicides in The BellJar are depicted as allegoric suicides with aesthetic significance. Via suicide, a seeminglydistorted viewpoint, Plath leads her readers to experience pain and confusion of the alive aswell as pleasure and sobriety of suicides. This perverse viewpoint allows readers to reexaminea seemingly rational and reasonable world and therefore uncover the absurdity andirrationality inherent in it.