Deconstructing American Empire With Mental Disease

The Bell Jar is an autobiographical novel written by American poetess Sylvia Plath in the middle of the 20th century,describing how a female college student named Esther struggles and gradually goes insane in the repressive society.Ken Kesey is-a-famous American writer in 1960s' America.By describing the inhuman oppression of the lunatic asylum,the novel reflects the criticism to the power system.Predecessors studied two works mainly from the perspectives of feminism and power theory.This research compares and analyses two works from different resistance ways,different writing angles because of male and female writers' gender differences and male and female doctors' different images.It discusses writers how to deconstruct American empire with mental disease.The Bell Jar queries the male empire's gender discrimination phenomenon through the awakening of female subject consciousness,which strongly criticizes the gender discrimination and social imbalance of the male empire.Thus it deconstructs the image of the American empire.One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest queries the power rule of capitalist industrial empire through the awakening of psychopaths'freedom consciousness.It deconstructs American empire and calls the freedom of democratic spirit,presetting the final outcome of the American empire politics.Based on previous studies,this research aims to interpret The Bell Jar and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest in an new perspective of medical anthropology.Through the comparative analysis of The Bell Jar and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest,we can see that writers construct a power empire of dictatorship,tyranny and authority.It is a industrial empire based on developed--technology and a traditional patriarchal empire based on sexual politics.However,the empire is sick and abnormal.The entire social system is suffocating.Eventually,people lead to mental disease.