Female Rebirth In Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar From The Perspective Of Illness Narrative

Sylvia Plath is regarded as a prominent confessional poet and novelist in contemporary American literature.Her works,highly psychoanalytic,penetrate and present females’ dilemma in American patriarchal society in the 1950s.The Bell Jar,her autobiographical novel,is a vivid description of female mental plight.As an oppressed woman and alienated mentally ill person,the protagonist Esther narrates with a first-person perspective,presenting readers with a different world in the eyes of the mentally ill and the dual mental pressure that she suffers from.This thesis intends to study the nature,and sources of Esther’s mental illness so as to explore Plath’s enlightenment for female rebirth from the perspective of illness narrative.Firstly,by drawing on Arthur W.Frank’s analysis of illness narratives,the thesis identifies some patterns and tendencies in Esther’s self-perceptions that are common in illness narratives.These similarities indicate that the nature of Esther’s mental illness is her response to double oppression from patriarchal society and the dominant "able-bodied" society.The thesis also examines the open ending of the novel with lens of illness narrative theory for a deeper exploration of the theme of "female rebirth" in the novel.This part elaborates that Esther realizes her female rebirth through reconstruction of her female and able-bodied subjectivity,rejection to the distorted social construction of mental illness and pursuit of professional medical authority with an analysis of the reasons for her illness.