The Bell Jar Critic Quotes (AO5)

Linda Wagner (1986)

‘In the traditional Bildungsroman, the character’s escape to a city images the opportunity to find self as well as truths about life’

1- Churchwell (2016)

‘A girl in the 1950s could be a virgin or she could be a wh**e: it was a neo-Victorian era’

2- Churchwell (2016)

‘The real doubles the novel explores are double standards, and double binds’

3- Churchwell (2016)

‘she cannot reconcile her desires and ambitions with society’s rules and expectations’

Adrienne Rich (1996)

Rich argues that the institutionalised concept of the maternal in this era was based on ‘instinct’ rather than intelligence, selflessness rather than self-realisation, in relation to others rather than the creation of the self

Marilyn Boyer’s Freudian critique of the Bell Jar

In the novel the female body is subjected to a number of physical traumas all directly or indirectly caused by a male character.

Showalter (1985)

Plath and her contemporaries explore mental hospitals as “environments in which deviants from conventional feminine roles were forced to conform”

Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (1963)

‘What if the terror a girl faces at twenty-one is the terror of freedom to decide her own life, with no-one to order the path she will take?’

Sartre’s theory of existentialism (20th century)

Freedom is not as liberating as it seems, since it forces humans to bear full responsibility for their choices

Smith (2013)

‘you have this legacy of parents who have passed on a poisoned chalice and a society that has passed on a poisoned chalice’

Marxist critique- What is false consciousness?

A theory on how subordinate classes adopt the ideology and values of the ruling class obscuring their own exploitation.