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’

Sarah Churchwell

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

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”