The Separative Self in Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar 

Critic: Diane S. Bonds

Source: Women's Studies, Vol. 18, No. 1, May, 1990, pp. 49-64. Reproduced by

 permission

Criticism about: Sylvia Plath (1932-1963), also known as: Victoria Lucas, Mrs.

Ted Hughes

[(essay date May 1990) In the following essay, Bonds reconsiders feminist critical

analysis of The Bell Jar, drawing attention to Esther Greenwood's recovery in the

novel. According to Bonds, Esther fails to establish an autonomous, or separative,

self, and ultimately resorts to "culturally-ingrained stereotypes of women."]

Plath's novel The Bell Jar dramatizes the collusion between the notion of a

separate and separative self (or bounded, autonomous subject) and the cultural

forces that have oppressed women. The pervasive imagery of dismemberment

conveys the alienation and self-alienation leading to Esther Greenwood's

 breakdown and suicide attempt; the recovery which Plath constructs for her 

heroine merely reenacts the dismemberments obsessively imaged in the first half of 

the novel. This "recovery" denies the relationality of the self and leaves Esther to

define herself unwittingly and unwillingly in relation to culturally-ingrained

stereotypes of women. Contemporary feminist theory has questioned the validity of 

the separative model of selfhood, but literary critics have brought to the novel the

same assumptions about the self which inform Plath's book. Thus they have failed

to recognize what the novel has to teach about the destructive effects--at least for 

women--of our cultural commitment to that model.

 

As Paula Bennett has written, Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar offers a brilliant

evocation of "the oppressive atmosphere of the 1950s and the soul-destroying

effect this atmosphere could have on ambitious, high-minded young women like

Plath." It has not been widely recognized, however, that the "soul-destroying

effect" of Plath's social context is dramatized as vividly by the putative recovery of 

the heroine as by her breakdown and attempted suicide. The novel presents the

transformation of Esther Greenwood from a young woman who hates the idea of 

serving men in any way to one who appears to earn her exit from the asylum by

committing herself, albeit unwittingly, precisely to that project. In the first half of 

the novel, the pervasive imagery of dismemberment conveys the alienation and

self-alienation leading to Esther's breakdown and suicide attempt. In the second

half of the novel a pattern of symbolic rebirth is superimposed on a narrative which

in its details suggests that Esther purchases her "new" self by the discontinuance of 

any relations that might threaten by means of intimacy or tenderness the

 boundaries of a self conceived as an autonomous entity, as a separate and

"separative" self.

Contemporary feminist theory has questioned the validity of this model of the self.

Catherine Keller, for example, has recently drawn on theology, philosophy,

 psychology (including the work of Nancy Chodorow and Carol Gilligan), and

literature, to demonstrate in impressive detail the historic collusion between the

notion of a separate subject or bounded, autonomous self and the cultural forces

that have oppressed women. The Bell Jar vividly illustrates that collusion by

 proposing, through its representation of Esther's recovery, an ideal of a self 

uncontaminated by others. But such a conception of the self denies the undeniable:

the relationality of selfhood. The recovery which Plath constructs for her heroine

reenacts the dismemberments obsessively imaged in the first half of the novel; I

 

would argue that it merely leaves Esther prey to defining herself unwittingly and

unwillingly in relation to all that remains to her: culturally-ingrained stereotypes of 

women. Critics for the most part seem to have brought to the novel the same

assumptions about the self which inform Plath's book, assumptions deriving from a

separative model of the self. Thus they have failed to recognize what the novel has

to teach about the effects of our cultural commitment to that model…

Source: Diane S. Bonds, "The Separative Self in Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar," in

Women's Studies, Vol. 18, No. 1, May, 1990, pp. 49-64. Reproduced by

 permission.

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