Category: The Bell Jar

The mental breakdown and insanity of women in both The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman and The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath are portrayed in numerous different ways. The Yellow Wallpaper introduces the reader of a nameless womans progressive mental breakdown from postpartum depression after giving birth and this provides the reader an opening…

In the novel The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath it shows the women and femininity. Tha novel challenged the rules that each woman should follow in the 1950s, as at that time everything was under control of the men. The main character Esther Greenwood, wanted to prove herself as a woman in a masculine world.…

Author of The Female Malady, Elaine Showalter, suggests that women have been labelled mad because mental illness has been defined and codified by male psychiatrists. Depictions of female hysteria in texts such as Sylvia Plaths The Bell Jar and Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper have notoriously been interpreted as the embodiment of deviance within…

It would be fallacious to suggest that the latter half of the twentieth century was anything less than revolutionary as the American literary sphere was marked by various social uprisings that sought to weave nationwide equality into the fabric of mainstream society. Aside from being the cornerstone for a profound cultural shift among the general…