Formations of Madness and Femininity in Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar, Susanna Kaysen's Girl, Interrupted and Janet Frame's Faces in the Water

Abstract

I have chosen for this study three novels from postwar literature, and all three account the trials and sufferings of three young women who are pronounced as mad, and subsequently incarcerated for a varying period of time, in the end they are deemed ‘cured’ and are released back to normal society. Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar (1963), Susanna Kaysens Girl, Interrupted (1993) and Janet Frame’s Faces in the Water (1961) despite their many differences tell a hauntingly similar experience of a young woman in postwar patriarchal culture, driven mad by the limitedness that surrounds her existence: As the slogan ‘Anatomy is destiny!’ announces the set of values that characterise that particular era is once again woman’s relegation to the domestic.