Trauma and Confusion in Women's Lives, and the Failure of Psychiatry in Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar

Abstract

Sylvia Plath’s extraordinary novel The Bell Jar is a timeless reminder of the situation of women in the modern world and it also touches upon some issues about the unconscious versus the repressive forces of society. However, it does not offer a solution to the problem it addresses but it makes the reader become more conscious of it. Plath’s aim with the novel, which is her autobiography, was, as she herself said “to write in order to free herself from the past” (Perloff 4). Her statement of her wish already suggests that her past is filled with some traumatic events which she wants to write down to become free... (Introduction)