The Empire Writes Back In Medical Imagination

The Bell Jar is an autobiographical novel written by American poetess Sylvia Plath in the middle of the 20 th century. The novel describes how a female college student named Esther struggles and gradually goes insane in the repressive society. Because of its unique female perspective in criticizing the social essence, the novel, as a must-read for female readers, became very popular in American campus for a time.According to Foucault’s power theory, the author found that the expansion and control of power are ubiquitous. The heroine in the novel is repressed and controlled by all kinds of power and rules in different institutions like magazines, school, home, hospital, and everywhere in her life. Especially in the hospital, the doctor’s supervision, the treatment of illness and the use of medical technology fully demonstrate the concealment and efficiency of modern power.From the medical imagination in the novel, the author found that the medical world described in the novel symbolizes the American empire in 1950 s and can be seen as an epitome of the society. Hospital can be seen as an executive branch of empire politics, in charge of population management and classification; doctor-patient relationship implies the social order of empire politics, which declares that doctors are superior to patients and patients should hold absolute compliance to their doctors; illness is the strategy of empire politics, and those who discard the classics and rebel against orthodoxy will be labeled “cancer”, “madness”, etc; medical technology is one of the most important tools for empire politics to transfer and assimilate the dissent.The empire image in the novel, as the embodiment of the power and the material, is autocratic and dictatorial. It is a traditional patriarchal empire with hierarchy as well as a modern industrial empire. However, its people are just mindless zombies, who blindly pursue money and materials. The novel narrates the prosperity and splendor of the empire from the perspective of a female psychopath, which has revealed the oppressive nature of the empire from the opposite side and criticized the empire society. Thus, the empire writes back in the novel.