A Corpus Stylistic Analysis Of The Narrator’s Mind Style In The Bell Jar

Sylvia Plath is one of the most famous American confessional poets in the twentieth century. As her only semi-autobiographical novel, The Bell Jar has attracted the attention of many scholars since the day it was published. Most of the researches about this novel are taken from the perspectives of feminist, psychological, social and political studies, etc. The narrator’s mind style, however, has been neglected by many researchers. Considering the fact that this novel is about the narrator’s experience of mental breakdown and her later treatment in an asylum, the analysis of the narrator’s mind style can nonetheless reveal the meaning of this novel. The purpose of this study is to understand how the narrator conceptualizes herself and the world, that is, the narrator’s mind style.In order to achieve the purpose of this study, we adopt a corpus-based stylistic analysis with a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods. By comparing the target corpus,that is, the text of The Bell Jar, and the reference corpus, that is, the first part of the Written Sampler of OANC in the software Wordsmith and Ant Conc, keywords and key clusters of the novel can be detected. This paper picks the first 100 keywords and the first 5 key three-word clusters and four-word clusters to analyze. The first 100 keywords are further divided into nine categories and this study mainly focuses on five of them.The results of the analysis can be divided into two parts: the narrator’s particular way of perceiving the world and the narrator’s particular way of perceiving herself. As to the former,there are three main conclusions. The first one is the narrator’s negative perception of the world.In the narrator’s eyes, the world is sinister, dangerous and jungle-like. And she is highly uncertain about the world and herself. The second one is the narrator’s feminist perspective of the world. The narrator loathes the dominating patriarchal society, but there is little she can do about it. And the third one is the narrator’s preference of using color vocabulary, such as “gray”,“blue” and “white”, to describe her negative and pessimistic attitudes. As to the narrator’s way of perceiving herself, there are also three main findings. Firstly, the narrator perceives herself as weak and incompetent, which results from her loss of confidence. Secondly, the narrator feels that she is always being confined and trapped. Lastly, the narrator used to repressing her feelings, which can be seen as a reason for her constant feeling of being stuck in the world.The significance of this study lies in the following two aspects. Firstly, this study can fill the research gap of The Bell Jar by analyzing the narrator’s mind style. Secondly, because most previous studies of mind style in literary works are purely qualitative, this study is able to approach mind style in a new way by using corpus linguistic techniques.