A Solitary Prisoner:Female Identity Crisis In The Bell Jar From The Perspective Of Space Theory

Sylvia Plath(1932-1963)is an outstanding American novelist and poetess in 1950s who is as famous as Elizabeth Bishop and Emily Dickson in the literary field.She won the Pulitzer Prize for Literature in 1982.Her works present us women’s rich inner world.She speaks for women,and expressed their appeals for freedom and identity construction.As her only semi-autobiographical novel,The Bell Jar tells a story about Esther who gradually failed to figure out the role she should play in society after going through the rules and regulations,which were set up by society for women in morality,family and career.As a result,her identity construction fell apart.Finally she had no choices but to commit suicide several times just in order to find a way out.Previous studies on The Bell Jar mainly focused on the perspectives of psychoanalysis,feminism,doctor-patient relationship,ecologism,female development and so on.This thesis attempts to analyze Esther’s identity crisis from the perspective of space theory,exploring her crisis in the physical space,the social space and the mental space.This paper is made of three parts:introduction,body and conclusion.The introduction part briefly introduces Sylvia Plath and her writing career,the overview of her works.The body part is made up of three chapters which discusses her crisis in the physical space,the social space and the mental space.Chapter one analyzes different geographical places Esther had experienced from the perspective of physical space,including New York and Boston suburb.Ideals collided with the reality,which resulted in Esther’s increasingly vague identity positioning.Chapter two analyzes the social space,which mainly refers to the social relations,revealing Esther could not get any guidance from them.Thus she suffers the crisis of lacking role models,and the crisis of identity construction also aggravated.Chapter three analyzes the mental space,which mainly refers to Esther’ s mental state,little by little revealing the process of her mental state.Her heart was full of hope at first,but then came into repression and finally got mad.The last chapter concluded that after Esther had suffered a series of confusion and crisis from the three-set space,she was like a prisoner caged in an invisible bell jar,and her identity construction completely failed.The novel encouraged women to take control of their own fate even in a society like a bell jar.The novel inspired them to fight for the equal rights and freedom,and realize their self-value.To some extent,the novel have triggered the development of feminism after the world war Ⅱ.That is the reason why the novel was called "the Catcher in the Rye" for women.