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This essay analyzes Esther Greenwood’s identity crisis, mental illness, and recovery in Sylvia Plath’s novel The Bell Jar (1963) from a feminist psychoanalytic perspective. The purpose is to understand the cultural and psychological mechanisms behind the main character’s situation. Esther is a talented and hardworking student who dreams of a literary career in 1950’s America. At the age of nineteen, events and realizations launch Esther into an identity crisis that leads to severe depression. Why she falls ill, and the nature of her illness and recovery, are up for interpretation. The thesis of this essay is that Esther Greenwood’s identity crisis, mental illness, and recovery can be explained using a feminist interpretation of Freud’s theories of hysteria and melancholia, and the development of the differences between the sexes, which includes the Freudian concepts of castration, bisexuality, and the Oedipus complex.

In her 1929 essay "A Room of One's Own," Virginia Woolf famously asserts that "a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction" (4). This concept places an immediate importance on the role of the Modernist female subject as an artist and as an architect, constructing the places and spaces that she exists within. With Woolf's argument as its point of departure, this thesis investigates the theme of female space in two Modernist texts: Nella Larsen's Quicksand (1928) and Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar (1963). The respective protagonists of Quicksand and The Bell Jar, Helga Crane and Esther Greenwood, each undertake journeys to obtain spaces that are purely their own. However, this thesis positions each space that Helga and Esther occupy as both male-constructed and male-dominated in order to address the inherent gendering of space and its impact on the development of feminine identities. This thesis focuses specifically on the roles of the mother, the muse, and the female mentor, tracking the spaces in which Helga and Esther begin to adhere to these roles. Expanding on Lauren Berlant's theory of cruel optimism, this thesis will use the term "cruel femininity" to support its intervening claim that the respective relationships that Helga and Esther each have with their own feminine identities begin to turn cruel as they internalize the male-dominated spatial structures surrounding them. Overall, this thesis argues that there is no space in existence where Helga and Esther can realize their full potential as human beings, as long as the spatial structures within their communities continue to be controlled by hegemonic, patriarchal beliefs.

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Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar portrays the complexities of female identity and the pernicious outcomes of societal pressure on mental health. At its core, the novel presents an exploration of female anxiety and the ways in which societal expectations and gender norms contribute to the erosion of one's mental well-being. Through the lens of feminist psychoanalysis, this thesis will claim that the novel's recurring motifs of confinement and anxiety – including its central image of the bell jar – function not only as an expression of Esther's mental illness, but also as a social commentary. More specifically, it will argue that these motifs make visible how Esther's anxiety and depression are the result of the interplay between external pressure and internal struggles. Since the novel is often regarded as a roman à clef, this essay will furthermore argue that these motifs are the result of Sylvia Plath's unconscious.

Les bâtiments résidentiels et industriels munis d'un réseau de ventilation constituent des installations complexes, susceptibles d'être le siège de transferts de masse et d'énergie variés, selon les situations de fonctionnement. Afin d'étudier ces transferts de masse, une méthodologie permettant d'établir des expérimentations à échelle réduite pour l'étude des écoulements isothermes, en régime permanent ou transitoire, a été développée. Cette méthodologie a été validée numériquement et expérimentalement sur des configurations simples, puis appliquée à deux configurations de référence, représentatives de celles rencontrées dans le domaine nucléaire.L'influence du vent sur les transferts de masse au sein de ces configurations, en situation de fonctionnement normale, dégradée (arrêt de la ventilation) ou accidentelle (surpression interne), a été étudiée dans la soufflerie climatique Jules Verne du CSTB. Les effets du vent, couplés ou non à une surpression interne, peuvent alors entraîner une perte partielle ou globale du confinement des polluants au sein des installations. De plus, la turbulence du vent peut induire des inversions instantanées des débits de fuite, qui ne sont pas identifiées en régime permanent. Par ailleurs, l'analyse de sollicitations transitoires montre la faible influence de l'inertie des branches sur les écoulements transitoires, pour des grandeurs caractéristiques d'une installation réelle. Enfin, des essais de traçage gazeux ont été réalisés afin d'étudier la dispersion d'un polluant au sein d'une configuration de référence soumise aux effets couplés du vent, de la ventilation mécanique et d'une surpression interne.La robustesse du code à zones SYLVIA, utilisé notamment pour appuyer les évaluations de sûreté des installations nucléaires, a été analysée à partir de ces résultats expérimentaux. La prise en compte des phénomènes physiques observés expérimentalement a été validée, en régimes permanent et transitoire. Toutefois, quelques limitations ont été identifiées pour l'étude de la dispersion d'un scalaire passif, du fait des hypothèses utilisées dans le code SYLVIA, comme dans tout code à zones (concentration homogène dans les locaux, propagation instantanée dans les branches et dans les locaux).

Middle Tennessee State Univ., Diss.--Murfreesboro, 1992. / Literaturverz. S. [99] - 102.

Thèse de doctorat : Anglais : Rennes 2 : 2008. / Bibliogr. f. 421-455. Index des noms.

This thesis has examined some women writers of the 1950s in an attempt to discover if there could be a "women" school of writers as definable as the Black, Jewish or Southern schools which gained recognition during that ten-year period. During the 1950s American literature became fragmented as various minorities began to search into personal histories in order to discover human identities within the framework of race, religion or geography. It was the contention of this paper that women were involved in much the same type of identity search, that through their own literature they were searching out a human identity' within, but not confined to, their sexual role in society.The cliche of the decade is that this was a placid time in feminist history, a time when women docilely sacrificed education and personal talents to return to the in a search for their homes as wives and mothers. However, a study of the works of Sylvia Plath, Carson McCullers, May Sarton and Elizabeth Janeway shows a group of women in active rebellion against the sexual stereotyping so prevalent in the 1950s. Through art these women were rejecting traditional concepts of a "woman's place," and instead were exploring their own talents, strengths and potentials human identity.This thesis has sought to combine a study of the cultural influences operating on society of the 1950s with the literature being written by women during this period in order to more fully understand the female attitude toward herself and her role. This study indicates that the active rebellion of the women's liberation movement a decade later arose from the search for identity found in much literature by women of the 1950s.

This thesis is the first study using contemporary spatial theory, including cultural geography and its precursors, to examine and compare representations of space in the poetry of three mid-twentieth century American poets: Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, and Anne Sexton. Because of the autobiographical content often foregrounded in their work, these poets have been labelled Confessional. Previous criticism has focused primarily on the ways in which they narrate (or draw on) their personal lives, treating accompanying descriptions of their surroundings primarily as backdrops. However, these poets frequently manifest their affective states by using the pathetic fallacy within structures of metaphor that form a textual mapping of the physical space they describe. This mapping can be temporal as well as spatial; the specific spaces mapped in the poem s present are often linked to memories of earlier life or family. These spaces include psychiatric, general, and penal institutions, parks and gardens, nature (especially coastal settings), and the home (almost always a place of tension or conflict). Each poet addresses these broad types of space differently according to their evolving subjective relationship to them. These relationships are in turn strongly influenced by their social class and gender: for the two women, their experience of their own bodies as prescribed space, in relation to the restrictive and objectifying female role that was imposed on them, is critical. Also, critical in shaping the poets experience of space are post-World-War II socio-cultural and demographic changes in the United States, notably suburbanisation, consumerisation and the consolidation of a therapeutic culture . Interwoven with these influences are major political concerns of the period such as the Cold War with its accompanying surveillance and conformism and the threat of nuclear annihilation. In the work of all three poets, awareness of these modern fears fused with traditional Gothic motifs to permeate their descriptions of spaces with anxiety, bitterness, and even dread in a rejection of the synthetic optimism of the American Century and commercial culture. Other criticism has touched on many of these themes in relation to one or another of the poets, but this study, by way of the theme of space, offers comparison and synthesis that aims to shed new light on their work and its relation to the period during which they wrote.