This essay focuses on female identity formation in patriarchal society in Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse and Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar. Both authors portray female characters who struggle with the normative gender identity. As the novels represent different eras and locations, the two characters examined in this essay, Woolf’s Lily Briscoe and Plath’s Esther Greenwood, have very little in common on the surface. However, both authors deliver similar feminist social criticism concerning the negative impact of patriarchal norms on female identity formation. This study analyzes some of these external constraints, or norms, and aims to prove that the two female characters’ ideas of womanhood and identity collide in a similar manner with those norms. Schachter’s study on identity constraints in identity formation and Sanchez and Crocker’s research on gender ideals work as the theoretical background in the study. The negative influence on Lily’s and Esther’s identity formation is similar since both characters live under a symbolical bell jar, unable to form their identity according to their own preferences. Patriarchal conventions remain a constant constraint and the two women keep struggling to find a balance between their own ideas and those of their societies. Both Lily and Esther grow to understand their own traits, desires and abilities in their respective stories, but fail to reach their preferred identity. Their resistance to adapt to gender conventions helps them to form a stronger identity, but it is an identity that remains profoundly and negatively influenced by the patriarchal norms of their societies.

This study focuses on analyzing and discussing the interpretation of the vocal chamber music Ariel by the 20th century American composer Ned Rorem. (1923-) In 1971, Rorem was commissioned to compose a vocal chamber music for soprano, clarinet and piano by one of his good friend, an American well-known soprano, Phyllis Curtin(1921) . He picked up five pieces of works from the anthology, Ariel, of Sylvia Plath(1932-1963), the American female poet, for this composition. With a tie-in of Plath¡¦s poems and the poetry¡¦s life experience, Rorem used various musical language to reveal the sorrow and frustration in the mind of a woman whose husband has affair, and also the ideology of death in these poems . This essay consists of five parts: 1. Composer Ned Rorem¡¦s life, 2. Rorem and his art songs, 3. Poet Sylvia Plath's life, 4. The composed background of the vocal chamber music, Ariel, 5. Analysis and interpretations of the five lyrics and songs of Ariel. Through my study of Ned Rorem¡¦s Ariel, I hope to assist the readers having a better understanding to this work, as well as providing useful ideas for the interpreta-tion.

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This introductory chapter aims to briefly address the theoretical approach used in my dissertation, situating Julia Kristeva in relation to Sylvia Plath's work, as well as to place my work among particular psychoanalytic studies of Plath. 'Initiation' further continues by briefly discussing the way primary and secondary data are utilized in the dissertation and developing the rationale behind juxtaposing biographical material (mostly journals and letters) and creative work, life and art. The chapter finishes by giving an overview of the dissertation organization. The purpose of this dissertation is to discuss the notion of motherhood in Sylvia Plath's work in light of Julia Kristeva's theory of subject formation. For Kristeva, as subjects, we are never the absolute masters of our own experiences, but split subjects divided between unconscious and conscious motivations, inhabiting both nature and culture. The subject is not only split, but is also a 'subject in process' ( sujet en proces); s/he is always on trial, tested in a way against his/her various contexts (Revolution in Poetic Language 22,58,233 ). Kristeva is concerned with discourses that call up a crisis in identity and for her the discourse of motherhood is such a discourse. Motherhood is also characterized by an instability as it takes place at the level of the organism, not the subject : 'It happens but I'm not there' ( 'Motherhood According to Giovanni Bellini' 237 ). The maternal body is a place of splitting; it is more of a filter than anything else - a thoroughfare where nature meets culture ( ibid. 238 ). Neither parturition nor the birth itself are final. They are, as it were, beginnings of something other than themselves - the onset of maternity for the woman, the beginning of life for the child (Robbins 138 ).

Thesis (Ph.D.)--York University, 2007. Graduate Programme in Education. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 222-233). Also available on the Internet. MODE OF ACCESS via web browser by entering the following URL: http://gateway.proquest.com/openurl?url_ver=Z39.88-2004&res_dat=xri:pqdiss&rft_val_fmt=info:ofi/fmt:kev:mtx:dissertation&rft_dat=xri:pqdiss:NR29322

Thesis (doctoral)--Ruhr-Universität Bochum, 1981. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 345-363).

The aim of this dissertation is to critically examine the representation of female madness in The Bell Jar, by Sylvia Plath, Wide Sargasso Sea, by Jean Rhys, and Surfacing, by Margaret Atwood, with a particular emphasis on the depiction of madness as a form of revolt against the oppression of women in patriarchal societies. I focus specifically on the textual construction of female insanity in three twentieth-century reading of these depictions in relation to an influential contemporary example of Western psychological discourse, namely The Divided Self (1960). Drawing on the work of Western feminist scholars such as Elaine Showalter and Lillian Feder, I engage with the broader questions of the female malady and dilemma. I pay attention not only to the various tropes, metaphors and images which are employed in the representation of madness, but also give attention to the explanations of madness that are offered in each text as well as the ways in which the various stories of madness are resolved. In the introduction, I offer an overview of the history of madness (and female madness in particular) and consider the importance of Laing and the antipsychiatry movement in challenging conventional definitions. In Chapter 1, I explore the depiction of madness in The Bell Jar, with the focus on the protagonist, Esther, whose madness, I argue, is represented as a conflict between female creativity and mid-twentieth century feminine ideals. In Chapter 2, I discuss Wide Sargasso Sea, a novel which gives a voice to the madwoman in the attic in Charlotte Jane Eyre. I argue tha rather that a particular construction of madness that of the stereotypical wild madwoman is imposed upon her. In addition, I argue that her madness is presented as the result of being abandoned and cast as insane by her husband, whom she marries as part of an economic exchange. In Chapter 3, I explore the ways in which, in Surfacing madness is attributed both to her abortion as well as to the realisation of her own complicity in the patriarchal oppression of women and nature. In all three novels, I suggest, female madness is represented sympathetically as a reaction to, and revolt against patriarchal oppression. In addition, I argue that each novel makes a contribution to an emancipatory feminist politics by suggesting several routes of transcendence or escape. In my concluding chapter, I draw on the previous discussion of the various ways in which madness is figured in the novels in order to show how, in contesting stereotypical views, the three authors must create new vocabularies and metaphors of madness, thus engaging with patriarchal language itself. In this way, they not only contest normative constructions of the female malady but also bend patriarchal language into new shapes. / Dissertation (MA)--University of Pretoria, 2017. / English / MA / Unrestricted

By examining critically poems in which Sylvia Plath’s speakers appear as daughters, wives, and mothers, this study situates Plath as an artist operating within Romantic and Modernist traditions of exemplary suffering. The thesis offers, on the one hand, a line of inquiry that accounts in part for the nature of the enduring Romantic interest in Plath, the synonymy of her cultural iconicity with pain or struggle, the way she has been read as an exemplary sufferer. On the other, it indicates Plath’s own self-conscious involvement in the Romantic tradition, the way she participates in and complicates that lineage by imbuing it with Modernist, feminist concerns. The thesis thus clarifies some vital, historico-artistic dimensions of Plath’s position as artistic sufferer (what qualifies it as exemplary), and scrutinizes the workings of suffering within the selected poems, the specifics of Plath’s exemplarity. Three thematic banners spanning across the poetic body of work are demarcated: representations of the daughter, representations of the wife, representations of the mother. All three denote major sites of conflict (agons), sites of struggle. They make for volatile, generative, provocative loci showing poetic engagements with suffering; as such, they highlight the gendered nature of the preoccupation. These categories are investigated as evolving narratives, trajectories that can be traced from the early stages of Plath’s poetic career right up until its end. Within each category special attention, in the form of a close reading, is given to select poems regarded as emblematic of a particular facet in the unfurling narrative. The study maps out and evaluates the manifestations, forms, and functions of a suffering whose genesis lies in prominent literary-historical traditions. / Thesis (PhD (English))--University of Pretoria, 2021. / English / PhD (English) / Restricted

In 1953, Sylvia Plath broke her leg while skiing. This event permeated her writing across genres, retold at least eight times, each with a unique perspective based on the genre and her intended audience. While she told the story non-fictionally in her journals, she also adapted the story for letters to her mother and friends and fictionalized the event in short stories and The Bell Jar. This thesis will examine 8 versions of the same event – critically examining how the culture and gender expectations of the 1950s and 1960s influenced her writing depending on her audience. This examination of the boundaries between fiction and non-fiction will work to help eliminate the assumption in certain current scholarship that all events in Plath’s fiction can be used to examine and explain her suicide. The chapters will be divided by genre of writing, with a conclusion on the implications for future Plath studies.

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