The Bell Jar, by Sylvia Plath: Female resistance to a reconfigured patriarchy
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.11606/issn.1984-1124.i27p198-211Keywords:
Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar, Feminism, Patriarchy, Subtext, ResistanceAbstract
The patriarcal ideology has been historically presented in different configurations. One of them, approached by Virginia Woolf in her essay “Professions for Women” (1942), brings the image of the “Angel in the House”, that is, the model of woman who belongs to the Victorian Era in England, endowed with characteristics such as purity, chastity, devotion and passivity. Gilbert and Gubar (2000), in The Madwoman in the Attic, brought a second configuration, the “angel”, absolutely similar to the first, but not only a model of woman: a model used in the constitution of female characters in the male authors’ writings as well. As a proposal of escape from the patriarchal stereotypes present in the literature produced by men, the authors offer the concept of subtext in female authorship, from which the woman writers could tell their own story of fight for freedom without expressly showing it on the textual surface – notion that was resumed by Elaine Showalter (1994) as a “double voice discourse”. In the present work, we aim to present in which way Sylvia Plath, in her novel The Bell Jar (1963), was able to configure the patriarchy in the image of a bell jar, and use the female subject disintegration as a subtextual strategy of resistance.
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