Metaphors of Madness: Sylvia Plath’s Rejection of Patriarchal Language in The Bell Jar

Abstract

Throughout history, the concept of madness has been linked to women and defined by men. Traditionally, female madness has been viewed as the result of the woman’s fragile constitution. Even when psychiatrists began to examine their patients’ situations, the woman’s place remained that of patient, and the man’s that of doctor. Furthermore, because the creative realm belonged to men, creative or intellectual women were viewed as somehow defective. Therefore, when female writers began to illustrate female madness as a result of external circumstances, they had to do so using the language of men. In her works, Sylvia Plath shows her awareness of patriarchal oppression and, in The Bell Jar, displays an understanding of madness as a social construction. The Bell Jar depicts Esther Greenwood’s madness as the result of an inability to reconcile dominant notions of the feminine with her creativity and, while Plath draws on contemporary metaphors to depict Esther’s psychic deterioration, she also creates new metaphors. In this article, I argue that Plath creates new vocabularies of madness to depict female madness as the result of patriarchal oppression; I suggest that these vocabularies are also an attempt to reject representations of madness that have been constructed and expressed in patriarchal language.