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No Need for Penis-Envy FACULTY OF EDUCATION AND BUSINESS STUDIES Department of Humanities No Need for Penis-Envy A Feminist Psychoanalytic Reading of The Bell Jar Kajsa Erikson 2021 Student thesis, Bachelor degree, 15 HE English English 61-90 15HE Supervisor: Iulian Cananau Examiner: Maria Mårdberg Abstract 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. Keywords: The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath, psychoanalysis, feminism, Oedipus complex, bisexuality, castration, hysteria, melancholia Table of Contents 1. Introduction ........................................................................................... 1 2. Theory and Method: Feminist Psychoanalytic Criticism ..................... 3 2.1 The development of the differences between the sexes: Oedipus complex, bisexuality, and castration ............................................... 4 2.2 Hysteria and melancholia ................................................................ 7 3. Previous readings of The Bell Jar ....................................................... 10 4. Analysis of The Bell Jar ...................................................................... 13 4.1 Identity crisis ................................................................................. 13 4.2 Mental illness ................................................................................ 22 4.3 Recovery ....................................................................................... 25 5. Conclusion ........................................................................................... 27 Works Cited ................................................................................................. 29 1. Introduction The Bell Jar is the American poet Sylvia Plath’s only novel. It was first published in England under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas in 1963, and Plath was nervous about the reception, telling her friends she considered the novel inadequate (Ames 172). That was not the main reason it was published under pseudonym, however. The Bell Jar is highly autobiographical and features many similarities to Plath’s real life (Ames 155-163). Just like the novel’s protagonist, Esther Greenwood, Plath suffered periods of severe mental illness, and a month after the novel’s publication, Plath committed suicide at the age of thirty (Moss). As a result, Plath never had the chance to witness her novel become a modern classic. It is difficult to overlook The Bell Jar’s autobiographical nature, and many critics have chosen to compare it to Plath’s life and to analyze Plath as Esther and Esther as Plath. Others have studied it as a novel, temporarily ignoring facts about Plath’s real life. This essay takes the latter approach and analyses The Bell Jar as a work of fiction, only taking into account the information available within the limits of the novel. The novel is set in 1950’s America and is narrated by Esther Greenwood who tells the story of her nineteenth summer. After winning a writing contest, Esther gets to spend a month working for the magazine Ladies’ Day in New York City. Esther is a talented student who dreams of a literary career, but at the age of nineteen everything falls apart. The reader is told from the start that something is wrong, and in New York, and later back home in suburban Boston, Esther experiences an identity crisis which develops into severe depression, suicide attempts, and treatments at psychiatric hospitals. Exactly why she falls ill, and the nature of her illness and recovery, are up for interpretation. 1 This essay examines Esther Greenwood’s situation from a feminist psychoanalytic perspective. Freud’s psychoanalytic theory of how the psychological differences between the sexes develop includes the theory of the Oedipus complex as well as concepts of ‘bisexuality’ and ‘castration’. Many feminists have been appalled by Freud’s phallocentrism and seemingly deterministic view on gender, but some, such as Juliet Mitchell and Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, have made different interpretations of his ideas. Focusing on the socio-cultural aspects of and reasons behind his ideas, his theories become interesting tools for feminist analysis. Another controversial Freudian concept is ‘hysteria,’ which soon became a derogatory term for mentally ill women. The French feminists Hélène Cixous and Catherine Clément have discussed hysteria as a result of, or potentially even a rebellion against, patriarchal culture. In relation to The Bell Jar, it is interesting to also consider Freud’s theory surrounding another neurosis, namely, ‘melancholia.’ Even though the analysis in this essay is limited to the contents of The Bell Jar, the choice of theoretical base for analysis was inspired by Oedipal themes in Plath’s poetry combined with the subject of mental illness in the novel. Poems such as “Medusa” deal with Plath’s complex relationship to her mother: I didn’t call you. I didn’t call you at all. Nevertheless, nevertheless You steamed to me over the sea, Fat and red, a placenta (The Collected Poems 225) 2 Poems like “Electra at Azalea Path” and “Daddy” deal with Plath’s relationship to her father who died when she was a child. The former carries a sense of mourning while the latter, “Daddy,” which also deals with her husband Ted Hughes, is more vengeful: You stand at the blackboard, daddy, In the picture I have of you, A cleft in your chin instead of your foot But no less of a devil for that, no not Any less the black man who Bit my pretty heart in two. ……………… Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m through. (The Collected Poems 223-224) As stated above, this essay analyses Esther Greenwood’s situation in The Bell Jar from a feminist psychoanalytic perspective. It argues that her 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. 2. Theory and Method: Feminist Psychoanalytic Criticism The Freudian concepts Oedipus complex, bisexuality, castration, hysteria, and melancholia will be used from a feminist perspective to interpret Esther Greenwood’s 3 identity crisis, depression, and recovery in The Bell Jar. These theoretical concepts are presented in this section. 2.1 The development of the differences between the sexes: Oedipus complex, bisexuality, and castration To account for Freud’s theories on the development of the differences between the sexes, Juliet Mitchell’s book Psychoanalysis and Feminism is used. As the title implies, Mitchell presents her feminist interpretation of Freud’s theories concerning gender differences. She provides a comprehensive synthesis of Freud’s works and considers his reassessments of his earlier ideas. Initially, Freud developed his theories of the Oedipus complex, bisexuality, and castration separately, but as his theory evolved, he realised that they were intimately connected (Mitchell 75). Freud found that all children initially believe they have a penis and desire their mother (Mitchell 95). Boys experience a rivalry with their father who threatens to castrate them if they do not give up their incestuous desire towards their mother, which leads to castration anxiety (Mitchell 95, 96, 81). Castration anxiety also arises when the boy observes that girls do not have a penis which implies that he too could lose his (Mitchell 95). The castration anxiety must be resolved, and the ‘normal’ way this is done is for the boy to accept a symbolic castration carried out by his father and to start identifying with him (Mitchell 81). This is the ‘positive’ male Oedipus complex (Mitchell 71). If the boy does not accept this castration, the Oedipus complex cannot be resolved, and the continued castration anxiety leads to neurosis (Mitchell 82). Freud later discovered a ‘negative’ Oedipus complex where the boy desires the father and identifies with the mother, thus taking a homosexual, or feminine rather than 4 masculine, position (Mitchell 66, 86). This discovery led Freud to realise that the Oedipus complex probably works differently for boys and girls (Mitchell 66). Before moving on, an explanation of Freud’s use of the terms ‘homosexual’ and ‘bisexual,’ and ‘feminine’/‘masculine,’ is needed. Freud was concerned with the development of feminine and masculine identities or positions, but the terms are not necessarily bound to a physical gender. Feminine equals ‘passive’ and masculine ‘active,’ and he argues that both boys and girls are originally ‘bisexual,’ that is, they are both feminine and masculine (Mitchell 68, 45, 43). Everyone goes on to possess both masculine and feminine
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