THE TRAUMATIC PROCESS OF ADAPTING TO LIFE IN 1950s AMERICA - SYLVIA PLATH’S THE BELL JAR

Abstract

Sylvia Plath’s only novel, The Bell Jar (1963), gives us an insight into the life of a young woman, Esther Greenwood, and the process of her adapting to life in 1950s America. As it is a rather traumatic process due to her (in)ability to accept and conform to the rules of a male-dominated society, the aim of this paper is to analyse this novel within the framework of trauma studies. The novel follows Esther Greenwood’s descent into depression and her attempts to make choices about her future, while showing that she finds the task rather traumatic because her desires are mutually exclusive and not in accordance with what the consumerist American society deems acceptable. Bessel A. van der Kolk et al. state that what makes something traumatic is “the subjective assessment by victims of how threatened and helpless they feel” (2007). Before the analysis of the novel, the theoretical framework is provided in terms of defining trauma, relying on the research conducted by Sigmund Freud, Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub in Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis and History (1992), and other similar studies connected to the analysis of trauma and, in particular, trauma in Sylvia Plath’s oeuvre. The historical background of the novel is also examined, in order to provide a clearer picture of the period the novel is set in. Hopefully, this small scale research offers another way of perceiving the traumatic experience of being a woman in a domineering, patriarchal society.