Sylvia Plath. The Portrait of Life under a Cracking Bell Jar (PDF)

Research Paper (postgraduate) from the year 2021 in the subject American Studies - Literature, grade: 5.0, , language: English, abstract: This research paper is about Sylvia Plath and her writings. The early writings show the process of Plath's coming into a period in which her initial idealism faded as she began to identify with the role of a creator, the writer, and especially, the aesthete. Although she was still a student at that stage, her construction of identity became more complicated and complex due to the nurturing questions of gender and sexuality.

It is also worth including, with regards to the aspect of feminism, some references from Foucault's The History of Sexuality, who questions so-called repressive hypothesis. The problem of gender roles is also extensively discussed in another bibliographical position written by Adrienne Rich and titled Compulsory heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence. Here the author presents how the society actually pursue a threatening politics.

Yet, Elaine Tyler May and Deborah Nelson reveal that the culture of the fifties displayed contradictory views on certain issues concerning ideas about "citizen and state, self and society", which led to the politics of containment (further elucidated in Chapter One). Nelson discusses in Pursuing Privacy in Cold War America in which ways privacy trapped woman in particular. While the term privacy presumably indicated self-sufficiency, it came to symbolize "isolation, loneliness, domination and routine" for many confessional writers, linking Sylvia Plath as a confessional writer to the Foucauldian hypothesis, and arguing that confession does not lead to freedom, as the private is already penetrated by power.