The Bell Jar Critics Flashcards
“The family - with wife and mother in he home, and not at the office” was protection from Communism
Paulina Bren
Women “ pursue a certain type of career, then give it up to get married”
Paulina Bren
Those who didn’t relinquish their “war-time men’s jobs” “became suspect”
Paulina Bren
“By the mid-1950s, 60% of women had dropped out of college to marry, or to make themselves more marriageable by being less educated”
Paulina Bren
“Sylvia Plath keenly felt the contradictions of the 1950s … neither able to comply with the demands made on women nor bravely shirk them”
Paulina Bren
“Literature cannot be the business of a woman’s life, more she is engaged in her proper duties, the less leisure she will have for it”
Robert Southey
“The process is not one of discovering a persona already there but rather creating a persona” [Bildungsroman]
Patricia Meyer Spacks
“Life offers not limitless possibilities but an unsympathetic environment” for women in a bildungsroman
Maureen Ryan
“Institutionalisation as extremes of typical female passivity and confinement”
Elaine Showalter
“Joan embodies Esther’s sexual and social transgression”
Tracey Brain
“Marrying at eighteen, losing themselves in having babies and the duties of housekeeping”
Betty Friedan
“Must mutilate or deform herself by mating, marriage and motherhood” (the theme of dismemberment symbolises Esther’s perception of conformity)
Diane S. Bonds
“Each of the various paths open to her will require that she dispense with, leave undeveloped, some important part of herself”
Diane S. Bonds
“Mental illness is the enemy of writing, it silences a writer”
Mariella Frostrup
You can write about emotion with “an informed and intelligent mind”
Sylvia Plath
