Exploring Satire in "The Bell Jar"
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Abstract
Given its grave subject matter, and author Sylvia Plath’s death a month after the book was published in 1963, it can feel uncomfortable to call The Bell Jar a funny novel. The book is known as a story about protagonist Esther Greenwood’s mental breakdown and the oppressive limitations on women’s potential in America in the 1950s. However, several critics and scholars have noted that, in addition to its devastating exploration of patriarchal oppression and a woman’s mental breakdown, the novel is funny. In her introduction to the novel, Sarah Churchwell calls The Bell Jar “an acidic satire on the madness of 1950s America” and that is “a much funnier book than many may realise [sic].” Few scholars have studied the humor in The Bell Jar in depth. This paper explores Plath’s use of satire in the novel to expose the oppressive, unfair, and absurd expectations of women during the 1950s to remain “pure,” to marry and become mothers rather than have careers, and other limits on women’s potential. The paper demonstrates that Plath’s novel follows a tradition of feminist satire that shifts frames, destabilizes readers, and refuses to settle for a traditional happy ending. Analyzing the novel through the lens reveals The Bell Jar to be an angrier novel than what many have recognized.
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