Mary Catherine Elizabeth Jackson

Journal of Undergraduate Research
Volume 7, Issue 5 - May/June 2006

Breaking The Bell Jar: A Study of the Boundaries Between the Private and Public Lives of Women

INTRODUCTION

Prior to the second wave of feminism, traditional Western views of women’s privacy denoted specific “female social roles” that valued “modesty and chastity,” and the isolation of women within the domestic realm of the household (Allen ix-x). The modern view of women’s privacy has more to do with reproductive rights than “modesty and chastity.”

The Cold War Crisis of Privacy

Deborah Nelson argues that Americans during the cold war became increasingly concerned about the “death” of privacy. No one during the cold war felt safe given that all Americans lived under the threat of being labeled an enemy of the state, and many people were angry about the abridgement of their civil rights resulting from being spied upon by the government. Three of Sylvia Plath’s works, “Lady Lazarus,” “Medusa,” and The Bell Jar, juxtaposed with three cold war privacy law cases, Griswold, Roe, and Jane Anderson’s lawsuit explore anxieties that the public was harboring concerning the boundaries between public and private life.

Confessional Poetry, Feminism, and Law

Feminists consider Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton pioneering writers who broke the rules of modernism, “to transgress public and private distinctions” (Nelson 34). Confessional poetry became known through the writings of Sandra Gilbert and others as a feminine type of poetry (Nelson 34). Alicia Ostriker defends the value of privacy in women’s writing as a means of creating autonomy for women, “at the core of the women’s poetry movement is the quest for autonomous self-definition” (Nelson 35).

The interdisciplinary approach to literature and legal analysis can explain how fiction and laws affect society and can be used as a method for commentary on current social situations. Clare Dalton in her Berkeley Women’s Law Journal article views law and other disciplines in a similar manner, “it becomes difficult to tell where law leaves off and something else—the market, for example, or medicine, or family, begins” (Dalton 4-5).

INVERTING THE POWER STRUCTURE THROUGH ABJECTION AND POLITICS

Plath’s work transgresses between the boundary of the physical body and the body of text. Jacqueline Rose describes Plath as a “writer of abjection” because she has created poetry that shows no clear cut boundary between the physical body and text. Rose examines Plath’s usage of the body in light of Julia Kristeva’s work, Powers of Horror. Abjection, according to Kristeva, is part of the process of psychically creating an individuated identity. In order to distinguish between the self and the not-self, boundaries must be established between the self and those elements of the self which will come to occupy an abject space, that which is designated as "other" or the not-self. In the process of making those boundaries, though, that which becomes abject also becomes an object of distance and disgust—such as feces, for example. Abjection, then, marks boundaries and, as such, anything or one considered foreign to the self will end up in the abject space. But abject space, the space of the "other" and the disgusting, can be fatal because the complete abjection of the body is, in effect, death. Abjection, then, is an on-going psychic process that patrols the individuated self—an important function in retaining privacy. Control over one’s personal identity is an important element in retaining privacy. Abjection is integral to Plath’s creative manifestations that expose the need for women’s privacy rights. S. I. Benn’s article on privacy argues that individuality is one of the reasons why privacy should be valued, “[. . .] ‘the very intimate connection between the concepts of oneself and one’s body,’ combined with the cultural norms of our ‘possessive individualist’ society, firmly ground the privacy principle as a moral reason for respecting privacy” (Allen 44). Privacy has no value for a person without personal control over one’s body.

Psychoanalysts believe that a child must split from the mother in order to truly gain an individualized concept of itself (Rose 33). Infants undergo a process through which they begin to create tenuous borders between the "I" and the other (McAfee 46). Kristeva also observes in her book About Chinese Women that women brought up in Christian societies are caught in a double bind between choosing to identify more with their mother or father (37). Women who choose to identity with the mother are guaranteeing the continuation of their exclusion in a patriarchal society. According to Kristeva, women who refuse to identify with masculine behavior prohibit themselves from entering into public political discourse (37-8). If a woman chooses to identify with the father she is perpetuating the patriarchal system which has marginalized her as a female. Kristeva advises to reject both the extremes of the masculine and feminine and to establish a new form that is neither male nor female and breaks the patriarchal symbolic order (38).

This battle between masculine and feminine is a constant struggle through one’s lifetime. Kristeva asserts that civilizations have created specific religious purifying rituals that ease the threat of abjection to one’s identity (McAfee 49). Native American religions allow for a “third sex” that is neither fully masculine nor feminine (Bowie 3420). Indian hijra are biologically male but behave like females; they have a religious caste with ties to a mother goddess (Bowie 3420). The one common factor in these “third sex” individuals is the connection with specialized religion. In modern times, the use of religious catharsis has become less prominent, “As societies develop and religion wanes, art takes over the function of purification, often by conjuring up the abject things it seeks to dispel” (McAfee 49). Writing is an art form that can replace religious rituals as a means for purification by using abjection to create subject matter.

Medusa

Medusa is specifically feared by men according to classical mythology and Freud’s theory on the “terror of castration.” Plath uses Medusa to symbolize the terrifying mother rather than a Gorgon feared by men for her threatening feminine sexuality. Plath mentions the ultimate link between mother and child, the umbilical cord, in her poem titled “Medusa,” “Old barnacled umbilicous, Atlantic cable,” (Collected Poems 225). The metaphorical umbilical cord acts as the long distance connection between mother and child. The poem does not specifically name the gender of the main speaker. Most critics interpret the central voice as Plath’s, however, this leads the reader into a biographical trap. “Medusa” is a fantastical re-working of the difficult relationship with her mother.

Plath’s mother, Aurelia Plath, was an important force in Plath’s personal and academic life. After Plath’s father died, when she was only eight, Aurelia became the sole caretaker of her two children. Plath felt the constant scrutiny of her mother who adored her for the achievements and scholarships that she received. Marjorie Perloff asserts that Plath did not find her true voice until she wrote Ariel because she was in a constant battle to untangle herself from her obsession with making her mother happy (Moses 5). Perloff argues that Plath had a life changing realization in 1962 when she recognized that she was living one of her worst nightmares, the life of her mother “a 'widowed' young mother with very slender financial means” (Moses 5). It was this epiphany that sparked the raging voice heard in Ariel, “Only now, one gathers, did Sylvia fully grasp the futility of her former goals. And so she had to destroy the 'Aurelia' in herself ... In the demonic Ariel poems, she could finally vent her anger, her hatred of men, her disappointment in life. 'Dearest Mother' now becomes the dreaded Medusa” (Moses 5).

The suffocating figure of the mother is a perfect example of Plath’s use of abjection in her poems. The poem describes the main speaker’s escape from Medusa (mother) by relocating across the ocean, and the mother’s desire to follow the character on the journey, “Your stooges / Plying their wild cells in my keel’s shadow, / Pushing like hearts” (Collected Poems 225). The speaker laments that the new place does not offer anymore independence, “Did I escape, I wonder? / My mind winds to you / Old barnacled umbilicus, Atlantic cable / Keeping itself, it seems, in a state of miraculous repair” (Collected Poems 225). Abjection is the process of expelling a part of yourself, while also retaining it. The main character in “Medusa” imagines itself as escaping from the mother, but it is unable to fully sever the ties. Finally the voice implores to the mother, “Off, off, eely tentacle! / There is nothing between us” (Collected Poems 226). This last statement has a double meaning; it can be interpreted to literally mean there is nothing between us, as in there is no longer any connection or it can be read as there is no space between us, meaning her mother is smothering her. This double meaning clearly shows how the mother is defined within the abject space, as something that the speaker wishes to expel and cannot fully reject because the mother is an integral part of the speaker’s identity.

“Medusa” does not only touch specifically on Plath’s troubled relationship with her mother, but it reveals the troubles with the new role of the mother during the cold war as the protector of the domestic sphere. During the beginnings of the cold war in the 1950s, women emerged as the protectors of public morality and acted as the opposing force in society to the subversive and radical Communists (Rogin 5). The shift in family life during the cold war compromised the privacy of the family, “However, domesticity did not so much enrich private life as socialize it. Denying the truly private character of the home, it made the family less a haven for protecting eccentricity than an arena for forming and standardizing personality” (Rogin 5).

In 1942, a book published by Phillip Wylie, titled Generation of Vipers, articulated the post-World War II fear of mothers and women. Wylie’s version of mom was not the nurturing woman. “Wylie termed his theory 'Momism' and created the ultimate image of the mother who represented the cold war domestic fears of, boundary invasion, loss of autonomy, and maternal power” (Rogin 6). In conclusion to his theory on “Momism,” Wylie wrote, “I give you mom. I give you the destroying mother. I give you Medusa” (Rogin 6).

Lady Lazarus and Roe v. Wade

Plath recreates the traditional character of Lazarus, the man resurrected by Jesus in the Bible, into an aggressive “third sex” character. Plath juxtaposes the feminine with the masculine in the title “Lady Lazarus”; lady refers to the female sex and Lazarus was a Biblical man. Lazarus was also a figure of rebirth in the Bible; therefore, the character Lady Lazarus is reborn with a sex that is the juxtaposition between male and female or as a “third sex.” Plath perceived that men possessed the freedom to act as they pleased, whereas females were shackled by the constructs of Western femininity. The fierce desire for women to seek a “third sex” identity is born out of the female desire for power, “Given even a modicum of power, as they were, for example, by the Great War, these women—for of course I am talking mainly about women—will enact their ceremonies of ritual transvestism with what we might call 'a vengeance'" (Gilbert 416). The desire to become a member of the “third sex” is born out of the desire to restructure the power balance between men and women in society. The poem recounts Lady Lazarus’s three attempts at death. The true transformation does not occur until the third time she is fully reborn. Rebirth is the major theme of the poem, and Plath’s motivation behind the rebirth theme was to recreate characters as Gilbert argues, “sexless and ‘pure as a baby’” (Gilbert 417).

Before Lady Lazarus can undergo her transformation into the “third sex” her body is exposed to the “peanut-crunching crowd” (Collected Poems 245). Plath blurs the lines between the text and body by nakedly showing her emotions through her poetry and writing about the exposure of her character’s body. The “figurative nakedness” of confessional poets act as, “an antidote to the repression of McCarthyism and later as a perfect complement to the freedoms of the age of Aquarius” (Lant 621). The poem also shows the power struggle between women and their doctors for privacy rights prior to the Roe decision.

The overpowering doctor acts a symbol in the poem which shows the underlying anxiety that woman felt towards their doctors concerning reproductive decisions. Prior to Roe, some states allowed for women to have abortions if their life was considered to be in danger according to a doctor. This system forces private confessions out of women seeking abortions, “instead of a right to privacy guaranteeing a ‘right to silence,’ this right to privacy depends upon forced confession. Not only must the woman confess the details of her life in order to establish a need to terminate her pregnancy, she must also be convincing” (Nelson 130).

The majority opinion in Roe does not vindicate an absolute right to privacy and is more of a balancing act that determines where the State interests begin to override privacy concerns. The arbitrary timeline of diminishing privacy rights that Blackmun delineated in his Roe decision has proved to confuse the issues of women’s privacy, rather than simplify them. Privacy advocate Anita Allen does not agree with Blackmun’s logic, “A pregnant woman’s privacy never ceases to be virtually sole, despite her pregnancy. Thus pregnancy itself cannot have the impact on a woman’s privacy that Justice Blackmun suggested it must. Moreover, even if pregnancy did lessen physical privacy, it would not follow as a matter of logic alone that decisional privacy rights have to be compromised” (91). Roe allowed woman to make individual reproductive choices. Women’s bodies were shackled by the government’s anti-abortion laws which prohibited them from making their own reproductive decisions. This left many women feeling that they did not have full control or ownership over their own bodies.

Lady Lazarus also does not have full control over her own body. The body becomes a community object that can be pieced off and sold, “and there is a charge, a very large charge / For a word or a touch / Or a bit of blood / Or a piece of my hair or my clothes” (Collected Poems 246). This puts the doctor and crowd in control of her “communal body.” After the metaphorical destruction of the old identity and “communal body,” Lady Lazarus is reborn as a “third sex” which is neither male nor female, “eat men like air,” and annihilate the patriarchal concepts of the female body.

The Bell Jar and Griswold v. Connecticut

The novel begins with a flashback where the main character, Esther Greenwood, remembers the execution of suspected Communist spies, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg in New York. The true nature of what the Rosenbergs did to aid the Russians continues to be a matter of debate (Rogin 4). The Rosenbergs’ executions made it clear that anyone who was politically opposed to American ideology would run the risk of being executed as traitors. Esther identifies with the Rosenbergs because she feels that she is also an outsider. She wishes to have a career instead of getting married or adhere to the strict rules of femininity that were expected during the cold war era.

Esther is caught between two worlds because she could either become the bored housewife of a doctor or pursue her dreams of becoming a famous poet. There is no middle ground because she feels that both of these worlds are “mutually exclusive.” The symbolic “bell jar” that surrounds Esther is her Iron Curtain between reality and the world she imagines for herself without these mutually exclusive distinctions. The bell jar acts as a divider that both allows Esther a greater degree of privacy, while also exposing her to the world as mentally unstable. Esther’s bell jar has a dual nature which shows how privacy can be isolating and liberating at the same time.

The bell jar is a symbol for all of Esther’s obsessions, fears, and neurotic anxieties that keep her from being happy in either of her mutually exclusive worlds. Esther’s first step in isolating herself from an existence that is too painful for her to bear is throwing away her wardrobe out her window. Esther wants to free herself of a world where femininity is force-fed to women by Mademoiselle, where she interns. Esther’s experiences at Mademoiselle prompt her to throw away the trappings of proper femininity by discarding her wardrobe in the night. The bell jar weighs down more on Esther and isolates her during the summer. Esther’s subsequent attempted suicide is what brings her to the mental hospital. After a series of electroshock and talk therapy Esther is allowed to leave the hospital. Esther’s reintegration into the world is her rebirth into her new identity, where she has come to better terms with her two mutually exclusive worlds of career and domestic family life. The bell jar allows Esther to retreat from the world and gain a sense of autonomy in a patriarchal society that does not allow true independence for women. However, her retreat left her in a state of despair and isolation, “to the person in the bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is the bad dream” (The Bell Jar 237). Esther’s fears about marriage and raising children are manifested through the many references to dead babies and the oppressive nature of marriage throughout the novel.

Esther confides to her therapist, Doctor Nolan, that her greatest fear is the relinquishment of her freedom if she chooses to get in a relationship with a man, “'What I hate is the thought of being under a man’s thumb,' I had told Doctor Nolan, 'A man doesn’t have a worry in the world, while I’ve got a baby hanging over my head like a big stick, to keep me in line'” (The Bell Jar 221). Doctor Nolan then gives Esther the name of a doctor that will fit her for a diaphragm so that she will not have to worry about having a baby. Esther’s frustrations before she gets the birth control are indicative of young women’s feelings of entrapment prior to the Griswold decision. Babies act as a symbol for the entrapment and isolation that women experience in marriage. Esther’s college love interest, Buddy Willard, takes her on a tour of his medical school and throughout the tour she is sickened by the sight of babies. The finale is a viewing of a woman giving birth. Esther is horrified at the birthing room, which she thinks resembles a torture chamber. Esther’s view of marriage shows it to be an institution that enslaves women. Esther’s vision for true independence for women would not be fully realized until Roe v. Wade because Griswold provided reproductive rights only for married couples.

The landmark decision in Griswold v. Connecticut (1965), which struck down the anti-contraception law of Connecticut, was the turning point in privacy law cases. The Griswold case set off a firestorm of scholarship analyzing each Justice’s opinion on the case. Almost none of the law review and journal writers felt that any of the Supreme Court Justices had adequately addressed the issues in their opinions (Johnson 190). Justice Douglas’s opinion was problematic because of its lack of specificity about the source of the right to privacy, precisely whether it is born out of a tort of privacy or the constitutional right to privacy (Johnson 192). There had been a steady development in the tort of privacy since the 1890 Louis Brandeis Harvard Law Review article co-written with Samuel Warren, but the constitutional right to privacy appeared to be recently conceptualized with little judicial precedent (Johnson 192). Despite the controversy Griswold set a precedent that changed the lives of American women, however the decision proved to be ineffective in guaranteeing individual privacy rights because the right to privacy was available only in the partnership of marriage.

JANE ANDERSON LAWSUIT: THE BLURRING OF FICTION AND FACT

Jane Anderson and Sylvia Plath were students at Smith College and patients at McLean Hospital, where they were being treated for mental disorders (Kiernan D2). Anderson’s lawsuit claimed the producers and distributors of The Bell Jar movie had defamed her character, invaded her privacy, and intentionally inflicted emotional damage. She asserted that she was identifiable as a lesbian character called Joan Gilling. Anderson’s privacy was compromised by the divulging of personal information in the lawsuit proceedings. This is a peculiarity of most cases where individuals are seeking to recover their reputations and vindicate their privacy through lawsuits.

Both cases of Roe and Anderson deal with female sexuality, whether it is regulation or rejection of it. An article in the London Guardian was quick to point out the display of America’s homophobia in Anderson’s lawsuit, “But a more depressing aspect of the case to anyone who followed the evidence day by day is that it showed how intolerant American society still is about mental breakdowns and lesbianism. ‘It’s such a relief to be able to talk about all this,’ said Dr. Anderson. She should have been able to do that from the beginning” (Weatherby).

FINAL ANALYSIS: PRIVACY IN PLATH’S WORLD

Most Plath critics ignore the historical and fictional elements of her poetry because they analyze her work only as confessional poetry. If the role of privacy is taken into account when deconstructing Plath’s work it is apparent that both her personal life and her historical surroundings played important roles in her writing. Plath used her creative energy to create a new space for her identity through abjection. Plath’s writings were articulating her anxieties about a woman’s role in marriage and her options in her reproductive life.

Although Roe is often viewed as a “gendered” decision, the implications are far reaching. If Roe is ever repealed by the Supreme Court, the privacy rights of both men and women would be in jeopardy. The feminist movement’s identification with Plath led to her appropriation by women as a specifically female writer, meaning that she catered to only a female audience. Yet, the issues of privacy that frustrate Plath should be important to all Americans because privacy rights are integral for a free society.

REFERENCES

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Kiernan, Laura A. “Pain and Outrage Emerge in Boston’s ‘Bell Jar’ Suit.” Washington Post 28 January 1987, final ed.: D1+.
Kristeva, Julia. About Chinese Women. New York: Urizen Books, 1974.
Lant, Kathleen. “The Big Strip Tease: Female Bodies and Male Power in the Poetry of Sylvia Plath.” Contemporary Literature 4th ser. 34 (1993): 620-669.
McAfee, Noëlle. Julia Kristeva. New York: Routledge, 2004.
Moses, Kate. “The real Sylvia Plath.” Salon.com. Ed. Joan Walsh. 30 May 2000. Salon Media 11 March 2006. <http://archive.salon.com/books/feature/2000/05/30/plath1/index.html>.
Nelson, Deborah. Pursuing Privacy in Cold War America. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002.
Plath, Sylvia. The Collected Poems. Ed. Ted Hughes. New York: Harper & Row, 1960.
---. The Bell Jar. New York: Harper & Row, 1971.
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Weatherby, W.J. “Open Space: Fact v. fiction / The case of Jane Anderson versus Sylvia Plath estate over the psychiatrist’s alleged depiction in ‘The Bell Jar.’” Guardian 3 February 1987.

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