Novel Shocks by Tucker-Abramson Myka;

Author:Tucker-Abramson, Myka; [Tucker-Abramson, Myka]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Fordham University Press
Published: 2018-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 5

Fallen Corpses and Rising Cities: The Bell Jar and the Making of the New Woman

At the center of Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar are two transformations: New York’s transformation from the nineteenth-century industrial city of slums, tenements, and factories to a shiny new metropolis, and the transformation of Esther, who begins the novel as an anxious, sick, and needy tenderfoot but ends the novel as a seemingly independent, liberated, and autonomous subject. Throughout this book, I’ve been arguing that the correlation between urban transformations and the transformation of the subject is not incidental. Rather, key processes of transformation playing out in urban and suburban space effectively helped to shape the emergence of a new kind of subjectivity. In this chapter, I argue that The Bell Jar offers one of the first fully developed critiques of the racial violence under pinning the formation of this new entrepreneurial subject. Moreover, I suggest that it confronts the limit of this model of entrepreneurial freedom on its own terms.

Published in 1963, The Bell Jar is set in 1952—a date the novel marks by two events that emblematize the overlapping and intersecting dynamics of Cold War history and the transformations taking place in New York City: the construction of the United Nations Building, which was completed by the end of that year, and the execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg on June 19, 1953. Esther arrives into this scene having won a fashion magazine contest that lands her a coveted internship at a women’s magazine in New York “for a month, expenses paid, and piles and piles of free bonuses, like ballet tickets and passes to fashion shows and hair stylings at a famous expensive salon and chances to meet successful people in the field of our desire” (3). Through Esther’s wide-eyed arrival into Manhattan, Plath provides one of the first comprehensive literary representations of New York in the age of urban renewal. This was a New York composed of the “slick marble and plate-glass fronts along Madison avenue” (2) that housed a booming, postindustrial creative economy marked by an endless parade of commodities and an all-encompassing phantasmagoria of mass cultural forms, from ladies’ magazines and commercial radio to movie theaters.

These urban and geopolitical markers have historically been underplayed in The Bell Jar criticism, which has largely forefronted how the double bind of consumer mass-culture and patriarchal 1950s values traps and confines women. Within this frame, The Feminine Mystique (1963)—that 1950s bible of suburban feminist liberation—is read as the novel’s paratext (Dowbnia; Leach), with Esther’s mental breakdown becoming both a symptom and a condemnation of frustrated female desire and ambition that reveals the fate of “talented yet powerless women” (Wagner-Martin, 61), or the bodily effects of a “gender-segregated knowledge economy” that doesn’t support “Esther’s hope of becoming a writer” (Jernigan, 4). Within such a reading, the novel’s ending—her escape from New York, her assertion of (a rather circumscribed) sexual agency, and her becoming the author of the memoir we now hold in our hands—serves

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