Society and Family in America: The Analysis of Plath’s The Bell Jar Based on Murdock’s Views

As an autobiographical novel, The Bell Jar is associated with Plath s own life, and revolves around a female character named Esther Greenwood who cannot adapt herself to the restrictions that the society has imposed on her. One of the most interesting features about this novel that has attracted the critics is related to its depiction of the American family and society in the fifties. The present study aims to shed more light on the analysis of the prevailing family patterns in the fifties, the main social outlines at the time of the novel, and the justification behind assignment of such roles to family and society by Silvia Plath in The Bell Jar. The novel has some indications that apparently refer to the family and society features (e.g. the implied and plain responsibilities of women, the influences that are universal and imperceptible in newspapers and magazines, in advertisements, and in the classes that are taught and the ways they are taught, in the career choices offered to women, in the university majors and the factors that lead to a college education at all) and provide helpful research material for the present study. The other significant point about this research is that it will explore why and how this novel considers the features of family and middle-class American society in the 1950s as suffocating and stifling, and how the great dilemma to be adjusted to the social standards like femininity brings about the suppression of individuality. In this study, it will also be explored how characters who are not capable of adjusting themselves to the familial or societal norms are often portrayed as unsympathetic or traumatized. It will be found that Esther s feeling of being confined under a bell jar not only expresses her mental breakdown, but also is a general metaphor for a society that is stifled by its own standards and settlements.