死亡的語言:普拉絲小說《瓶中美人》關於憂鬱症與劣質性的研究

Abstract

西爾維亞·普拉絲（Sylvia Plath）的小說“瓶中美人”（The Bell Jar）最初於1963年1月以維多利亞·盧卡斯（Victoria Lucas）的匿名出版。在一個女權主義意識初形的時代，普拉絲不懈地暴露了女性主觀性和社會代理問題的現實和緊張局勢。 她的小說提供讀者和評論家對於精神疾病及女性心理非常真摯且有價值的批判與探索。普拉斯對於死亡劣質性與憂鬱症的書寫啟發需多有關於女性主的體性與社會價值的省思和批判。這正是我這篇論文想解釋並討論的主題。

Sylvia Plath’s novel The Bell Jar was originally published in January 1963 under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas, and became tangled up almost immediately in the drama of her suicide. Writing during a time when stirrings of a greater feminist consciousness had just began to emerge, Plath exposes the realities and tensions problematizing women’s subjectivity and social agency. Told with blistering honesty and a vivid attention to detail, The Bell Jar offers readers and critics an unromantic yet bold perspective invaluable to achieving a better understanding of mental illness and its effects on the female psyche. It is a raw, unsettling book with flashes of brilliance drawn from Plath’s very own experiences as woman. Plath’s essential theme, is the protagonist Esther’s obsession with death linked to a worsening depression and abjection of others which she compare to suffocating under a bell jar. Esther’s predicament, more generally, is how to develop a mature subjectivity, as a woman, and to be true to that self rather than to conform to social expectations defined by the opposite sex. It is this quest that inspires and motivates me to explicate, through discourse, Plath’s introspective critique on arbitrariness of patriarchal value systems and the traumatic effects they incur female subjectivity and autonomy.