Gender Coercion and Artificial Femininity in Plath’s The Bell Jar and Kaysen’s Girl, Interrupted

Resumen

Gender coercion and artificial femininity in Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar (1963) and Susanna Kaysen’s Girl, Interrupted (1993) are portrayed as significant subjects of controversy in America’s 1950s and 1960s, for cultural conventions endorsed by male- centred modern psychiatry restrained the possibility of female identity beyond normativity. Modern psychiatry based on the foundations of nineteenth- century’s ethics proposed a model of femininity grounded on the notions of wifehood and motherhood, so female rebellion against social standards was pathologised since resistance was considered insane and opposed to female nature. As a consequence, the conflict between femininity and modern psychiatry diagnosed disobedience as a mental state for which women needed to follow aggressive psychiatric treatments and hospitalization. The presence of McLean hospital in both literary works resembles the imprisonment that femininity must prevail to shape the feminine experience according to social demands. So trauma and body studies allow to comprehend how brutality against the body results in mental deterioration and dualism, as the violence presented in both novels seems to be directed to the body for the psyche is the immaterial dimension of the individual. Phenomenological theories are also used to revise the dualism between body and mind, given that violence prevents the characters from unity, and commitment in the psychiatric ward approves the creation of an artificial femininity to create a simulated identity. Hence, McLean is represented as a hierarchy where its three stages, Wymark, Caplan, and Belsize perform the function of creating manufactured entities.