Confession, subjectivity and McCarthyist paranoia in Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar: A Foucauldian perspective

Abstract

Sylvia Plath is a much more political writer than she has been given credit for; and “Confession, subjectivity and McCarthyist paranoia in Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar: A Foucauldian perspective” aims to reveal the extent of that politicisation.   Prior to the publication of Michel Foucault’s The Archaeology of Knowledge, Sylvia Plath was demonstrating through her narrator Esther Greenwood how the subject is produced within discourse, when that discourse is the brief but profoundly unsettling period of McCarthyism in post-War America.  This is a discourse that has the quintessentially American values of liberal individualism at its core.

The notion of a Plathian subject revealed within discourse, however, is more than just a confirmation of Foucault’s archaeological method.  In fact, the Plathian subject tests Foucault’s methodology, by underscoring the extent to which Esther Greenwood manages to find a mental space outside of McCarthyism.  This testing of the boundaries of the subject as constructed within discourse reveals a silent but nonetheless subversive capacity for human agency outside of the parameters of McCarthyism, a capacity for action that is something akin to Debordian mental freedom from the capitalist society of the spectacle.