The Architecture of a Three-dimensional Female Character in Sylvia Plath's "the Bell Jar" and its Impact on Female Characters in the Hollywood Film Industry
Open Access
- Author:
- Murt, Katherine Elizabeth
- Area of Honors:
- English
- Degree:
- Bachelor of Arts
- Document Type:
- Thesis
- Thesis Supervisors:
- Lisa Ruth Sternlieb, Thesis Supervisor
Lisa Ruth Sternlieb, Thesis Honors Advisor
John Edmond Marsh, Faculty Reader - Keywords:
- Sylvia Plath
The Bell Jar
manic pixie dream girl
film - Abstract:
- Sylvia Plath is remembered in literary history for her complex and dimensional creation of characters through both her prose and poetry. Plath’s own personal experiences with emotionally challenging life events informed her collective works, and from these experiences she drew forth her seminal novel The Bell Jar, a semiautobiographical account of a young girl named Esther who moves to New York City for a new job and uncovers her own vast emotional depth and potential for instability in the process. Esther’s journey into the recesses of her own mind broke ground in that Plath exposed an emotional depth to a female character that had yet to be so explicitly explored outside of the confines of a male literary counterpart. Esther is a female character that stands on her own, and her three-dimensional emotionality constructed the blueprint for how we see modern females in literature and art. Following suit, the Hollywood film industry has produced countless films starring female protagonists with emotional issues, using these issues as a means to create depth in a character where depth does not truly exist. The recent coinage of the term “Manic Pixie Dream Girl” has been used to describe female film characters that do not fit traditional mold of a Hollywood dream girl due to their unique interests or experiences. However, these unique qualities of female characters in film are masquerading for emotional range and fail to create believable, realistic human females on screen as Plath created in her literature. In borrowing from Plath’s blueprint but failing to execute it properly, Hollywood has propagated the further mistreatment of women in film by merely using them as plot-drivers to further the journey of male protagonists. In this paper, I will argue that this Hollywood misappropriation of Plath’s ideals is detrimental to the future of female representation in cinema and stifles the effective portrayal of women in film.