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The Angel vs the Monster: Dichotomization of Identity in The Bell Jar
Full text linkThe Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath, depicts the struggle of a woman in search of her own identity and her desire to liberate from the Angel vs Monster dichotomy imposed by society. Esther Greenwood is torn between her mother, who wants her to become an Angel and her vocation as a female writer, more compatible with the Monster. As she encounters different women who represent these archetypes in New York, Betsy and Doreen, her division of the self grows prominent in her life. This paper aims to undertake an analysis on Esther’s struggle to find herself in this dichotomy and how the displacement that she suffers while failing to identify with neither of the binaries available is the main cause of her mental illness. Esther cannot be categorized as neither Angel or Monster, but still, society’s fixation on erasing women’s dichotomization of identity force her to choose between one of them. As there is no placement in society for a woman who does not complain with either one side or the other of the identity spectrum, Esther must leave the mental asylum as either a reformed Angel or a Monster in disguise in order to continue with her life, eliminating every trace of binarism in the female identity
Murder Ballads: Crime and Society in Victorian Literature
Full text linkThe Victorian age is a period known not only for its rich literary tradition, but alsofor the high number of crimes, specifically homicides, registered in England in those years.As well as in real life, crime was one of the main issues in poetic and fictional writings. Theaim of this paper is to analyse the ways in which the theme of murder in literature reflectsmoral changes in Victorian society, and to what extent this extreme criminal act represents aresponse to stifling restrictions imposed in that period. First, I will provide a broad view ofthe panorama in which those crimes took place and try to establish the introduction of thistheme in literature with the social background of Victorian culture. I will then explore thepsychological aspect of criminals as described in the dramatic monologue Porphyria’s Loverby Robert Browning, in the novel Tess of the D’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy, and in thepoem The Ballad of Reading Gaol by Oscar Wilde. The three literary works will be approachedindividually in each of the sections of this essay, in order to demonstrate the influence of thesocial background of the era upon the distorted psychology of the characters of these work
