Space and the Female Bildungsroman in Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar

DOI

10.2991/978-2-38476-511-9_108How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Spatial Theory; Female Bildungsroman; Feminism; Sylvia Plath

Abstract

Published in 1963 under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas, Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar has long been recognized as a semi-autobiographical novel grounded in her own early life. Through the six-month journey of Esther Greenwood—a brilliant college student navigating campus romance, a New York internship, and her descent into and recovery from psychological crisis—Plath reconfigures the traditional Bildungsroman from a female perspective. The novel portrays a young woman caught between academic ambition and domestic expectation, between the pursuit of intellectual ideals and the demands of social convention. Drawing on Henri Lefebvre’s spatial theory and feminist criticism, this study examines the interaction between gender and space in The Bell Jar. It argues that Plath transforms the classic Bildungsroman into a female Bildungsroman that maps self-formation through spatial experience. The novel reveals how patriarchal environments both constrain and stimulate women’s consciousness, converting physical confinement into an inquiry into identity and autonomy.

Copyright

© 2025 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Yaxi Jiang
PY  - 2025
DA  - 2025/12/31
TI  - Space and the Female Bildungsroman in Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar
BT  - Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Literature, Art and Human Development (ICLAHD 2025)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 922
EP  - 928
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-2-38476-511-9_108
DO  - 10.2991/978-2-38476-511-9_108
ID  - Jiang2025
ER  -