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Patriarchy, Conformity And Individuality As Expressed In The Bell Jar And Edible Woman Essay, Research Paper

Patriarchy, Conformity and Individuality

as Expressed in The Bell Jar and Edible Woman

There has always been some amount of difficulty being a woman in our society, whether

it be in the present day or fifty years ago. There are many roles that women are expected to

play and many circumstances they have to face if they ?fail? to live out these certain roles. Our

world is filled with conformity, patriarchy and stereotypical attitudes that are so embedded into

us that it is near impossible to look past. The book, Edible Woman, written by Margaret Atwood,

is about a woman who is torn between the feminine stereotype of the Nineteen-sixties and her

own personality. This is very similar to Sylvia Plath?s, Bell Jar, which examines the life of a

woman suffering from the patriarchal society that offers her no positive role models. Both novels

have similar themes and characters as well as similar portrayal of men and other women and the

different roles that they play in society.

Marian McAlpin, the protagonist in Edible Woman is in her mid-twenties and is about to

get married to her young and immaculate fianc?, Peter. Marian is a graduate student who now

has an office job working for Seymour Surveys. She is now very upset because for the first time

in her life she has to make choices that are very important to the direction of her future but she

is absolutely overwhelmed by all of these choices. She begins very slowly to reject different types

of food until eventually there is nothing left that she is comfortable eating. She has the ongoing

feeling that it is she that is being consumed and grows very disturbed by the people around her.

Eventually, she sees that in order for her to be healthy, she has to take responsibility for her

actions and destroy the socially approved feminine role that has been forced upon her.

Esther Greenwood is faced with similar problems in the Bell Jar, where she is reaching a

point where she has to make many important decisions and to choose what path she wants to

take in life. Although she is very talented and has many options ahead of her, she lacks decent

role models and is unsatisfied with the positions that women are supposed to take in society.

Eventually she becomes very mentally strained and this leads into her ongoing struggle with

schizophrenia in mental hospitals. Esther sees herself mirrored in other characters in the novel,

especially a woman named Joan who is somewhat of a reversed parallel to her personality.

Eventually when Joan commits suicide, Esther is able to recover.

In both novels, it seems that there are many paths that both protagonists are

presented with. These paths are seen in the many different characters that Marian and Esther

are faced with in their lives and because none of the roles are very satisfying to them, this

causes very much rebellion and stress for both women. For Marian, these roles include her

widow landlady; a spinster who is presented to her by a woman organizing pention plans at

Seymour Surveys; a pure woman waiting for marriage and children like some of the ?office

virgins? who work with her; mother, represented by her friend Clara, who is so obviously wiped

out by her children she refers to them as ?leeches?; and the enlightened unmarried woman who

she associates with her roommate. ?…Marian McAlpin has a…problem with defining her own

reality in a puzzling and nonsensical environment.? Marian deals with much stress with the

realization that she has very little control over her life.

Esther Greenwood is also faced with many different characters that seem to split her

personality into two parts. At the beginning of the novel, there are two major paths that are

presented. One is presented by Doreen, a sassy, beautiful woman who is wild and sluttish. The

contrasting role to this is Betsy, who is polite, clean and pure. This is the initial conflict that

Esther finds hard to deal with. There are two sides to her personality and she can?t accept them

as both being an integrated part of herself. Other contrasting roles for Esther is the role of the

mother and the role of the career woman. There are many women who represent the pure

traditional role of motherhood and there are also many women who represent the independent,

exciting role of the career woman. For example, Jay Cee represents the role of the career

woman, and her mother and Buddy?s mother are maternal figures, but all of these women are

poor role models for Esther and she feels even more unsatisfied.

Being a mother means that you need to give up your career and independence and

being a career woman means that you are going to die alone and lonely. Both Marian and Esther

have difficulty finding the balance between these two roles. ?Marian, Duncan [Marion?s lover] and

Peter are all twenty-six, at the age when society expects them to abandon youthful freedom and

being to assume imprisoning life-time roles.? Because of the expectations of society, both of the

women feel that they don?t have any time and that they are being pressured into taking their

place.

In both novels, there is a very similar and interesting portrayal of men. The character

Lenny that is introduced near the beginning of the novel as Doreen?s boyfriend can very easily be

compared to Peter, Marian?s fiance. Both men are portrayed as ?predators? who have

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