Entre a loucura e a feminilidade: uma análise da loucura feminina na obra a redoma de vidro de Sylvia Plath

Abstract

This research analyzes the novel The Bell Jar (2019), by Sylvia Plath, using The Journals of Sylvia Plath: 1950–1962 (2017) as auxiliary bibliography, with the aim of investigating the representations of female madness and the forms through which psychic suffering was produced and managed in the context of postwar United States. Rather than reconstructing the author’s biography or describing the empirical functioning of psychiatric institutions, the study approaches the literary work as a historically situated symbolic elaboration, in which subjective experiences, medical discourses, and gender norms intersect. The central problem is to understand how the narrative constructs madness as a female experience shaped by contradictory social expectations, while also examining how psychiatry appears in the novel both as a space of care and as a dispositif of normalization and social reintegration. Methodologically, the research conducts a historical-literary analysis of selected passages from the novel, confronting them with entries from Plath’s journals not as factual confirmation, but as interpretative support for understanding the processes of subjectivation at stake. It argues that Esther Greenwood’s madness is not presented as an isolated pathology, but as the result of tensions between individual aspirations, gender roles, and institutional dispositifs regulating femininity in the period. By problematizing the notion of cure, the study highlights the limits of psychiatric recovery as a functional return to a social order that continues to produce suffering. Thus, this research contributes to the historical understanding of the relationships between gender, subjectivity, and psychiatric knowledge, as well as to debates on the medicalization of female distress in the second half of the twentieth century. At the same time, it illuminates central aspects of Sylvia Plath’s trajectory, marked by experiences of loss, academic pressure, marital tensions, and rigidly gendered social expectations. Her biography is not mobilized as a causal or reductive explanation of her literary production, but as a field of symbolic disputes in which medical discourses, norms of femininity, and strategies of selfelaboration intertwine. In this sense, the analysis of her life allows for an understanding of how her experience was simultaneously singular and historically situated, revealing the tensions between creation, suffering, and the dispositifs of power that act upon the female body and subjectivity.