AO5 on Women in Lit
1. “A life of feminine submission, of 'contemplative purity,' is a life of silence, a life that has no pen
and no story, while a life of female rebellion, of 'significant action,' is a life that must be silenced, a life whose
monstrous pen tells a terrible story.” Gilbert and Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic
2. In fact, it is not really until the moment in the mid-nineteenth century when female resistance
becomes feminist rebellion that the battle of the sexes emerges as a trope for struggle over political as well
as personal power. —Gilbert and Gubar, From No Man's Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the
Twentieth Century, Volume 1: The War of the Words
3. During our own fin de siècle, after all, as during the last, a heightened consciousness of gender as a social
construct has generated heated debates about the place of biology in the formation of sex roles and sex
differences, about the relationship between anatomy and destiny. Gilbert and Gubar, From No Man's
Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century, Volume 2: Sexchanges
4. "...the apparently simple discovery that the experiences of women in and with literature are
different from those of men." Sandra Gilbert
5. In A Literature of Their Own, Elaine Showalter shows how women's literature has evolved, starting from
the Victorian period to modern writing. She breaks down the movement into three stages — the Feminine, a
period beginning with the use of the male pseudonym in the 1840s until 1880 with George Eliot's death; the
Feminist, from 1880 till the winning of the vote in 1920; and the Female, from 1920 till the present-day, including
a "new stage of self-awareness about 1960."
6. A female solidarity always seemed to exist as a result of "a shared and increasingly secretive and
ritualized physical experience... the entire female sexual life cycle." Female writers always wrote with this
commonality and feminine awareness in mind. Therefore, women's writing and women's experiences "implied
unities of culture." Elaine Showalter
7. Yet prior to the late twentieth century, novels of female development largely favor an internal growth,
one that comes, curiously enough, through sudden illumination: “epiphany” or “awakening”. George P.
Landow.
8. “The female Bildungsroman, then, is traditionally a tale of compromise and disillusionment, the chronicle of
a young woman’s recognition that, for her, life offers not limitless possibilities but an unsympathetic
environment in which she must struggle to discover a room of her own.” Maureen Ryan
9. In Subversive Intent, Susan Rubin Suleiman finds that many recent women's texts are like those of the
male surrealists, who "repudiate the mother" even as they appropriate her place in their battle with the father. As
an instance of this, Suleiman cites Jeanette Wintersoh's Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, where she reads the
mother figure as "an instrument of patriarchy" whom the lesbian daughter-writer must abandon and deny.
, AO5 (and some AO3 too) on THE BELL JAR (from previous lessons)
1. “In 1945, the Cold War was still barely on the horizon. Three years later, in 1948, Harry Truman won
the presidential election by channeling the growing anti-communist mood in America. Red-baiting became fully
entrenched in everyday life, and the family - with wife and mother in the home, and not at the office - was
understood to be the most effective safeguard against this new ideological threat emanating from Moscow. The
‘Red Scare’ quickly became intertwined with a postwar fear of the feminist. Many wondered if women would
be willing to relinquish their wartime ‘men’s jobs’ and return to the kitchen. Those who didn’t became
suspect” from Paulina Bren, The Barbizon (London: Two Roads, 2021).
2. “The rules were clear, and the expectations sky-high: women should be virgins, but not prudes;
women should go to college, pursue a certain type of career, and then give it up to get married. And above all,
living with these contradictions should not make them confused, angry, or worse, depressed. They should not
take a bottle of pills and try to forget. Sylvia Plath keenly felt the contradictions of the 1950s. She
embodied them and she battled them; she was neither able to comply with the demands made
on women nor bravely shirk them” from Paulina Bren, The Barbizon (London: Two Roads, 2021).
3. ‘A Different Approach to Context - The Bell Jar’, Mike Peters explains that “David Riesman's The
Lonely Crowd (1950) is an illuminating text in relation to The Bell Jar. In it, Riesman identifies an emerging
trend in post-war American society - the development of the other-directed personality, an individual,
whose identity is shaped not so much by tradition, family and education as by the opinions of their peers,
whether neighbours, friends or colleagues. The increase in the number of 'other-directed' individuals is seen by
Riesman as a product of growing affluence, consumerism and mass-culture through the 1950s and
60s”.
4. Critic Linda Wagner says: “In the traditional Bildungsroman, the character’s escape to a city images the
opportunity to find self as well as truths about life. […] [C]haracters […] idealize the city as a center of
learning and experience, and think that once they have re-located themselves, their lives will change
dramatically” - ‘Plath’s The Bell Jar as Female Bildungsroman’, (Women’s Studies 1986 Vol 12)
5. Patricia Meyer Spacks: “the adolescent character has no self to discover. The process is not
one of discovering a persona already there but rather creating a persona” (1981; quoted in Linda
Wagner, ‘Plath’s The Bell Jar as Female Bildungsroman’, (Women’s Studies 1986 Vol 12)?
6. “What if the terror a girl faces at twenty-one is the terror of freedom to decide her own life, with
no-one to order the path she will take? What if those who choose the path of 'feminine adjustment' -
evading this terror by marrying at eighteen, losing themselves in having babies and the details of housekeeping -
are simply refusing to grow up, to face the question of their own identity?” – Betty Friedan The
Feminine Mystique
7. “I can only lean enviously against the boundary and hate, hate, hate the boys who can dispel
sexual hunger freely” while her fate, as a young woman, was an unrelenting and unsatisfied “soggy
desire” - Plath quoted in Paulina Bren, The Barbizon (London: Two Roads, 2021).
8. Critic Sarah Churchwell says, “A girl in the 1950s could be a virgin or she could be a whore: it was a
1. “A life of feminine submission, of 'contemplative purity,' is a life of silence, a life that has no pen
and no story, while a life of female rebellion, of 'significant action,' is a life that must be silenced, a life whose
monstrous pen tells a terrible story.” Gilbert and Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic
2. In fact, it is not really until the moment in the mid-nineteenth century when female resistance
becomes feminist rebellion that the battle of the sexes emerges as a trope for struggle over political as well
as personal power. —Gilbert and Gubar, From No Man's Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the
Twentieth Century, Volume 1: The War of the Words
3. During our own fin de siècle, after all, as during the last, a heightened consciousness of gender as a social
construct has generated heated debates about the place of biology in the formation of sex roles and sex
differences, about the relationship between anatomy and destiny. Gilbert and Gubar, From No Man's
Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century, Volume 2: Sexchanges
4. "...the apparently simple discovery that the experiences of women in and with literature are
different from those of men." Sandra Gilbert
5. In A Literature of Their Own, Elaine Showalter shows how women's literature has evolved, starting from
the Victorian period to modern writing. She breaks down the movement into three stages — the Feminine, a
period beginning with the use of the male pseudonym in the 1840s until 1880 with George Eliot's death; the
Feminist, from 1880 till the winning of the vote in 1920; and the Female, from 1920 till the present-day, including
a "new stage of self-awareness about 1960."
6. A female solidarity always seemed to exist as a result of "a shared and increasingly secretive and
ritualized physical experience... the entire female sexual life cycle." Female writers always wrote with this
commonality and feminine awareness in mind. Therefore, women's writing and women's experiences "implied
unities of culture." Elaine Showalter
7. Yet prior to the late twentieth century, novels of female development largely favor an internal growth,
one that comes, curiously enough, through sudden illumination: “epiphany” or “awakening”. George P.
Landow.
8. “The female Bildungsroman, then, is traditionally a tale of compromise and disillusionment, the chronicle of
a young woman’s recognition that, for her, life offers not limitless possibilities but an unsympathetic
environment in which she must struggle to discover a room of her own.” Maureen Ryan
9. In Subversive Intent, Susan Rubin Suleiman finds that many recent women's texts are like those of the
male surrealists, who "repudiate the mother" even as they appropriate her place in their battle with the father. As
an instance of this, Suleiman cites Jeanette Wintersoh's Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, where she reads the
mother figure as "an instrument of patriarchy" whom the lesbian daughter-writer must abandon and deny.
, AO5 (and some AO3 too) on THE BELL JAR (from previous lessons)
1. “In 1945, the Cold War was still barely on the horizon. Three years later, in 1948, Harry Truman won
the presidential election by channeling the growing anti-communist mood in America. Red-baiting became fully
entrenched in everyday life, and the family - with wife and mother in the home, and not at the office - was
understood to be the most effective safeguard against this new ideological threat emanating from Moscow. The
‘Red Scare’ quickly became intertwined with a postwar fear of the feminist. Many wondered if women would
be willing to relinquish their wartime ‘men’s jobs’ and return to the kitchen. Those who didn’t became
suspect” from Paulina Bren, The Barbizon (London: Two Roads, 2021).
2. “The rules were clear, and the expectations sky-high: women should be virgins, but not prudes;
women should go to college, pursue a certain type of career, and then give it up to get married. And above all,
living with these contradictions should not make them confused, angry, or worse, depressed. They should not
take a bottle of pills and try to forget. Sylvia Plath keenly felt the contradictions of the 1950s. She
embodied them and she battled them; she was neither able to comply with the demands made
on women nor bravely shirk them” from Paulina Bren, The Barbizon (London: Two Roads, 2021).
3. ‘A Different Approach to Context - The Bell Jar’, Mike Peters explains that “David Riesman's The
Lonely Crowd (1950) is an illuminating text in relation to The Bell Jar. In it, Riesman identifies an emerging
trend in post-war American society - the development of the other-directed personality, an individual,
whose identity is shaped not so much by tradition, family and education as by the opinions of their peers,
whether neighbours, friends or colleagues. The increase in the number of 'other-directed' individuals is seen by
Riesman as a product of growing affluence, consumerism and mass-culture through the 1950s and
60s”.
4. Critic Linda Wagner says: “In the traditional Bildungsroman, the character’s escape to a city images the
opportunity to find self as well as truths about life. […] [C]haracters […] idealize the city as a center of
learning and experience, and think that once they have re-located themselves, their lives will change
dramatically” - ‘Plath’s The Bell Jar as Female Bildungsroman’, (Women’s Studies 1986 Vol 12)
5. Patricia Meyer Spacks: “the adolescent character has no self to discover. The process is not
one of discovering a persona already there but rather creating a persona” (1981; quoted in Linda
Wagner, ‘Plath’s The Bell Jar as Female Bildungsroman’, (Women’s Studies 1986 Vol 12)?
6. “What if the terror a girl faces at twenty-one is the terror of freedom to decide her own life, with
no-one to order the path she will take? What if those who choose the path of 'feminine adjustment' -
evading this terror by marrying at eighteen, losing themselves in having babies and the details of housekeeping -
are simply refusing to grow up, to face the question of their own identity?” – Betty Friedan The
Feminine Mystique
7. “I can only lean enviously against the boundary and hate, hate, hate the boys who can dispel
sexual hunger freely” while her fate, as a young woman, was an unrelenting and unsatisfied “soggy
desire” - Plath quoted in Paulina Bren, The Barbizon (London: Two Roads, 2021).
8. Critic Sarah Churchwell says, “A girl in the 1950s could be a virgin or she could be a whore: it was a
