Femininity, Talent, and Insanity: an Analysis of Female Madness through Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar and Alda Merini’s L’altra verità.

Abstract

For the longest time, due to dominant patriarchal ideals, the female gender has been associated with a weakness of spirit. Women were considered inferior because they belonged to the sphere of nature, men to that of culture and refinement. This behavioral contrast was used to reinforce the long-standing tradition of male dominance, for which women should have been trained to limit themselves and the range of their activities to the toned-down sphere of domesticity. They therefore just had one duty in life: to embrace femininity and fulfill their role as a stay-at-home partner. Contemporary to the rise of the so-called “female malady” - a condition of the spirit of women identifiable through mental breakdowns - women writers have essentially highlighted through their publications that madness was the price they had to pay for the exercise of their creativity in a male-dominated society. Alda Merini and Sylvia Plath, despite their different cultures and approaches to life, both aim to highlight how their mental disorder is the result of an essentially social situation, confining them to their roles as daughters, wives, and mothers, instead of letting them express their poetic natural gift. This thesis therefore poses itself as an analysis of the condition of women, especially those of women writers, trapped within the conventions and confines of an extremely patriarchal society. Moreover, it will explore how these two powerful poetesses have highlighted, through their most famous prose writings, how their inability to balance their femininity and extreme talent locked them into the most repressive of all twentieth-century institutions, the much-dreaded asylum.