“However, the standard narrative of motherhood and housewifery hovers over her despite her detachment from it—she is always reflecting on marriage and looking for a partner after her failed relationship with Buddy Willard, although she claims to despise the housewife life embodied by her or Buddy’s mother. But the moment she feels inadequate at an internship in a prestigious magazine and is then rejected at a writing summer course, Esther’s sense of self begins to break down to pieces. As Baldwin claims, «[t]he rhetoric of the public and the private coalesce to form a particularly pernicious form of disorientation for the fragmenting Esther Greenwood whose sense of a private self becomes increasingly dependent upon her failing public self.”
Parra Fernández, Laura de la. “‘We are all Mad here’: Sylvia Plath’s the Bell Jar as a Political Novel.” Revista De Filología Románica, vol. 33, 2016, pp. 165
