Abstract
Natalie Waite and Esther Greenwood, college girl protagonists of Shirley Jackson’s Hangsaman and Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar, are ultimately unable to make friendships with other women; this chapter offers the reason why. Natalie and Esther share a dearth of meaningful female friendships; Natalie and Esther, as relatively privileged white, middle-class college girls in the mid-twentieth century, also view their lives as a struggle for self-actualization that is stymied by relationships. This chapter argues that these two are linked. Because Natalie and Esther seek to actualize selves that are fundamentally autonomous rather than necessarily relational, all relationships, including friendships, are liabilities to the self rather than the very things to help it flourish. Both novels illustrate the incompatibility of female friendship with a drive for female self-actualization that mimics, rather than challenges, the individualistic (white, male self), deceived into believing it is autonomous.
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Notes
- 1.
Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (New York: Norton, 2013), 5.
- 2.
Shirley Jackson, Hangsaman (New York: Penguin, 2013), 9. Subsequent citations of Jackson’s novel will be noted parenthetically in-text.
- 3.
Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar (New York: HarperCollins, 2006), 72. Subsequent citations of Plath’s novel will be noted parenthetically in-text.
- 4.
Friedan, The Feminine Mystique, 379.
- 5.
Plath, The Letters of Sylvia Plath v1 (New York: HarperCollins, 2017), 613.
- 6.
Franklin, Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life (New York: Liveright, 2016), 67.
- 7.
In Feminist Theory from Margin to Center (New York: Routledge, 2015), bell hooks calls Friedan’s work simultaneously “a useful discussion of sexist discrimination on a select group of women” and “a case study of narcissism, insensitivity, sentimentality, and self-indulgence,” a white feminism that ignores “the lived experiences of women as a collective group” (3).
- 8.
Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. Constance Borde and Shelia Malovany-Chevallier (New York: Vintage, 2010), 5, 17.
- 9.
Little scholarship has focused on this connection between relationship and selfhood in these two novels. Scholars have paid Jackson’s work far too little attention in general, and Hangsaman has received considerably less attention from scholars than Jackson’s more well-known works, such as “The Lottery,” We Have Always Lived in the Castle, and, The Haunting of Hill House. Lynette Carpenter’s 1984 essay “The Establishment and Preservation of Female Power in Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle” notes Jackson’s fictional explorations of “the causes and consequences of female victimization and alienation” and argues that she deserves more scholarly attention (32); Angela Hague, writing twenty years later, repeats Carpenter’s call (73). Scholarship focusing specifically on female relationships in Hangsaman is even more thin on the ground; the best example is Roberta Rubenstein’s “House Mothers and Haunted Daughters: Shirley Jackson and the Female Gothic,” which considers “ambivalent attachment between mothers and daughters in particular” (309).
The Bell Jar has received far more critical attention. Most scholars who discuss Esther’s development in The Bell Jar focus on her search for individual identity (as woman, as artist, etc.). For example, Margorie G. Perloff argues in “‘A Ritual for Being Born Twice: Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar” that “The Bell Jar has become for the young of the early seventies…the archetypal novel that mirrors…their own personal experiences” of self-development (508). Linda Wagner christens “Plath’s The Bell Jar as Female Bildungsroman” in a 1986 essay using Jerome Buckley’s 1974 definition of bildungsroman, which focuses on “a growing up and gradual self-discovery” (55). Caroline J. Smith examines The Bell Jar’s connections to women’s magazines of the 1950s, arguing that the novel explores how Esther grapples with the sense of self these magazines encourage in readers (4). Rose Miyatsu’s “‘Hundreds of People Like Me’: A Search for a Mad Community in The Bell Jar” is one of a handful of essays in scholarship on The Bell Jar for its focus on community; she explores the building of community by those who identify as mentally ill. Diane S. Bonds’s essay (see footnote 8, below) is another.
- 10.
Diane S. Bonds makes a similar argument in her essay “The Separative Self in Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar,” noting that Esther’s recovery still “denies the relationality of the self.” Her focus is on images of dismemberment in the novel; I argue that Esther’s friendships (or lack thereof) provide another lens through which to view Esther’s alienation.
- 11.
Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 132.
- 12.
Gilligan, “Remapping the Moral Domain: New Images of Self in Relationship,” in Mapping the Moral Domain, eds. Carol Gilligan, Jaine Victoria Ward, and Jill McLean Taylor (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1988), 7.
- 13.
For examples of critiques of Gilligan from within and without academia, see Dennis M. Senchuk, “Listening to a Different Voice: A Feminist Critique of Gilligan”; Kathy Davis, “Toward a Feminist Rhetoric: The Gilligan Debate Revisited”; and the debate between Christina Hoff Sommers and Gilligan in the letters of the Atlantic’s August 2000 issue.
- 14.
Martha Minow, Making All the Difference: Inclusion, Exclusion, and American Law (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), 194.
- 15.
Virginia Held, The Ethics of Care: Personal, Political, and Global (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 46.
- 16.
Bell hooks, Feminist Theory from Margin to Center (New York: Routledge, 2015), 9.
- 17.
bell hooks, Feminism is for Everybody: Passionate Politics (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2000), 51. Emphasis added.
- 18.
Friedan, The Feminine Mystique, 394.
- 19.
Ibid., 403.
- 20.
Ibid., 405.
- 21.
Virignia Held, Feminity Morality: Transforming Culture, Society, and Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), viii.
- 22.
Ibid., 162.
- 23.
Gilligan, “Remapping the Moral Domain,” 7.
- 24.
Friedan, The Feminine Mystique, 72.
- 25.
Ibid., 202.
- 26.
Susan Van Dyne, “‘Abracadabra’: Intimate Inventions by Early College Women in the United States,” Feminist Studies 42, no. 2 (2016): 281.
- 27.
Susan Van Dyne, for example, charts the language early college women in the U.S. developed “for erotic self-awareness before the categories of lesbian or homosexual were in circulation on US college campuses” (287) in her essay in Feminist Studies’s 2016 special issue on female friendship. Linda Rosensweig’s 1999 study of middle-class American women’s friendships in the twentieth century notes the “heightened cultural emphasis on heterosexual relationships” post-1920, and the “concomitant stigmatization of passionate same-sex attachments fostered by the dissemination and popularization of Freudian ideology” (70). And Shirley Marchalonis describes, in her 1995 book College Girls: A Century in Fiction, the “charge that the women’s colleges encouraged homosexual relationships” that was “hinted at in the women’s magazines” and “overt in a 1927 article in Harper’s” by Edna Yost; Marchalonis quotes Yost: “She goes on to charge that ‘intense homosexual friendships of an undesirable nature form a problem that is admittedly disturbing some of our best women’s colleges and unadmittedly disturbing the others’” (153).
- 28.
Plath copies Doctor Nolan’s advice almost verbatim from her own journals. In an entry written in January of 1959, Plath describes talking with her therapist, Ruth Barnhouse, about “Lesbians, [sic] (what does a woman see in another woman that she doesn’t see in a man: tenderness)” (Journals 460).
- 29.
Worth noting here is that I do not interpret Esther’s hemorrhage as a result of her loss of virginity as some sort of punishment for inappropriate sexual activity. Esther’s mother would likely advocate such an interpretation—earlier in the novel, she sends Esther a Reader’s Digest article by a married woman who entreats her reader: “Of course [men] would try to persuade a girl to have sex…but as soon as she gave in, they would lose all respect for her…and they would end up by making her life miserable” (81).
- 30.
Held, Feminist Morality, 208.
- 31.
Ibid., 214.
- 32.
Natalie does come close to imagining it. As she helps a drunk Elizabeth home, having been abandoned by Vicki, Anne, and Arthur Langdon, she thinks:
[A]fter all…everyone was mortal and everyone was faulty and everyone was all together in one great world where only one life was vouchsafed to any of us, and there was never enough time to reflect on whether to do a thing or not to do a thing, because when you looked at someone it was someone no more or no less than another mortal, and, after all, who could deny another mortal some solace in a life on this world, and in the last analysis, Elizabeth…. (133)
The ellipsis is Jackson’s; Natalie never finishes her thought.
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Ooms, J. (2023). “What Obligation Do I Have Toward Her?”: College Girl Friendships and Self-Actualization in Hangsaman and The Bell Jar. In: Branham, K., Reames, K.L. (eds) Navigating Women’s Friendships in American Literature and Culture. American Literature Readings in the 21st Century. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-08003-6_8
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