여성, 잡지, 전후 미국: 실비아 플라스의 『 벨 자』와 미디어 읽기
Women, Magazines, and Postwar America: Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar and Readings of Mass Media
1
조회
0
다운로드
3
인용
0
참고문헌
키워드
초록
Sylvia Plath’s only novel The Bell Jar has garnered critical attention as a quintessential American female bildungsroman especially in association with the author’s autobiographical account of her coming of age struggle. The novel goes far beyond being Plath’s personal narrative as it extensively explores the American culture of the 1950s that defined and circulated the notion of femininity prescribed by Postwar America. Considering the various forms of mass media that operate to construct society’s views on women as well as women’s view of themselves, this paper focuses on the functions of print media embedded in the world of Esther Greenwood, the novel’s protagonist. Women’s magazines are an obvious communication medium through which the principles of femininity are conveyed, and Esther’s experience as a guest intern for a New York magazine both fascinates and disillusions her in the midst of a consumer society that promotes picture-perfect and mannequin-esque portraits of women. Using the media as a mirror, Esther recognizes her desire, guilt, anxiety and the repressive mold of postwar society. Her curious relationship with the print media of magazines, newspapers, tabloids, and advertisements, functions to delineate her self-portrait as she tries to understand herself. Though she never encounters a convincing, definitive picture of herself, Esther persists as an oppositional gaze in conflict with the dictates of the omnipresent media. In relation with the author Plath’s struggle with a mass media that drew on her public images and continues to mythologize her life, the objective of this paper is to analyze The Bell Jar as a social commentary on 1950s mass media and Esther as a complicating and complicated subject in search of herself in the labyrinth of glossy images.
Abstract
Sylvia Plath’s only novel The Bell Jar has garnered critical attention as a quintessential American female bildungsroman especially in association with the author’s autobiographical account of her coming of age struggle. The novel goes far beyond being Plath’s personal narrative as it extensively explores the American culture of the 1950s that defined and circulated the notion of femininity prescribed by Postwar America. Considering the various forms of mass media that operate to construct society’s views on women as well as women’s view of themselves, this paper focuses on the functions of print media embedded in the world of Esther Greenwood, the novel’s protagonist. Women’s magazines are an obvious communication medium through which the principles of femininity are conveyed, and Esther’s experience as a guest intern for a New York magazine both fascinates and disillusions her in the midst of a consumer society that promotes picture-perfect and mannequin-esque portraits of women. Using the media as a mirror, Esther recognizes her desire, guilt, anxiety and the repressive mold of postwar society. Her curious relationship with the print media of magazines, newspapers, tabloids, and advertisements, functions to delineate her self-portrait as she tries to understand herself. Though she never encounters a convincing, definitive picture of herself, Esther persists as an oppositional gaze in conflict with the dictates of the omnipresent media. In relation with the author Plath’s struggle with a mass media that drew on her public images and continues to mythologize her life, the objective of this paper is to analyze The Bell Jar as a social commentary on 1950s mass media and Esther as a complicating and complicated subject in search of herself in the labyrinth of glossy images.
참고문헌 (32)
- Axelrod, Steven Gould, "Sylvia Plath: The Wound and the Cure of Words" (1990), Johns Hopkins UP
- Badia, Janet, "Sylvia Plath and the Mythology of Women Readers" (2011), U of Massachusetts P
- Banita, Georgiana, "‘The Same, Identical Woman’: Sylvia Plath in the Media", The Journal of Midwest Modern Language Association, 40(2), pp.38~60 (2007)
- Barthes, Roland, "Mythologies" (1972), Hill and Wang
- Britzolakis, Christina, "Sylvia Plath and the Theatre of Mourning" (1999), Oxford UP
- Bryant, Marsha, "Plath, Domesticity, and the Art of Advertising", College Literature, 29(3), pp.17~34 (2002)
- Budick, E Miller, "The Feminist Discourse of Sylvia Plath’s the Bell Jar", College English, 49(8), pp.872~885 (1987)
- Bundtzen, Lynda K., "Lucent Figs and Suave Veal Chops: Sylvia Plath and Food", Gastronomica: The Journal of Food and Culture, 10(1), pp.79~90 (2010)
- Bundtzen, Lynda K., "Sylvia Plath: Modern Critical Views", pp.121~131 (1989), Chelsea House
- Farrel, Amy E., "Desire and Consumption: Women’s Magazines in the 1980s", American Quarterly, 46(4), pp.621~628 (1994)
- Ferguson, Marjorie, "Forever Feminine: Women’s Magazines and the Cult of Femininity" (1985), Gower
- Gilbert, Sandra M., "Sylvia Plath: Modern Critical Views", pp.49~65 (1989), Chelsea House
- Gill, Jo, "The Cambridge Introduction to Sylvia Plath" (2008), Cambridge UP
- Greenberg, Arielle, "Mad Girl’s Love Songs: Two Women Poets—A Professor and Graduate Student—Discuss Sylvia Plath, Angst, and the Poetics of Female Adolescence", College Literature, 36(4), pp.179~207 (2009)
- Hall, Stuart, "The Cultural Studies Reader", pp.507~517 (1999), Routledge
- Harzewski, Stephanie, "Chicklit and Postfeminism" (2011), U of Virginia P
- Hite, Molly, "A Parody of Martyrdom’: the Rosenbergs, Cold War Theology, and Robert Coover’s ‘The Public Burning", Novel: A Forum of Fiction, 27(1), pp.85~101 (1993)
- Leonard, Garry M., "‘The Woman Is Perfected. Her Dead Body Wears the Smile of Accomplishment’: Sylvia Plath and ‘Mademoiselle’ Magazine", College Literature, 19(2), pp.60~82 (1992)
- Nava, Mica, "Feminism & Cultural Studies", pp.45~64 (1999), Oxford UP
- Neuhaus, Jessamyn, "The Way to a Man’s Heart: Gender Roles, Domestic Ideology, and Cookbooks in 1950s", Journal of Social History, 32(3), pp.529~555 (1999)
- Peel, Robin, "Body, Word, and Photograph: Sylvia Plath’s Cold War Collage and the Thalidomide Scandal", Journal of American Studies, 40(1), pp.71~95 (2006)
- Peel, Robin, "The Ideological Apprenticeship of Sylvia Plath", Journal of Modern Literature, 27(4), pp.59~72 (2004)
- Plath, Sylvia, "The Bell Jar" (2013), Faber and Faber
- Radway, Janice A, "Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature" (1991), U of North Carolina P
- Séllei, Nóra, "The Fig Tree and The Black Patent Leather Shoes: The Body and Its Representation in Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar", Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies, 9(2), pp.127~154 (2003)
- Silverman, Kaja, "On Fashion", pp.183~196 (1994), Rutgers
- Simpson, Caroline Chung, "An Absent Presence: Japanese Americans in Postwar American Culture, 1945-1960" (2001), Duke UP
- Smith, Caroline J., "‘The Feeding of Young Women’: Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar, Mademoiselle Magazine, and the Domestic Ideal", College Literature, 37(4), pp.1~22 (2010)
- Smith, Stan, "Sylvia Plath: Modern Critical Views", pp.33~48 (1989), Chelsea House
- Steiner, Linda, "Oppositional Decoding as an Act of Resistance", Critical Studies in Mass Communication, 5(1), pp.1~15 (1988)
- Winder, Elizabeth, "Pain, Parties, Work: Sylvia Plath in New York, Summer 1953" (2013), HarperCollins
- Winship, Janice, "Inside Women’s Magazines" (1987), Pandora