Narrating Female Consciousness: Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar between Modernism and Feminist Critique

This thesis aims to investigate the narrative strategies of Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar (1963) in relation to modernist and feminist studies. Drawing from classical and post-classical narratology, as well as feminist narratology, this study analyzes focalization, temporality, and experientiality to show how Plath reshapes modernist techniques to portray Esther Greenwood’s fragmented consciousness. By situating The Bell Jar in dialogue with the works of James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, this dissertation aims to demonstrate how Plath inherits modernist experimentation, while redirecting her narrative as a feminist statement, exploring feelings of alienation and identity in 1950s America. This study argues that The Bell Jar should be read as a work of late feminist modernism: it is a novel that fuses formal innovation with cultural critique, transforming modernist narrative techniques into a mean to articulate female consciousness and resistance. In doing so, Plath positions her writing within a lineage of women writers who challenged the boundaries of literary form to claim space for women’s voices.