While reading both The Bell Jar and The Woman Warrior I noticed the prevelance of symbols and metaphors regarding the female body and reproductive system, such as menses, sex, pregnancy and birth that had similar undertones and meanings in each of the seperate stories. Although I was able to see this connection I unfortunately did not make the conclusion soon enough that this is due to the feminine quality of both the books and not simply coincedently similar. My research presented me with many different interpretations of the body in each of the books seperately and I was interested to see what interpretation could be extracted from using both The Bell Jar and The Woman Warrior together. My original ideas were brought about by extensive explication and then I tried to position my argument amongst already established views to show a new way to interpret these symbols.
I have always been very aware of my personal strengths and weaknesses in my writing. As I performed my self-evaluation I knew exactly what went wrong or right before Professor Hardy had reviewed it. My struggle has no longer become recognizing these problems, but being able to rework my essays in order to fix these. I have become good at revision for grammatical and simple stylistic errors, but I need to improve my argument as a whole and in doing so reevaluate my position and claim see more of the feminine lens. If I could further revise my paper I would refocus the argument and therefore clarify my introduction, which would lend more structure to the rest of my paper. I would also group my ideas differently. At first I tried to group the explications according to the manner in which the female body was described but I have now realized that this is too confusing and it would be easier just to explicate one whole book at a time and end with a few paragraphs comparing and contrasting them to reach my conclusion.
I believe that amongst all my papers I have reached all the course goals one at a time, but this paper was not able to reach success in all areas because of some flaws in my original argument. This might have been helped by getting more peer feedback and further contemplating the reason behind the coincidence of the similar portrayals found in The Woman Warrior and The Bell Jar with regard to the female body.
Shoshana Rosenthal
Professor Madsen Hardy
WR 150 AO
14 April 2009
Representing the Female Body and Reproductive Cycle in The Woman Warrior and The Bell Jar
Controversy surrounds the correct way to interpret both Kingston’s The Woman Warrior and Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar. The tension between those who see these as cultural and societal critiques and those who see these as confessions of strictly personal struggles has caused the boundaries between the genre of autobiography and fiction to become indistinguishable. These positions have been defended through many different readings of the texts, but none are able to find an explanation that unites these seemingly fragmented themes successfully. Instead of finding the literary merit in these works, many critics fail to see the cohesiveness and artful use of experience and metaphor. Frank Chin in his essay “Come all ye Asian Writers of Real and Fake,” criticizes The Woman Warrior as “a lie of their version of history” (3), although this is derived only from the interpretation of The Woman Warrior as a a critique of Asian patriarchal society as compared only to other literature with authors of Chinese background, completely discrediting Kingston’s own value as a writer. One way these views can be integrated is through the intersection of society and personal experience in the representations of the female body. This essay will examine the physical portrayal of the female body in both works separately, but with the goal of showing how the cultural limitations in both texts are transcended as similar themes of reproduction and sexuality can be extracted. In this explanation, images of the female reproductive cycle will be studied in respect to the metaphorical value of portraying vulnerability and empowerment. In The Woman Warrior, this reading will provide proof that it is indeed a cohesive story, and that the liberties she takes in interpreting traditional Chinese tales serves a purpose other than cultural commentary and stereotyping. Simultaneously using the same metaphorical images of the female reproductive cycle connects readings of The Bell Jar as a social commentary and a story of inner mental struggle between two mutually exclusive ideas. First the images of the reproductive system will be interpreted in regard to both texts, and then this reading offered will be used to show that these manifestations of the reproductive system through vulnerability and empowerment parallel and unify the other themes found in these books, and are not unique to a certain cultural background.
The vulnerable side of sexuality and the female body can be seen clearly in both texts as a source of conflict rooted in pressures from society as well as certain specific events in each of the main character’s lives. Menstruation, sex, pregnancy and the silence surrounding these issues all show a sense of hopelessness and susceptibility in these characters. The body is the junction between inner and external turmoil, expressed through physical manifestations. Kathleen Lant also interprets Plath’s body of work through some of the same metaphorical images of the female body. However, she fails to discern the fictional elements Plath uses, and her interpretation fails because she attempts to use Plath’s own life to interpret her “flamboyantly revealing” (623), work, which she lacks the authority to accomplish. This interpretation will not use this false authority to make hazy connections between the lives of the authors and their writings as one would in an autobiography, but the value of the stories themselves as fiction.
One way that the female body can exhibit these qualities is through the rite of passage that all girls must pass through, beginning to menstruate. Menstruation is one of the first signals of the reproduction system’s effects on the female body. Menstruation impacts the characters of The Woman Warrior as a warning of fertility leaving the female body vulnerable to impregnation as well as in a negative connotation as a biological process that cannot be controlled or altered. At the very beginning, the Kingston opens with a scene in which the narrator has started her first menses and her mother tells her a story of a woman who became pregnant intended to warn her of the risks she now faces. Her mother tells her, “Now that you have started to menstruate, what happened to her could happen to you. Don’t humiliate us. You wouldn’t like to be forgotten as if you had never been born” (5). This is the start of the conflict Maxine has regarding her identity at the pivotal moment where she learns that she now has the ability to bear children, although this is not viewed as a celebratory occasion. Her mom takes advantage of this event to scare her into strict abstinence and modesty, rather than face the alienation from her family and society that her unnamed aunt faced.
Menstruation is mentioned in The Woman Warrior in the story of Fa Mu Lan as well. As she trains she learns how to have complete control over her whole body, and although she menstruates it does not have any effect on her training. However, she still does not understand the purpose of the bleeding or why she was unable to control it as she did the rest of her body. She thinks she had somehow hurt herself, but the old woman explained to her that this meant she could have children and that this was a biological function that she could not control just as urination and defecation. This shows how even in Maxine’s woman warrior role models, it is impossible to control this biological aspect of fertility and bleeding physically and her body is also vulnerable as she has no way to stop the bleeding, although she finds a way to cope with it.
The struggle lies in Fa Mu Lan’s sense of identity as a warrior and now as a fertile woman as physically represented in her menstruation. This blood sacrifice in return for fertility is echoed in the blood as Fa Mu Lan’s parents “carve revenge” on her back (34). This part of the work is interpreted as “a sign of cultural identification” by Lisa Crafton in her essay, “’We are going to carve revenge on your back’: Language, Culture, and the Female Body in Kingston’s The Woman Warrior” although this is a misunderstanding because there is no mention of this inscription belonging to a certain cultural practice. The symbolism of the spilling of blood Maxine compares to “when a woman gives birth, as at the sacrifice of a large animal, as when I menstruated and dreamed red dreams” (34). Fa Mu Lan must go through this pain and sacrifice further attesting to her role as both a warrior and a female as she uses her body as both a weapon if she dies in battle and a vehicle for reproduction when she gives birth and menstruates. These are the sacrifices Fa Mu Lan makes to retain both her status as a warrior and a woman, leaving her vulnerable and yet empowered through her personal battle to control her body through menstruation and sacrifice. Fa Mu Lan embodies these two seemingly opposed feelings and acts as a role model for the narrator’s struggle to find middle ground in conflicts of her own life.
Similar forces of defenselessness and empowerment appear at odds in The Bell Jar. Plath examines sexuality and the female body rather than menstruation. Kingston and Plath both use these symbols of the female body as a way to portray helplessness she uses the power of seduction. At the very beginning of the story, Plath creates this tension through Esther’s two friends, Betsy who is portrayed as very innocent and timid while Doreen is very overtly sexual in an almost bestial way. One image of Doreen shows Esther’s reaction to this raw sexuality as:
Doreen’s breasts popped out of her dress were swinging out slightly like full brown melons as she circled belly-down on Lenny’s shoulder, thrashing her legs in the air and screeching, and then they both started to laugh and slow up, and Lenny was trying to bite Doreen’s hip through her skirt when I let myself out the door before anything more could happen and managed to get downstairs by leaning with both hands on the banister and half sliding the whole way. (17)
Marilyn Boyer, who combines feminism and the study of disability in “The Disabled Female Body,” interprets Esther’s reaction to this crude sexual mockery as having, “psychologically disappeared at the experience of watching human beings be reduced to animals through violent, devolved, tribal behavior” (202). Though Esther seems to shrink away from this display of the female body, it is not simply because this might have affected her psychologically but this act has served as a warning attesting to the risks and dangers of presenting her own body in this sexual manner. Esther slides down the banister showing her attempt to escape the fate of Doreen as she then proceeds to bathe, cleaning her body of the brutish demoralizing acts witnessed by the female body. This bath shows that she takes care of her body and did not completely “psychologically disappear,” but rather heeds the warning of this scene and understands the vulnerability and helplessness of the female human body in the hands of men. Esther consciously decides to reject this blatantly sexual nature of the female body exhibited by Doreen and instead attempts to “be loyal to Betsy and her innocent friends” (22), as she leaves Doreen throwing up in the doorway. Esther’s rejection of female sexuality portrayed in this manner simultaneously displays the helplessness of the female body at the hands of men and the power she takes over the situation in deciding to not allow her own body to be viewed in this unpure primitive display of sex.
The Woman Warrior also shows these two different kinds of character, one of sexual innocence and the other of the seductive power of the female body simultaneously over men and at the hands of men. This is shown not through two different characters, but through two different interpretations the narrator suggests in response to her mother’s story warning her of the dangers of sex, as her mother leaves out the details of how her no-name aunt became pregnant at the very beginning of the story. First she sees her aunt as a powerless woman who had been taken advantage of as she eventually grew, “a protruding melon of a stomach (1),” while her husband was away. However, the narrator does not want to accept this connotation of events and instead she entertains the idea that her aunt may have fallen in love as she attempted to portray her sexuality and seduce the man by combing, “individuality into her bun” (10), removing an undesirable freckle from her face, and spending much time admiring men as, “her hair lured her imminent lover” (10). This introduces tension between society’s traditional role of women as sexually submissive against the idea that women could have power over their own sexual nature by altering their physical appearance. This further underlines the inner turmoil the narrator faces of the internal and external pressures to embody certain values and ideals.
In both novels these scenes set up the conflict that is further examined in the rest of the work. The main characters must resolve their view of the female human body and its ability to both serve to exhibit the pain and pleasure of being a woman. Maxine searches for a role model she can use that can help her combine society’s expectations as a woman and her own while Esther falls into mental anguish stemming in part from her inability to choose between being a successful mother and wife or having a career as a writer. These rising actions in the stories are embodied through many vulnerable scenes showing the female body under attack through childbirth and under the control of a patriarchal society.
In The Bell Jar, Plath adds an anecdote of an intimate moment shared between a rabbi and a nun under a fig tree while watching a bird hatch as they touch the back of their hands together, but then she never returns again. This is paralleled in Esther’s life in her relationship with Buddy Willard as she says following the tale, “We had met together under our own imaginary fig tree, and what we had seen wasn’t a bird coming out of an egg but a baby coming out of a woman, and then something awful happened and we went our separate ways” (55). She proceeds to describe how this event proved how Buddy was a hypocrite and although he made her feel more experienced as they first kissed, this was a false sense of empowerment and really Buddy had tricked her into being even more susceptible than she initially realized. This is represented through the female body through the scene of childbirth Buddy shows Esther.
Esther’s vision of childbirth is romanticized as an awful ordeal yet one in which at the end she imagines herself, “dead white, of course with no makeup…but smiling and radiant, with my hair down to my waist, and reaching for my first squirmy child and saying its name, whatever it was ” (67). In reality she finds that this is not the case; the woman was drugged up and seemed inhuman. Whereas childbirth is normally seen as joyous experience, the woman has no idea what is occurring around her as she is treated almost as a machine attended to by male doctors as they put her in, “some awful torture table, with these metal stirrups sticking up in midair at one end and all sorts of instruments and wires and tubes” (65). The male doctors cut into her to free the baby and an intern is the first to hold the baby as he feared he would drop it. This hypocritical nature of an event that is supposed to be empowering for the woman but is turned into another episode where men take control over her destiny deeply disturb Esther as she is forced to reevaluate her views of the female body. Esther’s main concern is that the woman would have no recollection of the pain her body experienced afterwards as she concludes:
I thought it sounded like the sort of drug a man would invent. Here was a woman in terrible pain, obviously feeling every bit of it or she wouldn’t groan like that, and she would go straight home and start another baby, because the drug would make her forget how bad the pain had been, when all the time, in some secret part of her, that long, blind, doorless and windowless corridor of pain was waiting to open up and shut her in again. (66)
This view not only shows how society has placed the most important element in a woman’s life, childbirth, as controlled by men and inhuman, but also relates to her own inner struggle with her body. This can be seen in Esther’s mention of her first sexual encounter with Buddy directly after watching the delivery being performed. She becomes so desensitized watching the way the woman are treated in childbirth she felt no connection to Buddy romantically, as Buddy had ruined the romantic image of childbirth for Esther. Esther compares Buddy’s genitals to, “a turkey neck and turkey gizzards” (69), as she alienates herself from the sexual nature of the physical body. Soon after she discovers that Buddy himself is not as pure and lost his virginity in an affair over the summer. Buddy’s hypocrisy is mirrored in the hypocrisy of the childbirth she had just witnessed and the female body connects both these double standards in society and her personal experience as the images of being a woman she once found empowering have intersected through the body to portray her powerlessness.
Childbirth in The Woman Warrior is represented as a rite of passage to becoming a successful woman. Although at first in the chapter as referred to in “No Name Woman”, childbirth is seen as disgraceful and dirty as her aunt has to give birth to her illegitimate child in a pigsty in secrecy. This birth is also not seen as celebratory but a misfortune for the woman. Maxine describes, “Laboring, this woman who had carried her child as a foreign growth that sickened her everyday, expelled it at last” (14). Her child becomes an inhuman growth inside of her due to social pressures and her own personal alienation from her child that she must sacrifice along with herself as she drowns in the well. This story leaves the narrator confused about how to overcome this vulnerable nature of the female body yet also fulfill empowerment over their own reproductive rights as women.
The latter half of both The Woman Warrior and The Bell Jar work to find female role models and regain power over the reproductive system and their own sexuality, solving these problems of hypocrisy rooted in society and their own personal experience. The unity of these seemingly mutually exclusive roles of the female body heal the characters as they find ways to take pride in their female body despite the challenges they may face.
The Woman Warrior combines these two views of the female body with the figures of woman warriors who fight alongside men and but still serve their purpose as women by giving birth in the midst of these military campaigns. The narrator takes liberties in portraying these traditional Chinese tales in order to solve the conflict she portrays in her own body between appearing submissive or powerful. The woman warriors she uses are Fa Mu Lan and Ts’ai Yen who both overcome personal struggles to intersect their desire to fight and to reproduce in their own female body. When Fa Mu Lan becomes pregnant, she alters her armor so that she looks like a big powerful man (39) fighting the stereotype of woman as helpless during childbirth and reversing gender roles as the husband leaves to care for the baby instead of Fa Mu Lan. In the story of Ts’ai Yen she fights with barbarians while having two children by her captor, as well as succeeding as a poetess writing songs that can both be sung in by the barbarians and the Chinese. These stories show the narrator how to take charge of her sexuality and escape the silence surrounding woman’s reproductive rights and stereotypes as well as her internal struggle to combine her mother’s cultural themed stories with American values of success.
It is very important that The Woman Warrior is recognized not as a social commentary of Chinese culture specifically, but a story involving the personal struggle of the narrator with the societal conformities that all woman face in the common metaphors of the female body as a place of satisfaction and suffering. Frank Chin and other critics misconstrue her freedom in interpreting Chinese stories and fail to understand the purpose these alterations serve. Through the explanation presented it is possible to understand the literary merit of this novel and the cohesiveness and importance of the fantastical elements Kingston adds.
The conflict is resolved in The Bell Jar through Esther’s own metaphorical rebirth to escape these stifling double standards. These two factions of the female body are healed as she overcomes her hopelessness and no longer sees herself as the victim of her female body but the victor. She does this by rejecting her mother’s roses she brings to her on her twentieth birthday and instead suggests that these may be for her funeral instead of her “birthday” (203). Esther must first reject her own birth in order to regain control of her body. Her improvement is characterized by many references to rebirth as she describes her reaction to being given hot milk after she is given medicine as, “tasting it luxuriously, the way a baby tastes its mother (200).” During this rebirth she is fitted for birth control, gaining power over her ability to be impregnated and she decides to lose her virginity herself to Irwin as she reflects, “I felt part of a great tradition” (229), even though she begins bleeding uncontrollably as did the woman giving birth, she sees this as overcoming a hurdle on her way to being reborn and is in charge of the situation. And to conclude these images of healing and rebirth at the very last page of the novel Esther herself states, “There ought, I thought, to be a ritual for being born twice- patched, retreaded and approved for the road” (244). Esther’s answer to this struggle to decide between the mutually exclusive roles of the female body is to take charge of her own sexuality and even her own birth so that she is not dependent on anyone else’s views psychologically or within society.
An important difference between the critical essays describing the use of the body in each work separately include their limitation to see the use of the body in purely cultural terms leading to misunderstandings of both books. This interpretation has credibility in its ability to not only parallel and unite the many themes intertwined in these works but to transcend cultural difference to find similarities in the use of the female body and more specifically the reproductive system to embody the vulnerability and empowerment that lie at the turning points of both the author’s works.
References
Boyer, Marilyn. “The Disabled Female Body as a Metaphor for Language in Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar.” Women’s Studies. 33. Fordham University: Taylor and Francis Inc, 2004. 199-223.
Chin, Frank. “Come all ye Asian American writers of real and fake.” An anthology of Chinese American and Japanese American literature. Meridian 1974.
Crafton, Lisa. “’We are going to carve revenge on your back’:Language, Culture, and the Female Body in Kingston’s The Woman Warrior.” Women as Sites of Culture. Burlington: Ashgate, 2002. 51-63.
Kingston, Maxine. The Woman Warrior. New York: Vintage International, 1989.
Lant, Kathleen. “The Big Strip Tease: Femal Bodies and Male Power in the Poetry of Sylvia Plath.” Contemporary Literature. 34. University of Wisconsin Press, 1993. 620-699.
Plath, Sylvia. The Bell Jar. New York: Harper Perennial, 2005.