Of angels and demons: Virginia Woolf s homicidal legacy in Sylvia Plath s: The bell jar.

Abstract

This dissertation is a comparative study of the legacy left behind by the Victorians to the twentieth-century woman writers Virginia Woolf and Sylvia Plath. Firstly, we shall discuss the controlling agencies governing the female body in the Victorian Era and the rise of an ideal, the Angel in the House. Secondly, we expose how Virginia Woolf apprehends and subverts this Victorian ideal, duplicating it into what we call the Demon in the House. At last we encourage the dialogue between Sylvia Plath and Virginia Woolf. Plath seems to write in accordance with Woolf s parameters, creating a literature of death, a literature that is the killer of the Angel. We use the concept of écriture féminine promoted by the French critics Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigaray, and Julia Kristeva, among others, to parallel a feminine space for writing to Woolf s search for a feminine literary tradition. Kristeva s abjection, Foucault s power dynamics between the soul and the body, and Otto Rank s work on the double, shall foster our discussion on the death of the Angel in literature, especially in Sylvia Plath s The Bell Jar (1963)