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With reference to wider critical reading, compare and contrast how…
With reference to wider critical reading, compare and contrast how societal expectations impede the individual agency of the key characters depicted by Sylvia Plath and Virginia Woolf in ‘The Bell Jar’ and ‘Mrs Dalloway’, respectively.
Introduction
Para 1 - Gender expectations
"She had the oddest sense of being herself invisible; unseen; unknown; there being no more marrying, no more having of children now"
"This being Mrs. Dalloway; not even Clarissa any more; this being Mrs. Richard Dalloway"
"She did undoubtedly then feel what men felt. Only for a moment; but it was enough"
"The trouble was, I hated the idea of serving men in any way. I wanted to dictate my own thrilling letters"
"she seemed to have nothing but an enormous spider-fat stomach and two little ugly spindly legs propped in the high stirrups and all the time the baby was being born she never stopped making this unhuman whooping noise"
Para 2 - Impact of limitations on mental health
"on the deck of a ship or at a street cafe in Paris or Bangkok - I would be sitting under the same glass bell jar, stewing in my own sour air"
"The skin of my wrist looked so white and defensless that I couldn't do it"
"I felt myself melting into the shadows like the negative of a person I'd never seen before in my life"
"It was a case of complete breakdown - complete physical and nervous breakdown, with every symptom in an advanced stage"
"She had a perpetual sense as she watched the taxi cabs, of being out, out, far out to sea and alone; she always had the feeling that it was very, very dangerous to live even one day"
"She felt somehow very like him - the young man who had killed himself. She felt glad that he had done it; thrown it away. The clock was striking"
Para 3 - Relationships and friendships, homosexuality
"Sally stopped; picked a flower; kissed her on the lips. The whole world might have turned upside down!"
"Peter Walsh had been in love with Clarissa; that he would go back directly after lunch and find Clarissa; that he would tell her, in so many words, that he loved her"
"All I'd heard about, really, was how fine and clean Buddy was and how he was the kind of person a girl should stay fine and clean for"
"I saw the world divided into people who had slept with somebody and people who hadn't, and this seemed the only really significant difference between one person and another. I thought a spectacular change would come over me the day I crossed the boundary line"
"But this question of love (she thought putting her coat away), this falling in love with women. Take Sally Seton; her relationship in the old days with Sally Seton. Had not that after all, been love?"
Para 4 - Key characters when younger, how society limits hopes and dreams
"I was supposed to be having the time of my life"
"The one thing I was good at was winning scholarships and prizes, and that era was coming to an end"
"I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest"
"She would go 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"
"your inferiority; how poor she was; how rich you were; how she lived in a slum without a cushion or a bed or a rug or whatever it might be, all her soul rusted with that grievance sticking in it, her dismissal from school during the War"
"It was Sally Seton - the last person in the world one would have expected to marry a rich man and live in a large house near Manchester, the wild, the daring, the romantic Sally!"
"She was Clarissa's greatest friend, always about the place, totally unlike her, an attractive creature, handsome, dark, with the reputation in those days of great daring and he used to give her cigars, which she smoked in her bedroom"
Conclusion