This paper delves into the connection between female writers and depression, both historically and currently.

A study of the "madwoman" in literature and the effect of patriarchal rhetoric

The purpose of this Mémoire is to examine the way in which female authors who were young women in the 1950's have presented their own views of a gender restrictive era through semi-autobiographical novels. The choice to focus on semi-autobiographies is crucial, because those texts have an inherent power that historical accounts cannot convey: they carry the voice of a female individual who underwent the anxiety triggered by the restrictiveness of the era's expectations, and had to find a way around it. Moreover, by adding fictional elements to their stories, the authors can strengthen or reduce some facets of their stories so as to point to a particular moment of their lives, and the repercussions it had on their present self, offering the reader alternative versions for their life-stories Both primary texts, The Millstone and The Bell Jar, have been chosen because they reflect on double standards and unfair treatments of women during the fifties. They unveil the difficulty to reconcile one's apparently contradictory desires, whether a husband, a family or a career. Both texts also enhance the idea that women have a superior role to play, but that they are deprived of their own possibilities: not by their husbands or men in general, but by the socially enforced cultural values, norms and morals that reduce them to their role as housewife or mother. This Mémoire will also reflect on contemporary media and political movements which contributed to the widely gender-centered organization of society: feminine magazines such as Mademoiselle or Seventeen and their ambiguous advice for young women, and political debates such as the Kitchen Debate of 1959. Then, with the help of Ian McEwan's novel On Chesil Beach, written in 2007 and looking back on the first years of the 1960's, it becomes obvious that constrictive gender roles were not specific to the Cold War era in America. They were indeed constitutive of Western cultural norms based on a patriarchal conception of society.

AbstrAct Sylvia Plath's roman à clef The Bell Jar has largely been read as an autobiographical novel and as the key to understanding her suicide. The novel, however, presents an important political complexity—the contradictions Esther faces in post-WWII, 1950s American society, the unattainable and conflicting ideals of womanhood, and the political treason that betraying them implies, dealt with as madness. Esther Greenwood's descent into madness is no more than the reflection of the sick, hypocritical society she lives in, and an attempt to escape from her obligations as an American woman. However, the institution of psychiatry was closely related to the politics of the time, and acted as a means of control over the population, especially women, through the use of treatments such as ECT and lobotomy. I would like to look at how Cold War politics, gender, and psychiatry interact in The Bell Jar in order to submit American society to the conformism and consumerism that dominated the 1950s.