Homes are normally thought of as places filled with love, where families grow and care for one another. Yet, for young girls and women the home is a place where they learn their limitations in society. Females learn their appropriate place in the outside world by their time spent in the home. In all of the books we read this semester, we saw roles for females become confined as they drew closer to the gates of womanhood. As Thomas Foster states in his novel, Transformations of Domesticity in Modern Women’s Writing: Homelessness at Home,
“the ideology of separate spheres that characterizes most feminist work on the nineteenth century involved the severing of the home from the capitalist marketplace and the privatization of the middle class …show more content…
This idea of home being a way of confining and defining women provides an interesting frame of analysis for each of these novels. I have excluded Flight and March, not because I do not think they have relevant examples for this topic or that they were written by male identified authors, but because of that fact that those books do not center on the female perspective. I will be looking at each novel on a spectrum of how possessive the home is and how much it affects the main female character. This bibliographic essay will start from the most constricting home, which is from Beloved, and continue on to less and less defining homes, such the home in The House on Mango Street.
I am starting with Beloved because this book has the most blatant examples of how home can define a woman, as well as some of the most violent and physical forms of domination by the home. Sethe is haunted by her home and the event that have occurred within, the death of Baby Suggs, the abandonment by her sons, and the murder of her child. …show more content…
First I will be looking at The Bell Jar because we are able to see where Esther came from and see how she did not change from what her mother did. In The Bell Jar, we see how much home and the woman’s sphere play a large factor for Esther. Her home is not haunted or plagued by mistrust because she has yet to build a home, she still lives with her family, but the daunting expectation of building a home lays heavily on Esther. This idea of settling down is the root cause of Esther’s feelings of alienation from the world and her friends. Her mother’s home is especially important to her, it defines what she expects true womanhood to be, and she despises it. When she is at her mother’s home before she is sent to the asylum, she tries to kill herself several times. She gets angry with herself and states, “I would simply have to ambush it with whatever sense I had left, or it would trap me in its stupid cage for fifty years without any sense at all” (Plath 159), she is commenting on the entrapment into the domestic sphere. That she would have to give up her individuality for a life of tending a home, husband, and children. Esther talks often about the way the home was built, to fit her grandmother’s needs and wants. Yet, for Esther there does not seem to be a house out there, nor one that could be built to suit her. In Sethe’s
“the ideology of separate spheres that characterizes most feminist work on the nineteenth century involved the severing of the home from the capitalist marketplace and the privatization of the middle class …show more content…
This idea of home being a way of confining and defining women provides an interesting frame of analysis for each of these novels. I have excluded Flight and March, not because I do not think they have relevant examples for this topic or that they were written by male identified authors, but because of that fact that those books do not center on the female perspective. I will be looking at each novel on a spectrum of how possessive the home is and how much it affects the main female character. This bibliographic essay will start from the most constricting home, which is from Beloved, and continue on to less and less defining homes, such the home in The House on Mango Street.
I am starting with Beloved because this book has the most blatant examples of how home can define a woman, as well as some of the most violent and physical forms of domination by the home. Sethe is haunted by her home and the event that have occurred within, the death of Baby Suggs, the abandonment by her sons, and the murder of her child. …show more content…
First I will be looking at The Bell Jar because we are able to see where Esther came from and see how she did not change from what her mother did. In The Bell Jar, we see how much home and the woman’s sphere play a large factor for Esther. Her home is not haunted or plagued by mistrust because she has yet to build a home, she still lives with her family, but the daunting expectation of building a home lays heavily on Esther. This idea of settling down is the root cause of Esther’s feelings of alienation from the world and her friends. Her mother’s home is especially important to her, it defines what she expects true womanhood to be, and she despises it. When she is at her mother’s home before she is sent to the asylum, she tries to kill herself several times. She gets angry with herself and states, “I would simply have to ambush it with whatever sense I had left, or it would trap me in its stupid cage for fifty years without any sense at all” (Plath 159), she is commenting on the entrapment into the domestic sphere. That she would have to give up her individuality for a life of tending a home, husband, and children. Esther talks often about the way the home was built, to fit her grandmother’s needs and wants. Yet, for Esther there does not seem to be a house out there, nor one that could be built to suit her. In Sethe’s