Mental Illness in the American Novel: A Study of Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar and Otessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation.

Abstract

Our contemporary society is beginning to take seriously the mental problems and illnesses that affect too many people. Therefore, madness, depression, and anxiety, among others, are being considered openly by the public opinion, even by politicians. Literature has a long tradition in the representation of these topics although in the past, sometimes it dealt with mental disorders in an indirect way, as was the case, far instance, with women's anxieties, fears or postnatal depressions and the use of the trope of the ghost that was used by writers to refer to these states and conditions. The purpose of this research is to study two seminal fictions that have dealt with mental illnesses: Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar (1963) and Otessa Moshfegh's My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018). The analysis will cover two main objectives. The first one is to identify how these novels feature mental disorder and illustrate the circumstances that led the protagonists to suffer from it. In this sense, we shall take into account the fact that they are young women so that a gender perspective will be applied. The second main objective is to assess the social and cultural projection of these two works, that have become classics in the representation in literature of the topic of mental illness.