Comparing Female Sexuality in Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar and Alice Mun

Contrasting Female Sexuality in Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar and Alice Munro’s Lives of Girls and Women In Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar and Alice Munro’s Lives of Girls and Women, Esther and Del attempt to assume responsibility for their sexuality and their sexual lives. These two female heroes endeavor to increase sexual certainty by unobtrusively dismissing the cultural pictures of ladies. They can allure men and pilot their own sexual lives. These ladies are likewise ready to overlook the mainstream views about marriage and parenthood, hence liberating them from the conventional, prohibitive female sexual jobs. By dismissing the mainstream ideas of womanhood, sexuality, and marriage, Esther and Del become the courtesans of their sexuality and sexual lives. Female sexuality is regularly compared with physical excellence. In The Bell Jar, the hero Esther works for a â€Å"intellectual† design magazine The Ladies’ Day and gets rewards, for example, apparel and make-up packs. These bogus enhancers of female sexuality just cause her to feel â€Å"very empty† (Plath, 3). To fill the unfilled void in her sexual prosperity, Esther stows away these excellence items and secretly begrudges the â€Å"stern strong Russian young lady with no make-up† at the U.N. (78). Also, Esther respects Jay Cee, the supervisor who has cerebrums so that â€Å"her plug-revolting looks didn’t appear to matter†(6). Esther sees that once a lady is freed of her make-up, she may seem manly, yet her quality will move towards helpful gifts, for example, concurrent understanding, which upgrades her actual female worth. To be sure, Esther is offended when she peruses a magazine article which demands: â€Å"The kid thinks about the universe, its massiveness and riddle; the young lady thinks, ‘I must wash my hair’†(177). Esther doesn't give a false representation of... ...g her fruitful authority over her sexuality. As Del comments in Lives of Girls and Women, â€Å"There is a change coming I think in the lives of young ladies and ladies. Truly. Be that as it may, it is dependent upon us to make it come† (Munro, 173). Del and Esther are ladies who answer this call to repossess their sexuality and recover their sexual lives. They step up to the plate and stray from the standard meaning of womanliness, and they figure out how to make men move to their tune in the round of sex. Uninterested in the customary residential jobs of ladies, Del and Esther dismiss the foundation of marriage and reshape their mentalities towards parenthood. The change isn't simply coming; it has just flourished in the minds of these two ladies. WORKS CITED Munro, Alice. Lives of Girls and Women. London: Penguin Books, 1982. Plath, Sylvia. The Bell Jar. London: Faber and Faber, 1966.