Writing through the experience of fire: Bachmann and Plath

Sylvia Plath and Ingeborg Bachmann were two outstanding contemporary post-war writers of the same ethnicity, dealing with the place of women in the social order and examining the characteristics of relationships in order to shed light on the self-destructive and suicidal inclinations in the female psyche. In their works, they provide a psychoanalytic perspective by presenting their mental state, sufferings, and the consequences of their emotions and actions. Suffering similar psychological problems and having experienced alike treatments like the electro-shock therapy, the stimuli for their self-destructive behaviors will be analyzed through various psychological theories. Considering the direct reference to the 'anima-animus theory' in Malina and associating Ich's dream cycles with Esther's employment of 'stream of consciousness', Jung and Freud's researches on the structure of the psyche will be a fundamental medium to interpret Malina and The Bell Jar. The sociological dimensions of these novels will also be discussed through Emile Durkheim's theories on suicide within the framework of 'integration' and 'alienation'. This work will make an intensive study of self-destruction and the suicide of women as a consequence of fascist behaviors. It will compare the process of self-destruction in two works of literature, Ingeborg Bachmann's Malina and Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar, examining the female protagonists' personality traits and their identities to reveal common motives for suicide. It will also examine and analyze events and secondary characters leading the narrator protagonists to suicide, using the reflections of Bachmann and Plath to interpret The Bell Jar and Malina. It will concern itself with the psychological dimensions of norms and regulations that function in a fascistic and depressive way, limiting females and depriving them of authenticity and individuation. This study will also attempt to explore the purpose of myths from a sociological perspective, to display how they function and what they intend to accomplish.