SOURCE: Martin, Elaine. “Mothers, Madness, and the Middle Class in The Bell Jar and Les Mots pour le dire.” French-American Review 5, no. 1 (spring 1981): 24-47.

In the following essay, Martin explores the mental instabilities of the protagonists in Les Mots pour le dire and Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar, noting the similarities between the two women's mental states and the extreme pressures that influenced their illness.

Human madness and the representation of that madness in literature have existed in Western civilization for centuries, beginning as early as Classical Greece. Not only does madness have a long literary history, but it has also engendered a complex system of motifs that identify and attempt to define and confine this social aberration. Lillian Feder, in the conclusion to her historical survey, Madness in Literature, summarizes some of these motifs: “the identification of the mad with animals by society and by the mad...