Digital Object Identifierhttps://doi.org/10.66376/criterion.v17.n5.42
This article examines how gendered norms shape the interpretation and management of women’s psychological distress in Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar and Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea. Bringing feminist disability studies into dialogue with feminist and postcolonial criticism, it uses the concept of “femininity as disability” to explore how departures from socially privileged expectations of rationality, emotional stability, and acceptable feminine behaviour may be interpreted as deficiencies. Through a comparative textual analysis, the article investigates Esther Greenwood’s experiences of psychological distress and psychiatric treatment alongside Antoinette Cosway’s vulnerability within colonial hierarchies, marital authority, and imposed identity. While Esther’s encounters with Dr Gordon and Dr Nolan reveal contrasting experiences of psychiatric intervention, Antoinette’s relationship with Rochester exposes how unequal marital power, racial hierarchies, and geographical displacement restrict her autonomy. The article argues that feminist disability studies offers a productive framework for analysing the relationship between gendered expectations, psychological difference, and social power when used without treating disability as a metaphor for oppression. By reading the novels together while preserving their distinct historical and cultural contexts, the study demonstrates how literary representations of women’s distress and suffering reveal the consequential relationship between norms of femininity, interpretive authority, and individual agency.
Adhikary, Indranil. “Against the Tide: Gender, Disability, and Social Control in The Bell Jar and Wide Sargasso Sea.” The Criterion: An International Journal in English, vol. 17, no. 5, Oct. 2026, pp. 756-72, https://doi.org/10.66376/criterion.v17.n5.42.
© 2026 The Author(s). Published by the Research Centre for English Language and Literature (RCELL) under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) licence.
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