The Language of a Closed Mind:Absolutist Expression and Depressive Cognition in Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar

Abstract

The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath describes the inner world of depression in great detail using the first-person narrative perspective of Esther Greenwood. Even though there are plenty of critical works written on feminist and autobiographical aspects of the book, little is known about the linguistic representation of cognitive distortions. This paper analyzes the way in which the patterns of depressive thinking are coded in the narrative language of Esther Greenwood using a cognitive stylistic framework. Based on the cognitive theory of depression by Aaron Beck, the psycholinguistic study of absolutist language by Mohammed Al-Mosaiwi and Tom Johnstone, and the mind style theory by Roger Fowler, the study takes a qualitative approach of interpretation to analyze the chosen passages along the psychological arc of the story. The analysis indicates that absolutist expressions like “nothing,” “never,” and “always” are not only stylistic indicators, but linguistic performances of cognitive distortion, especially all-or-nothing thinking. The results prove that the depressive thinking in the novel is not only expressed in the theme, but it is built at the micro-level of language. This paper is relevant to the field of cognitive stylistics in that it demonstrates that literary narration presents an effective place to study depressive cognition without the need to make it clinical determinism.