A Feminist Reading of Literary Safe Spaces in Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar (1963) and Matt Haig’s The Midnight Library (2020)

Abstract

There is no set way to handle grief. The grief of losing a loved one, alive or dead, of dealing with heartbreak, of being in a world that does not stop when life falls apart. Grief can affect a person mentally, physically, and emotionally, and the universality of grief allows the individual to feel as part of a whole, instead of alone in their experience.

Matt Haig’s The Midnight Library (2020) is a fictional novel set in a world with a fantastical element. After Nora, the female main character, attempts suicide, she is transported into a library in between life and death. Nora is not yet dead, but not alive either. In this library, she has the opportunity to live out all sorts of choices that she did not take in her life. In addition, Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar (1963), will be read in adjacent. The female protagonist, Esther Greenwood, goes on an internship in New York City. While there, Esther’s mental health declines rapidly, and she experiences a mental breakdown due to anxiety and depression.

The novels, The Midnight Library and The Bell Jar, will be approached through the feminist lens of Virginia Woolf’s essay A Room of One’s Own (1928), in which Woolf argues that for women to write and produce work, they must be financially independent as well as have “a room of their own,” a private space for themselves to work in.

I argue that spaces, external, internal, imagined, or real, and how these “rooms” that are equipped for reading and writing, specifically libraries, provide women with a place to grieve and process their losses. In addition, the internal and external pressures and expectations that are placed on women that lead to their entrapment in a predisposed societal mold, while also discovering how their regrets shape their lives. I explore the relationship between grief and seeking refuge in safe spaces, and what it means to create their own refuge in imagined or real spaces.