Into Research and Literature | Joanna Personal Updated

The Path to Comparative Literature

My interest in comparative literature grew out of the same curiosity that drives my other projects: a need to understand how stories shape identity, power, and possibility. As I reflected more, I realized these power structures don’t only appear in real life. They’re mirrored and often challenged in literature. That realization pulled me into the world of comparative literature, where the boundaries between culture, gender, and narrative become tools for critical insight.

Literature, for me, is more than art—it’s a mirror of social structures and a space where resistance, imagination, and critique take form. Comparative literature allows me to read across cultures and histories, asking how different voices grapple with similar questions of freedom, belonging, and justice.

This perspective came to life in my feminism paper, where I drew on theorists like Gramsci, de Beauvoir, and Butler to explore how patriarchy embeds itself not only in politics and society but in the very texts we read and the language we use. Writing this paper reinforced my belief that scholarship can’t remain isolated in the academy; it has to speak to lived experience. For me, comparative literature is a way of bridging theory and practice, showing how words carry the weight of history while opening doors to new forms of understanding and change.

My independent research project compares The Song of Everlasting Sorrow by Wang Anyi and The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath, two novels that explore the fragmentation, resilience, and constraints of the female experience under vastly different sociopolitical contexts. Through this lens, I examine how literary form, cultural history, and narrative structure reflect and resist systems of gendered control — and what it means, across cultures, to write as a woman within and against dominant ideologies.

Meet the Authors

Wang Any

Song of Everlasting Sorrow

Set in postwar Shanghai, this novel follows Wang Qiyao, a woman whose pursuit of beauty and belonging is shaped by political upheaval and personal isolation. Through her quiet resistance and emotional restraint, the novel explores femininity, memory, and the constraints of urban life.

Sylvia Plath

The Bell Jar

The Bell Jar follows Esther Greenwood, a gifted young woman whose promising career aspirations collapse under the pressures of 1950s gender expectations and her own depression. Struggling with identity and isolation, she experiences a mental breakdown and undergoes psychiatric treatment. The “bell jar” becomes a symbol of her suffocating confinement, as she begins a fragile path toward recovery.

Research Breakdown

1. Theoretical Frameworks

Engages with thinkers such as Gramsci, de Beauvoir, and Butler to examine how patriarchy operates through culture, language, and power structures.

2. Comparative Textual Analysis

Analyzes Wang Anyi’s The Song of Everlasting Sorrow and Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar to reveal how women’s lives are constrained by societal expectations across different contexts.

3. Intersection of Identity and Oppression

Explores how class, gender, and cultural norms intersect to shape female subjectivity and silence women’s voices.

4. Feminism in Literature and Beyond

Argues that literature not only reflects patriarchal structures but also provides space for resistance, making feminist analysis essential to both scholarship and social change.

Abstract

Aesthetic Coercion and the Illusion of Choice: Mid-Century Patriarchy in the East and West

Under the shackles of patriarchy, the fight for women's rights has once again become precarious. From the Taliban's strict dress code for women in Afghanistan to the United States' refusal to grant women abortion rights, it seems that whenever feminism gains vindication, the cycle of patriarchy re-emerges to dominate society. Historically in the U.S., it was not until the latter half of the 20th century that women began entering the workforce, higher education, and athletics in significant numbers, and when Roe v. Wade was codified, affirming women’s abortion rights. Against this backdrop of awakening, Wang Anyi’s The Song of Everlasting Sorrow (1995) and Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar (1963) emerged — texts written during a time when feminism was gaining prominence, yet still fighting for oxygen in a world where women’s subjugation had been normalized. Through their protagonists, these works exposed that women were products of an unequal society that constrains and exploits them as inferior tools.

Wang Anyi’s The Song of Everlasting Sorrow chronicles the life of Wang Qiyao, a working-class Shanghai woman whose beauty leads to her tragedy as she attempts to climb up the social ladder. On the other hand, Plath’s The Bell Jar records six transformative months in the life of Esther Greenwood, a gifted college student who lives under the suffocating social expectations, masked by her seemingly enviable life as a fashion intern. Separated by thirty years and an ocean, these narratives together still serve as mirrors of patriarchal control, revealing how even progressive societies instinctively reinforce primitive oppressions through new means.

The central theme commonly depicted in both works is the adaptability of patriarchy. By adapting to social change, patriarchy continues to restrict women's autonomy, not only through direct oppression but also by reframing oppression as seemingly liberating ideas. The protagonists' resistance in both novels is ultimately crushed by the reconstructed control system, revealing that women's resilience is ultimately futile even in an era of apparent social progress. By combining historical context analysis, cultural difference research, and theoretical frameworks, this paper argues that the so-called gender progress in mid-20th-century America and China was merely rebranding patriarchal oppression through new mechanisms: the commodification of female beauty, hypocritical double standards toward transgender individuals, and false promises of liberation.

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