Both texts also enhance the idea that women have a superior role to play, but that they are deprived of their own possibilities: not by their husbands or men in general, but by the socially enforced cultural values, norms and morals that reduce them to their role as housewife or mother. ![]() They unveil the difficulty to reconcile one's apparently contradictory desires, whether a husband, a family or a career. Moreover, by adding fictional elements to their stories, the authors can strengthen or reduce some facets of their stories so as to point to a particular moment of their lives, and the repercussions it had on their present self, offering the reader alternative versions for their life-stories Both primary texts, The Millstone and The Bell Jar, have been chosen because they reflect on double standards and unfair treatments of women during the fifties. ![]() The choice to focus on semi-autobiographies is crucial, because those texts have an inherent power that historical accounts cannot convey: they carry the voice of a female individual who underwent the anxiety triggered by the restrictiveness of the era's expectations, and had to find a way around it. The purpose of this Mémoire is to examine the way in which female authors who were young women in the 1950's have presented their own views of a gender restrictive era through semi-autobiographical novels.
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