The Splitting Maternal Body in the Poems of Sylvia Plath

Abstract

Sylvia Plath's poems on motherhood raise essential questions about the traditional psychoanalytic notion of motherhood. In Freudian psychoanalysis, motherhood is regarded as a part of normal female development and as an intrinsic part of female sexuality. While psychoanalysis regards motherhood as natural to women, Plath questions the centrality of motherhood in her poetry.Rather than focusing on motherly tenderness, her poetry about motherhood shows a strong ambivalence toward the mother-child relationship. Julia Kristeva has suggested that the experiences of pregnancy, birth, and lactation break down the physical and psychic boundaries between mother and child. For Kristeva, motherhood disallows discrete categorization between self (mother) and other (child). In particular, Kristeva notes the violent and disruptive aspects of the maternal body; she stresses that the pregnant maternal body represents an incarnation of the split subject. Plaths description of motherhood as a crisis in female identity is strikingly similar to Kristevas analysis of motherhood. She shows that the experience of motherhood produces complex ambivalence in women. Plath's sequence of poems, "Poem for a Birthday," and other poems on motherhood dramatize the horrifying blurring of the boundary between mother and child. For the mother-speaker in her poetry, the child appears as a devouring, monstrous, and horrifying figure. Plath vividly describes the speaker's potent maternal suffering as a catastrophe of identity. Plath thus shedsnew light on the mother-daughter relationship by revealing the ambivalent nature of motherhood.