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‘Cow-heavy and floral in my Victorian nightgown’: maternity and transatlanticism in Sylvia Plath’s poetry and fiction

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Journal of Transatlantic Studies Aims and scope

Abstract

This paper examines a transatlantic identity in the poetry and fiction of Sylvia Plath through the lens of her experiences of pregnancy and childbirth in England. Although the influence that her transatlantic movements had on her writing has attracted scholarly attention in the past 20 years, the cross-cultural dimensions of her poetic representation of maternity and motherhood have been largely ignored. Through a close reading of ‘You’re’, ‘A Life’, ‘Morning Song’, ‘Candles’, and sections of The Bell Jar, I will argue that the depiction of maternal experiences is crucial to understand Plath’s problematisation of the issue of identity, and especially to understand it in terms of post-war nationalist discourse rooted in the fear of the contaminated ‘other’. In those works written during and after her first pregnancy in London, the female and maternal subjects are frequently displaced from their native land and situated on boundaries between two different societies and cultures. Focusing on the dual (or multiple) view of society and culture surrounding maternity that was fostered through her transatlantic movements, this paper will illuminate how Plath redefines motherhood as a ground on which one’s national identity and the matter of belonging are to be radically questioned.

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Notes

  1. Tracy Brain, The Other Sylvia Plath (Harlow: Longman, 2001), 48.

  2. Jahan Ramazani, A Transnational Poetics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 35.

  3. Ramazani, A Transnational Poetics, 38.

  4. Paul Giles, ‘Double Exposure: Sylvia Plath and the Aesthetics of Transnationalism’, Symbiosis 5, no. 2 (2001): 110.

  5. Brain, The Other Sylvia Plath, 48, 59.

  6. Ibid., 75.

  7. Ibid., 54.

  8. Tim Kendall, Sylvia Plath: A Critical Study (London: Faber and Faber, 2001), 62.

  9. As Deborah Nelson argues, Plath was by no means a stranger to Cold War domestic ideology and strongly aware of ‘its asymmetrical effects on women’s lives’. Deborah Nelson, ‘Plath, History and Politics’ in The Cambridge Companion to Sylvia Plath, ed. Jo Gill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 29. For Plath’s awareness of the gendered ideology linking women to the domestic, see for example Carole Ferrier, ‘The Beekeeper’s Apprentice’ in Sylvia Plath: New Views on the Poetry, ed. Gary Lane (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979), 215; Susan R Van Dyne, Revising Life: Sylvia Plath’s Ariel Poems (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993) 129–30.

  10. Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier (London: Vintage, 2010), 36.

  11. Luce Irigaray, Je, Tu, Nous: Toward a Culture of Difference, trans. Alison Martin (London: Routledge, 2007), 42.

  12. Julia Kristeva, The Kristeva Reader, ed. Toril Moi (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), 297.

  13. Jacqueline Rose, The Haunting of Sylvia Plath (London: Virago, 1991), 49, 56.

  14. Unless indicated otherwise, all references to Plath’s poems are to Sylvia Plath, The Collected Poems, ed. Ted Hughes (New York: Harper Collins Publishers, 2008), and the line numbers of each poem are given parenthetically.

  15. Bertram Wyatt-Brown recollects how Americans were seen as ‘wayward colonists with regrettable accents and pushy manners’ in England in the 1950s. Bertram Wyatt-Brown, ‘Ted, Sylvia, and St. Botolph’s: A Cambridge Recollection’, Southern Review 40, no. 2 (2004): 352, ProQuest. For Plath’s colonial anxieties, see Heather Clark, The Grief of Influence: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 88–109.

  16. Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath, ed. Karen V. Kukil (New York: Anchor Books, 2000), 339.

  17. Lewis Carroll, The Annotated Alice: The Definitive Edition, ed. Martin Gardner (New York: W. W. Norton, 2000), 27.

  18. Peter Orr, The Poet Speaks: Interviews with Contemporary Poets (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1966), 168.

  19. J. D. O’Hara, ‘Plath’s Comedy’ in Sylvia Plath: New Views on the Poetry, ed. Gary Lane (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979), 77.

  20. John Donne, ‘The Sunne Rising’, in Elegies, and The Songs and Sonnets, ed. Helen Gardner (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965), 72–73.

  21. See, for example, Nira Yuval-Davis and Floya Anthias, eds., Women-Nation-State (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1989), 8–9; Craig Calhoun, Nationalism (Buckingham: Open University Press, 1997), 114.

  22. Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (New York: Basic Books, 1988), 136–37.

  23. Although Ted Hughes speculates that Plath was working on The Bell Jar from February to May 1961, the novel’s date of origin is not clearly established. Ted Hughes, Letters of Ted Hughes, ed. Christopher Reid (London: Faber and Faber, 2007), 536. For a detailed commentary on discrepancies between scholars’ estimations, see Jo Gill, The Cambridge Introduction to Sylvia Plath (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 75.

  24. Plath, The Unabridged Journals, 374.

  25. Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar (London: Faber and Faber, 1963), 67–68.

  26. See Emily Martin, The Woman in the Body: A Cultural Analysis of Reproduction (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1989), Chapter 4.

  27. Luke Ferretter, ‘“Just Like the Sort of Drug a Man Would Invent”: The Bell Jar and the Feminist Critique of Women’s Health Care’, Plath Profiles 1 (2008): 136,

    https://scholarworks.iu.edu/journals/index.php/plath/article/view/4776/4409.

  28. Plath, The Bell Jar, 67.

  29. May, Homeward Bound, 139.

  30. Plath, The Bell Jar, 234.

  31. For pronatalist injunctions on white women and antinatalism concerning the fertility of women of colour among public policies and cultural authorities, see for example Rickie Solinger, ‘Reproduction, Birth Control, and Motherhood in the United States’ in The Oxford Handbook of American Women’s and Gender History, ed. Ellen Hartigan-O’Conner and Lisa G. Materson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 252.

  32. Plath, The Bell Jar, 68.

  33. Plath does not make it clear whether the mental patient is the same Mrs Tomolillo whom we encountered in Chapter 6 or not. It can be the case that here Esther uses the name which she felt to be strange earlier in this novel again for any other woman who seems to her to be alien, and then this simplification of the alien other can be read as exemplifying prejudice. It is also worth noting that Plath uses the name Tomolillo in her short stories, including “The Daughters of Blossom Street’ and ‘The Fifteen-Dollar Eagle’, as a figure of ridicule. See Rose, The Haunting, 203.

  34. Plath, The Bell Jar, 189.

  35. Ibid., 186–87.

  36. Ibid., 186, 189.

  37. This is based on the jarred unborn infants arranged in chronological order which Plath could inspect during the 1952 Boston Lying-In hospital tour. For biographical accounts of this visit, see Edward Butscher, Sylvia Plath: Method and Madness (Tucson: Schaffner Press, 2003) 62; Ronald Hayman, The Death and Life of Sylvia Plath (London: Heinemann, 1991), 67.

  38. Plath, The Bell Jar, 65, 93.

  39. Ibid., 98.

  40. Linda Wagner-Martin, Sylvia Plath: A Literary Life (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 63.

  41. For Plath’s concern with those agents, see Luke Ferretter, 126–27, 135–37; Robin Peel, Writing Back: Sylvia Plath and Cold War Politics (London: Associated University Press, 2002), 69.

  42. Gill, The Cambridge Companion, 100.

  43. Ibid.

  44. Julia Kristeva, Nations Without Nationalism, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 34.

  45. Ibid., 35.

  46. According to Ann Oakley, the proportion of deliveries in hospital was 64.7 per cent in 1960 Britain. Ann Oakley, The Captured Womb: A History of the Medical Care of Pregnant Women (Oxford: Blackwell, 1984), 215. For the detailed information about maternal care in England in the mid twentieth century, see ibid., 132–151.

  47. Sylvia Plath, The Letters of Sylvia Plath Volume II: 1956–1963, ed. Peter K. Steinberg and Karen V. Kukil (London: Faber and Faber, 2018), 451.

  48. Ibid., 448, 451.

  49. Jo Gill, ‘“Exaggerated American”: Ted Hughes’s Birthday Letters’, Journal of Transatlantic Studies 2, no. 2 (2004): 181, https://doi.org/10.1080/14794010408656833.

  50. ‘A Life’ [two typescripts], Box 10, Folder 137, Sylvia Plath Collection, Mortimer Rare Book Room, Smith College, Northampton MA.; ‘A Life’ [typescript], Plath mss., Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana.

  51. Christina Britzolakis, Sylvia Plath and the Theatre of Mourning (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 52.

  52. Eileen Aird, ‘“Poem for a Birthday” to Three Women: Development in the Poetry of Sylvia Plath’ in Sylvia Plath: The Critical Heritage, ed. Linda W. Wagner (London: Routledge, 1988), 201.

  53. Britzolakis, Theatre of Mourning, 53.

  54. Plath, The Bell Jar, 69.

  55. Plath, The Letters Volume II, 451.

  56. Plath, The Letters Volume II, 408, 412, 430. Her copy of Read’s Childbirth Without Fear, the third edition published by Heinemann in 1959, is housed in the library of Sylvia Plath at Smith College, Northampton MA.

  57. For example, Plath marked a sentence where Read begins to talk about motherhood as ‘a holy estate’ (6) with a bold vertical line and wrote an exclamation mark beside his claim that every girl finally falls in love upon and marries ‘one semi-divine individual’, no matter how ‘blissfully ignorant’ she is of ‘the fact that she is but an instrument in the design of Nature’ (7).

  58. Plath, The Letters Volume II, 519.

  59. Tess Cosslett, Women Writing Childbirth: Modern Discoveries of Motherhood (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994), 15.

  60. Langdon Hammer, ‘Plath’s Lives’, Representations 75, no. 1 (2001): 79, https://doi.org/10.1525/rep.2001.75.1.61.

  61. Tracy Brain, ‘Unstable Manuscripts’ in The Unraveling Archive: Essays on Sylvia Plath, ed. Anita Helle (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007), 21.

  62. Ibid.

  63. ‘Candles’ [two typescripts], Box 7, Folder 43, Sylvia Plath Collection, Mortimer Rare Book Room, Smith College, Northampton MA.; ‘Candles’ [typescript], Plath mss., Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana.

  64. Plath, The Letters Volume II, 531.

  65. Gill, The Cambridge Introduction, 118.

  66. Brain, The Other Sylvia Plath, 61.

  67. Sylvia Plath, The Letters of Sylvia Plath Volume I: 1940–1956, ed. Peter K Steinberg and Karen Kukil, (London: Faber and Faber, 2017), 903.

  68. Plath, The Letters Volume II, 739.

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Acknowledgements

I wish to thank my anonymous reviewers for their helpful feedback. I am also grateful to my supervisors Professor Jo Gill and Professor Jana Funke for their invaluable comments and suggestions on the earlier versions of this article. My research in the Sylvia Plath Collection at Smith College was enabled by the British Association for American Studies and was greatly aided by generous help from Karen V. Kukil, Associate Curator of Special Collections at Smith College, to both of whom I express my sincere gratitude. References to and quotations from documents in the Sylvia Plath Collections are with permissions of the Young Library, Smith College and the Lilly Library, Indiana University, and I thank these organisations for their permissions.

Funding

This research was funded by the Japan Student Services Organization (JASSO). It was also benefited from a British Association for American Studies (BAAS) Postgraduate Short Term Travel Award (the Malcolm Bradbury Award), which enabled me to make visits to the Sylvia Plath archives at Smith College and Indiana University.

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  1. Department of English, University of Exeter, Exeter, UK

    Shihoko Inoue

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Shihoko Inoue is a PhD candidate at the University of Exeter. Her research focuses on the shifting borders and boundaries of the body and poetic subjectivity in the Cold War period.

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Correspondence to Shihoko Inoue.

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Inoue, S. ‘Cow-heavy and floral in my Victorian nightgown’: maternity and transatlanticism in Sylvia Plath’s poetry and fiction. J Transatl Stud 19, 350–371 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1057/s42738-021-00077-y

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