“I Want to Be an Earth Mother”: Birth Imagery in the Poetry of Sylvia Plath
- Autores: Clara Contreras-Ameduri
- Localización: Taking stock to look ahead: celebrating forty years of English studies in Spain / coord. por María Ferrández San Miguel, Claus Peter Neumann, 2018, ISBN 978-84-16723-51-5, págs. 51-56
- Idioma: inglés
- Enlaces
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Resumen
The purpose of my research is to identify and analyze the ambivalent representations of motherhood in Sylvia Plath’s poetry in relation to various anthropological and mythological concepts regarding female reproductive power. By observing the author’s allusions to pregnancy and childbirth, it is possible to draw a connection between these processes and the recurrent themes of transformation and regeneration which are present in her texts. The poet blends diverse traditions, tones and styles, blurring the line between a distant legendary past and the mundane elements of everyday life, in such a way that it is intriguing for the reader to determine which view is prominent, or to find out whether the poetic persona eventually embraces the identification with an archetypal view of motherhood. It is precisely this ambiguity which makes Plath’s approach on the matter so innovative. Her poems foreground a polyphonic narrative in which archetypal notions of female biology are reshaped in order to grasp the complexity and diversity of maternal experience, thus offering several intriguing—and, occasionally, contradictory—depictions of a reality that was a source of simultaneous anxiety and fascination for the poet.
