Misunderstood Motherhood: The Poetry of Sylvia Plath and Sharon Olds

Picasso’s La Vie demonstrates the split characterization of the western woman. On the left, a woman clings in the nude to her lover’s arms. On the right, a mother, fully clothed, holds her child in her arms. The sexually viable woman exists in opposition to the mother. The mother represents a Holy Virgin-type figure and is almost deified but not viewed as a partner of the man. She loses a certain level of personhood through her maternity. This schism of the female identity still haunts western culture today.

Some feminists believe sexual liberation through the limitation of reproduction will answer the problem of society’s prescriptive view of mothers. However, this only eliminates motherhood, not society’s mistaken view. A more traditional or religiously fundamentalist perspective still upholds that the female identity should come primarily from her role as a mother. A problem emerges for women who desire to have children but do not wish to abandon their careers, the arts, or their sexual identities for a purely domestic. As they attempt to merge the bifurcated person of the contemporary woman into one whole, these mothers meet opposition from feminists and fundamentalists alike. The poets Sylvia Plath and Sharon Olds both struggle with this schism of the maternal person and push towards a vision of integrity. For Plath, her major opponent is the standard of 1950s domesticity which would have her abandon art, education, and public life in favor of an exclusively child-oriented existence. For Olds, the problem is how to incorporate familial ideas into a literary landscape that largely opposed domestic themes. Although neither poet discovers a definitive answer to the question of writing and childbearing, both engage significantly with their fraught status as mother and poet through their writing. Sylvia Plath and Sharon Olds both exemplify the crisis of contemporary motherhood in their poems and reject intensive mothering while upholding their roles as mothers. Their poetry is a guiding light for contemporary women who desire integrity: a liberation from destructive patriarchal norms without de facto sterilization, an ability to enjoy the opportunities of modernity while embracing their maternal spirit and personality as both woman and mother.

Generally, contemporary feminists view mothers as their opponents, not their allies, since they have submitted to the supposedly patriarchal institution of motherhood. Though it is a distinct and significant aspect of the feminine identity, motherhood has been largely ignored by most Women’s Studies programs. Samira Kawash, a program director for a Ph.D. program in women’s studies, noted that in the early 2000s she never saw a graduate school application that proposed studying motherhood. This void of interest in a uniquely female aspect of life speaks to the fear of anything traditional that dominates academic culture today. Due to a false opposition constructed between those who advocate for women and those who raise them, this highly relevant area of study has not received the attention it deserves from scholars.

In the late 1990s, Sharon Hays coined the term “intensive mothering” to describe the behavior of most middle-class mothers. Hays describes intensive mothering as “one’s ‘natural’ love for the ‘inherently’ sacred child necessarily leads one to engage in child-centered, expert-guided, emotionally absorbing, labor-intensive, and financially expensive child-rearing.” Hays observes that opposite to most assumptions, women with high-paying careers are more likely to engage in intensive mothering behaviors. Ultimately, Hays concludes that intensive mothering “suggests that all the troubles of the world can be solved by the individual efforts of superhuman women. Clearly, this places a tremendous and undue burden on women, and one that becomes increasingly difficult to maintain” as mothers enter the workforce. Hays’ key insight is that intensive mothering places an impossible burden on mothers who must devote their whole lives to the service of their children while often simultaneously working a full-time job. Even without the complicating issue of work, utter devotion to the child undermines the woman’s role as wife, community member, and individual. Thus, the intensive mothering model sets goals that inherently fragment the personhood of a mother in the name of familial love.

Some women refuse to participate in intensive mothering, but many who reject intensive mothering also reject motherhood itself because they unfortunately conflate motherhood with intensive mothering. Social scientist Maura Kelly reflects this idea in her survey of recent research on voluntary childlessness. According to Kelly, women who are voluntarily childless are “women of childbearing age who are fertile and state that they do not intend to have children, women of childbearing age who have chosen sterilization, or women past childbearing age who were fertile but chose not to have children.” Further, voluntarily childless women have increased over the past few decades, especially among upper-class white women, and Kelly concludes the trend will only continue. Within the research Kelly surveys she notices a strain of voluntarily childless women who believe “voluntary childlessness represents an opportunity for women to opt out of a central component of women’s oppression.” This “women’s oppression” that voluntary childlessness is seen as means to end is motherhood. The cultural syncretism between the ideals of intensive mothering with motherhood itself is a conflagration that harms women on a fundamental level. According to the ideas of intensive mothering, the woman as a lover and societal participant must be cast aside in the advent of a child or else risk ruining the child by neglect. As demonstrated in Picasso’s La Vie, society often imagines woman, the sexual being, and woman, the mother, to be split into incompatible identities. Naturally, contemporary women do not desire to sacrifice their rich identities in pursuit of a maternal ideal that they consider bankrupt of meaning. Therefore, more and more women choose voluntary childlessness rather than devote themselves to intensive mothering. However, the poetry of Plath and Olds offer an alternative idea about the meaning of mothering to that upheld by the intensive mother or the voluntarily childless.

Janice Raymond opposes any schism of the female identity. She worries about the growing use of the term androgyny to represent a feminist ideal. Although Raymond represents a radical rejection of an idea like intensive mothering, she expresses concern about the possibility of alienating traditional expressions of femininity like motherhood from the feminist movement. Her article written in 1975 for Quest: Feminist Quarterly is remarkably prescient. As she states in her article, “In order for androgyny to be attained in the woman, she must first make herself male.” Mothers often feel alienated from the feminist movement, because they have not accepted an androgynous or frankly masculine lifestyle that involves sex without pregnancy. As an alternative to the problematic idea of androgyny, Raymond offers the idea of integrity. Integrity is defined primarily in the following way: “The condition of having no part or element taken away or wanting.” Although this language and mindset did not prevent androgyny from becoming a feminist ideal, it does offer some insight into what Plath and Olds strive for in their poems. They attempt to maintain a wholeness of personhood that rarely exists within the dialogue about motherhood — a dialogue that is deeply important for contemporary issues regarding the family, motherhood, and female identity. Both poets resist the urge to define themselves only in terms of their family or to deny the significance of their role as mothers in their lives.

Plath and Olds on Motherhood

Plath and Olds write extensively in their poetry about their lives as mothers but do not fit within the tradition of sentimental, intensive mothers. Thus, both poets are difficult for critics to categorize in a broader ideological sense. In a 2016 interview with CBC, Olds discussed her situation as a poet of the family and said, “If I had the choice of being a great writer and a not-so-good mother, or a great mother and a medium-good writer, I would choose the latter.” Despite Olds’ status as a Pulitzer Prize winner, she still values her identity as a mother more than her success as a writer. She expresses her personal commitment to her children and does not suggest that motherhood is a patriarchal tradition that oppresses her. Instead, she experienced discrimination for her decision to write about maternal themes. In an interview for the podcast On Being, Olds recalls a rejection letter she received saying “If you wish to write about your children, may we suggest The Ladies’ Home Journal? We are a literary magazine.” Olds comments, “It wasn’t that atypical back in the ’70s.”  This rude editorial comment demonstrates a disinterest in the lives of women with children that persists even today. The surprise when reading Olds is her voraciously contemporary poetic style coupled with discussions of the domestic. In Olds’ complex identity of poet and mother, she demonstrates the principle of integrity, abandoning neither procreation nor craft.

Plath also discusses motherhood extensively, though she does not do so with the same candor as Olds. Not only is Plath’s poetic style far more oblique than Olds’, but she also expresses more negativity about the confining nature of her role in society.[1] Considering the rigid nature of 1950s domestic life, Plath’s reaction is not surprising. However, her negativity often leads scholars to conclude that she was not a devoted mother or would have preferred to have been childless. Scholar Susan R. Van Dyne explains Plath’s many writings that demonstrate a positive opinion about motherhood: “Plath had internalized the 1950s cultural convention that womanhood is proven by motherhood.” Due to the negative imagery in some of Plath’s motherhood poems, scholars like Van Dyne conclude that if Plath lived today, she would have been freer to live her true life as an artist, unburdened by the weight of motherhood. Whatever Plath might have been, however, is unknowable. The only available information is what Plath thought while she lived. Thus, Plath’s opinion about motherhood should not be oversimplified because of the possible implications of her cultural moment. She neither affirms a vision of childlessness nor the ideology of intensive mothering.

One of the strongest pieces of evidence that Plath did not desire to be a mother comes from her a fragment of her diary written when she was seventeen. Plath wrote, “Spare me from cooking three meals a day—spare me from the relentless cage of routine and rote. I want to be free.” Ikram Hili references this letter as evidence of Plath’s “distrust of the domestic roles assigned to women.” Hili overstates the significance of this diary entry in establishing Plath’s view of the domestic, especially since she states the direct opposite in her later letters.[2] Although Plath’s journals do reveal her as an unconventional young woman, who finds fault with her society’s limited view of the lives of women, this entry does prove that a more mature Plath found maternal life oppressive. However, this diary entry is significant because it evidences that a seventeen-year-old Plath considered voluntary childlessness as a reaction to the stifling standards prescribed by the ideal of intensive mothering. The tension between the feminist idea that freedom is childlessness and the traditional ideal characterized by intensive mothering exists even in Plath’s earliest writing. She should not be read as an apologist for either camp, but someone very much caught between unlivable extremes.

Plath’s Criticism of Domestic Life

Like this early journal entry, some of Plath’s poetry can appear at first glance to be an attack on motherhood. Yet, upon further consideration, such poetry is better understood as a critique of 1950s domestic standards. Her willingness to shock readers with sharp statements and express intense emotions does not fit into the image of the happy mother painted on television. When reading a poem such as “Lesbos” for the first time, it is easy to assume that the negativity expressed by a mother in a kitchen with her child means that the poet resents her role as mother and wife. However, the negative language of the poem centers around an altercation between two mothers not between mother and child. Within the poem, Plath portrays with shocking complexity a mother’s defense of her child against the other woman’s senseless attack. The battle begins over a statement by the other mother, not the speaker, that the speaker should drown her daughter. The other woman also says of the child, “She’ll cut her throat at ten if she’s mad at two.” Thus the “viciousness in the kitchen” commences over an insult to the speaker’s child. Critic Jeannine Dobbs suggests that “Lesbos” occurs within a broader schematic within Plaths’ work where the kitchen is emblematic of the patriarchically imposed domestic space. Dobbs is correct to observe that a strand of Plath’s writing includes a critique of 1950s domestic life. However, as much as the poem may criticize domestic entrapment, it upholds the significance of maternal love.

“Lesbos” is a poem that expresses a critique of 1950s domestic culture and a protective mother-child relationship. Plath includes an unhappy portrayal of the speaker’s child who is having a tantrum on the floor, as a “little unstrung puppet” and “schizophrenic.” Some readers would understandably find the speaker’s description of the child troubling. The other woman insults the speaker’s child and incidentally unleashes the rage of the mother at an affront to her child. In a nasty insult, the speaker says, “you who have blown your tubes like a bad radio / clear of voices and history, the staticky / noise of the new.” This vehement insult mocks the other woman for her sterility. Due to the other woman’s absence of fallopian tubes, which are missing by choice or necessity, the speaker regards her as empty. Her purpose, like the purpose of the broken radio, cannot be fulfilled. With no “voices and history,” the woman lost her ancestral power to create. Now she has only the new, or sterilized, instead of a fertile past. With this passage in mind, it is difficult to imagine Plath possessed twenty-first century ideas about motherhood. Perhaps she is robustly “ahead of her time,” and this whole poem is a satire about unenlightened women, but there are no textual indications of this, nor would it match the bulk of Plath’s work. The speaker’s chosen insult portrays a value system that esteems fertility and child-rearing. Unlike contemporary Americans who view fertility and motherhood as optional or inconvenient, the speaker values her status as a fertile woman and mother.

At the same time, Plath and the speaker do not romanticize domestic life to fit within a certain cookie-cutter mold demonstrated on television shows like “Leave it to Beaver.” Many uncomfortable aspects of life make it onto the page in “Lesbos,” such as the other woman’s husband’s impotence, the diminished beauty of the other woman, and the other woman’s exhaustion. Motherhood and domestic life include misery from this speaker’s perspective.  Although motherhood is complex to the speaker, she does not target domestic standards or even men with her viciousness. The speaker reserves her bile for the other woman — the woman who suggested that the speaker should drown her own daughter. Read within this interpretive frame, the speaker’s viciousness appears an unfortunate side effect of her intense motherlove.

Another of Plath’s complex and explicitly maternal poems, “Morning Song,” offers an image of a simultaneously alienated and intimate relationship between mother and child. The speaker uses various nonhuman images to portray her newborn child which symbolizes the emotional disconnect between the two. As the poem progresses, the images become more animate. First Plath describes the child using the cold mechanism of the watch. Then, she compares the child to a statue, human-shaped though frigid, and at last, she compares the child to a cat, the first living comparison. However, the child is not the only one described in animalistic terms. The mother, rising early in the morning, compares herself to a cow as she rises to perform the most intimate of maternal functions, breastfeeding. Critic Tracy Brain argues that the poem largely centers around a pun on the idea of “morning” and “mourning.” “Morning” invites comparison to birth, but “mourning” evokes death. Brain considers this invocation of death as representative of the speaker’s regret at giving birth to a child. Van Dyne also notices this gesture towards death in the poem. However, she reads this undertone as a reference to the Hegelian idea: “The birth of children is the death of parents.” Van Dyne’s hypothesis is better than Brain’s because within the poem itself, the speaker references time and mirroring between parent and child. There is no hint of Brain’s idea that the mother regrets the birth of her child, though while breastfeeding in the middle of the night, this might be both understandable and forgivable.

Ultimately, Van Dyne’s reading of “Morning Song” does justice to both the alienated language at the beginning of the poem and the intimate moment in the end. She writes, “Awed by the infant’s incontrovertible separateness, [Plath] reports gestation and birth as if she were rather curiously removed or even absent from these events.” The poem resists oversimplification as either a sentimentalist poetic about motherhood or an anger-filled poem of maternal regret. Brain’s suggestion that “Morning Song” expresses Plath’s regret after giving birth dulls the emotional dynamism of the poem.  As Van Dyne notes, “Morning Song” ends with an incontrovertible “pull toward maternal communion,” even though it begins with a disassociation between mother and child. The power of the bond union between mother and child transforms the trajectory of the poem to the point that the poem ends by recognizing a particularly human vocalization by the child whose notes optimistically, “rise like balloons.”

The Pro-Motherhood Poems of Plath and Olds

Unlike “Lesbos” or “Morning Song,” much of Plath’s poetry is undeniably positive about motherhood and childrearing. She explores different maternal perspectives including the perspective of a woman who cannot conceive but desires children. “Barren Woman,” as the title suggests, comes from the perspective of a woman who wants to get pregnant but cannot. Unlike contemporary society’s voluntarily childless woman, this speaker desperately desires a child that she for some unknown reason cannot conceive. She describes herself as an empty museum. Brain describes the museum as “a sterile place that is not for living things.” Every image Plath invokes in this poem is white with absence and death. Because the speaker cannot bear children, she uses the language of virginity to identify herself, even though her identification as barren suggests her childlessness is not for a lack of sexual activity. She calls herself “nun-hearted” and paints a vivid image of lilies, which also invoke virginity or death. Plath writes, “Marble lilies / exhale their pallor like scent.” The lilies being marble only emphasizes her strong association with death. The poor woman even imagines herself happy with a brood of children. If this poem is any indication, Plath does not consider childlessness an ideal as a certain section of contemporary culture sometimes does. Van Dyne provides the insight that Plath wrote “Barren Woman” after the miscarriage of her second child. The poem is compelling evidence that the speaker behind “Barren Woman” represents the grief Plath experienced at the loss of her child and the significance with which she views her role as a mother.

One commonality between Plath and Olds is that they both experienced miscarriages that left them with abiding grief which they turned into poetry. Stylistically, Plath is often, though not always, indirect in her portrayals of difficult subject matter. Her poem about miscarriage, “Parliament Hill Fields” is less explicit than Olds’ series of poems on the same subject. The controlling metaphor of Plath’s poem is the “bald hill” which represents the grave of her miscarried child. The speaker of the poem, the mother who miscarried, observes the indifference of nature and her community to the grief she feels about the loss of her child. Plath uses an assortment of bleak images to demonstrate how the mother’s grief disenchants her vision of the world. Then, in a more straightforward moment, she writes, “Your absence is inconspicuous; / Nobody can tell what I lack.” As with many women, an intensifier of Plath’s pain is its concealed nature. Most mothers do not hold funerals for a deceased child whom they never met alive. Feminist scholar and philosopher J. Lenore Wright explains, that for many women, miscarriages occur in secret accompanied by a sense of shame that their bodies failed to produce life effectively. The added element of secretness only increases the acuteness of the mother’s grief. Plath represents this difficult and understudied, especially for the 1950s, aspect of motherhood.

After this moment of clarity, Plath moves back into more imagistic terms to describe the anguish she feels after a miscarriage. She shocks readers with a disturbing image of a frightful crowd of little girls that “swallows” her. These girls may represent Plath’s peers, other wives and mothers, whom she describes negatively as gossiping. Dobbs reads the girls as representative of children in general, not women, and considers this image to be evidence of Plath’s fear of children, because of the language of swallowing. This is an entirely possible interpretation, but it does not diminish the general theme of the poem is maternal grief over the loss of an unborn child. Clearly, she experiences alienation from her community during this time of grief. Perhaps the presence of her peers or a mob of children only punctuates her experience of grief. Plath struggles most acutely with the private and supposedly irrelevant nature of her loss. Of her lost child, she writes, “I suppose it’s pointless to think of you at all. / Already your doll grip lets go.” She struggles to accept the significance of her loss because the only time she spent with the child was during pregnancy. Still the loss of this child, this opportunity to nurture and delight, deeply impacts her.

“Parliament Hill Fields” ends with a series of images about replacement. The speaker ceases to hear the cry of her child. The grass begins to grow over the grave, and she loses “sight of you on your blind journey.” Slowly the evidence of her child disappears, usurped by the demands of the living, but her mourning continues. The speaker’s attention turns back to the nursery where “your sister’s birthday picture starts to glow.” In the moonlight, the living daughter’s image glows, if possible, even more precious than before the miscarriage. The poem resolves not by mourning by the graveside where it began, but back in “the lit house.” The speaker’s movement from outside by the grave back inside the house suggests she receives some refuge from grief by engaging with her family.

In Olds’ cultural moment from the 1970s until now, the power of the ideology of the intensive mother still pervaded culture, but the feminist ideal of the woman liberated from the traditional family progressively gained cultural significance. Within her poem “Miscarriage,” Olds uses unconventional language to describe her lost child. She describes the child as a “jelly-fish,” “fungi,” and perhaps most damningly as “it.” By these subhuman identifiers for the child, she demonstrates a distance between them. This could be misconstrued as an attack on the humanity of the child, but Olds is not engaging in the debate over the rights of an unborn child. Instead, she wrestles with the value of her child, born after only one month of gestation. The child’s alien appearance confuses Olds. She cannot understand how the loss of something minuscule, only about a quarter of an inch long, could cause the emotional impact that it did. Both the unhuman appearance of the child and the real emotional pain experienced at this loss baffle her.

Later in the poem, Olds mentions that she conceived her son only a month after the miscarriage. She writes, “I never went back / to mourn the one who came as far as the / sill with its information.” The language of this line reveals tension in her conception of her miscarriage. By calling the child, “the one who” rather than “the one which,” or worse “that thing which,” Olds acknowledges at least partially the human nature of the child. However, by continuing to use the pronoun “it” in reference to the child, she denies the child gender and knowable personhood. Through this paradoxical line, she represents the confusion involved in an early miscarriage who does not yet resemble a human. She cannot understand the identity of this child since she never experiences them as she does her healthy son. Yet her miscarried child still captured enough of her affections to cause acute grief. Olds continues to write about her lost child 30 and 50 years after the miscarriage. This image captured in “Miscarriage” demonstrates the potential significance of motherhood in female life. The loss even of a barely formed baby is devastating and in Olds’ case hurts for decades.

Like Plath before her, elements of Olds’ poetry can scandalize. She offends a sentimental instinct towards “niceness,” yet her poetry is maternal enough to offend the sensibilities of some who consider domesticity to be too traditional a subject for modern poetry. Renee Burch considers the mission of Plath in Ariel and Olds in her corpus to be similar because of their inventive discussion of the often over sentimentalized theme of family. The transgressive element of Olds’ poetry is greater than that of Plath’s, which given Olds’ later historical moment is not surprising. Olds’ lines frequently contain sexually explicit words and images, sometimes unnecessarily so. Rita Jones suggests that Olds’ simultaneous embrace of the sexually explicit with the maternal prevents her poems about her children from seeming sentimental. Jones recognizes Olds’ strong concern with motherhood and feels it necessary to defend Olds from mischaracterization as an intensive mother. Some of Olds’ use of sexuality is in questionable taste. In the poem, “Six-Year-Old Boy,” she casually references her son’s erection and continues to reference his penis throughout the poem. Although she does differentiate herself from any number of sentimental authors through this bawdiness, she also exposes something private about her son and refers to his sexuality at an inappropriately young age. If Olds were a father referencing his daughter’s privates, she would be decried as a pedophile, but there seems to be a double standard here. Whenever Olds discusses the sexual organs of her children in her poetry, she invites a sexualizing gaze toward her children that is reprehensible and unnecessary.

The poem “New Mother” is an example of Olds’ bawdiness at its best, because she invites readers into the experience of intimacy after childbirth. Olds still portrays sexuality explicitly in this poem, but she shares something that is about the experience of an adult woman, her own experience, not a vision of her children. The encounter between the desirous husband and recovering wife demonstrates tenderness. The woman’s body, which is still recovering from the trauma of birth, unites the sexual love of the couple with the natural result of their lovemaking, the child. Unlike the image presented by Picasso in La Vie, the lover and mother are one being, a woman. In this poem, Olds does some of her finest work, because she violates a taboo with a purpose. She reconnects sex and birth in the mind of her readers by invoking her breast milk and stitches with a sexual encounter. Through this countercultural merging of two naturally connected experiences, Olds offers a vision of Raymond’s idea of integrity, which envisions a woman whole, a maternal, sexual, and intellectual being. Unlike the poem about the son where sex serves as nothing more than a moment of shock, a mode of differentiation from sentimentalism, the sexuality of “New Mother” is a strong statement about romantic love and motherhood both valuable and countercultural.

Olds’ does not shy away from grotesque details of violence either. In her poem, “Fear of Oneself,” she uses the imagery of torture to explain the intensity of her fears about being a bad mother and failing to protect her children. Olds relates a compliment from her lover and writes, “you say you believe I would hold up under torture / for the sake of our children. You say you think I have / courage.” She responds to this compliment by crying, and her tears falling on her arm on the cold winter night, remind her of torture. Facing the image of women standing naked in the frigid cold with “guards pouring / buckets of water over their bodies,” Olds recoils. As she states within this poem, her primary goal in life is to “stand between [her children] and pain,” but she doubts her ability to withstand torture for their sake due to her mother’s selfishness. Olds ends the poem in a grim place imagining her own children enduring torture in the cold. Through this poem, Olds illustrates the fear of insufficiency that complicates the mother-child relationship beyond the 1950s image of the mother, who is completely satisfied and safe, living in a bubble of domestic bliss. Viewing the situation of the mother within the context of torture suggests the difficulty and the personal sacrifice involved in motherhood. At the same time, the torture described by Olds is not a polite kind of sacrifice, such as leaving behind a career. Thus, she does not fit into the category of the intensive mother. Olds maintains her career and sexuality in defiance of the ideal of the intensive mother, yet she demonstrates an intense commitment to protecting her children from evil. The fear she exhibits about not measuring up, speaks to the anxiety of the intensive mother about not adequately fulfilling the needs of her child. Thus, this poem shows Olds’ refusal to submit to the ideals of intensive mothering while simultaneously demonstrating her participation in a cultural moment that prioritizes the personal sacrifice of mothers.   

Similar to Olds’ “Fear of Oneself,” Plath’s “Nick and the Candlestick” contains shocking portrayals of both dark and light in the context of motherhood. Written for her son Nick, the poem is one of Plath’s most significant poems about her children. Susan Stanford Friedman considers this poem an example of Plath’s general ambivalence towards the experience of motherhood. What Friedman considers ambivalence is better-termed complexity. Not even complexity about the speaker’s opinion of the child but complexity about her perception of herself as a mother. The beginning of the poem contains frightening cave-related imagery. Plath considers the cave an “earthen womb” that is crying from boredom. She compares the air within the cave to “cold homicides” and suggests there are newts and fish drinking blood from her toes. This imagery does not have a knowable one-to-one correspondence with reality, but it evokes a strong connection between the womb, normally a place of life, with death. Friedman connects this evocation to grief over the loss of writing time due to the concerns of motherhood. She sees the negativity surrounding Plath’s womb to be because Plath resented her own reproductive power pessimistically because it came with certain societal opinions about how she should spend her energies. However, this reading of “Nick and the Candlestick” only considers the first part of the poem.

Van Dyne offers insight into what Plath suggests through the cave and womb image. She orients this image of Plath’s within a tradition of female writing that considers this same image as a place that is “often unknowable by rational means.” Van Dyne suggests, “Because they embody the realm of natural processes, they may promise gestation as well as death.” She finally says that “Intimacy within these spaces can be chilling, even life threatening.” Like Friedman, Van Dyne references the redefinition or death of self that motherhood may entail for women, but Van Dyne does a better job recognizing that the terror of motherhood is not only for abstract selfhood reasons but for a very real threat of death both to infant and mother. Since Plath uses distinctly dangerous imagery to describe the progenitive feminine space but exclusively positive terms to describe her child, the poem is not arguing against motherhood but expressing fear. Analogous to the feeling Olds articulates in “The Fear of Oneself,” Plath fears that she will fail to birth her child safely and nurture him after his birth.  In the poem, Plath refers to the child as “love,” a “ruby,” and even “the baby in the barn,” a Christological reference. Clearly, the problem expressed in “Nick and the Candlestick” is not one of reluctant motherhood, but fear. Since she associates the womb with death, she fears the womb will kill this precious life, Nick. It is appropriate in this instance to notice that biographically, Plath had just had a miscarriage before becoming pregnant with Nick. The negativity associated with the womb may be more from a sense of failure or an association with herself as death-dealing, than a fear of motherhood or changed identity. Van Dyne provides the background information that Plath wrote this poem in October before Nicholas was born. Although Van Dyne does not use this information about the timeline of the poem to reference Plath’s miscarriage, there appears to be anxiety in the poem about the inadequacy of the woman to carry the child. Thus the ending, where the woman addresses the child and says, “Love, love, / I have hung our cave with roses, / With soft rugs—.” Plath explains she has done her best to make the cave now belonging to both mother and child hospitable. Under this assertion is a deep fear of failure as a mother and of repeated miscarriage. Like Olds, Plath’s negativity in her motherhood poem is an expression of fear and the complexity of her experience. She is not a glowing fertility goddess. She is a miserable woman, overwhelmed with fear, walking alone in the dark, and trying her best to provide comfort for the child she carries. It would be an incredible mistake to read this poem to Nick as expressing his unwantedness, instead of her fear of her own inadequacy.  

No poem better exemplifies Van Dyne’s statement that “Motherhood was not a stable, unified, or transparent category to Plath,” than her radio play “Three Women.” The wife’s voice represents a married woman who is happy to be pregnant and gives birth to a healthy child. Even within this happy voice, Plath inserts a complicating factor because the woman experiences great pain in childbirth and disconnection with her child after giving birth. The secretary’s voice Plath uses is also a woman who is happy to be pregnant, but she tragically miscarries. Within this voice, Plath adds the complication of the woman’s satisfaction with her domestic life with her husband even though she mourns her lost child and yearns for children. The student voice Plath uses is the voice of a single college student who becomes pregnant by accident and does not want a baby. Her narrative ends with giving the child up for adoption. Plath demonstrates a refusal to gloss over the emotionally and physically painful aspects of motherhood while simultaneously demonstrating the wife woman’s satisfaction with her new child. She also demonstrates the secretary woman’s overwhelming desire for a child, as well as the student woman’s grief after giving up her child. The poem rings with the emotional complexity typical of Plath’s poetry and represents the three major experiences of motherhood that Plath inhabits throughout her motherhood poems.

The student voice in Plath’s poem is the closest to the ideology of voluntary childlessness that she expresses in her poetry. When the student’s voice discusses the conception of her child, she does so while using the imagery of Leda and the Swan, which as evidenced by Yeats’ poem with that title connotes the rape of Leda by Zeus in the form of a swan. The student voice then faces an unwanted pregnancy. Her repeated refrain is “I wasn’t ready.” Overall, this speaker has the most negative opinion about her pregnancy and her child in general. On this note, Dobbs emphasizes this speaker’s resentment of men because of her unwanted pregnancy. The student’s voice does resent men for her situation and explicitly states, “they are to blame for what I am.” She fears the results of pregnancy, namely the death of the child and herself, and most chillingly claims, “I should have murdered this that murders me.” In this voice, Plath embodies a woman who fiercely resists her immanent motherhood for reasons not described by the poem, though most likely her youth and status as a single woman. Significantly, at the end of the student voice’s monologue, she repeatedly wonders what she is missing while strolling through her college campus. Even the reluctant mother who gives up her child for adoption feels a significant absence that she never felt before giving birth. Plath’s witness to the emotional complexity of forgoing motherhood after childbirth surpasses an idealistic view of childlessness and suggests the significance that even the voluntary loss of a child. Critics like Dobbs wish to draw the most connections between Plath’s voice and this student voice that represents a perspective like the one of contemporary voluntary childless women. However, Plath’s view of motherhood is more complex than the voice of the student woman, and this is represented by the other two voices.  

The wife’s voice represents a more traditionally maternal woman who values her experience of motherhood. This voice speaks the most stereotypically maternal lines that Plath writes:

What did my fingers do before they held him?
What did my heart do, with its love?
I have never seen a thing so clear.
His lids are like the lilac-flower
And soft as a moth, his breath.
I shall not let go.
There is no guile or warp in him. May he keep so.

Throughout this section, the speaker admits to no complication. She finds her ultimate fulfillment in her newborn child. She describes her boy in the terms of flowers and moths, delicate and beautiful delights. Plath does not leave the wife’s voice so uncomplicated throughout the rest of the poem. Before childbirth, the wife woman compares herself to “a seed about to break.” She also compares childbirth to a kind of death in a gesture towards the fearsomeness of the ordeal she is about to undergo. During childbirth, she explains, “There is no miracle more cruel than this.” Plath’s decision to mention the significant pain of childbirth separates this voice from sentimentalism by witnessing not only to the joys of motherhood but also the intense pain mothers experience for their children. Even after giving birth, the mother is not free from worry and says, “How long can I be a wall around my green property? / How long can my hands / Be a bandage to his hurt.” She asks the same question as the intensive mothers. She wishes to protect her child from the miseries of the world. At the same time, this wife’s voice acknowledges that she lacks the power that would be necessary to offer perfect protection to her child. Plath’s juxtaposition of the joyous mother with the mother in pain provides a realistic though deeply affectionate view of motherhood.

Lastly, Plath offers the voice of a married secretary who suffers from repeated miscarriages. This secretary’s voice offers insight into the emotional difficulty of pregnancy, especially a pregnancy marred by loss. At the same time, the secretary’s voice maintains the most consistently positive view of motherhood throughout the poem. This reflects an understandable idealism on the part of the secretary woman who cannot conceive. The dark moments of the secretary woman’s narrative are mostly her reflections on herself. She associates herself with death and wonders, “Is this my lover then? This death, this death? / Is this the one sin then, this old dead love of death?” As expressed previously by another Plath speaker in Parliament Hill Fields, the secretary’s voice expresses feelings of shame over her inability to carry a child full term. She wonders if it is her personal fascination with death that keeps killing her babies in the womb. This is a tragic example of the emotional difficulty of a lost pregnancy. Plath’s decision to include this perspective as one of the three major voices on motherhood offers a realistic look into the experience of real women that fits into neither the narrative of intensive mothering nor voluntary childlessness. If a woman’s identity comes primarily from her relationship with her children, then this woman is less of a woman than the wife or even student voice. The secretary’s voice expresses this fear and says, “I see myself as a shadow, neither man nor woman.” But her narrative does not end here. Rather, she experiences learned contentment even in grief while sitting in the evening with her husband. At the same time, the childish voice of the secretary is not voluntary. She desires a child desperately. Thus, Plath complicates both narratives by expressing a need for a value beyond the ideal of intensive mothering or the impotence of voluntary childlessness.

In their poetry, Sylvia Plath and Sharon Olds represent the struggle of contemporary women against the pressure of intensive mothering and voluntary childlessness. Although Plath lived in the 1950s, she wrestled with the idea of childlessness as a reaction against the prevalent practice of intensive mothering, common in the 1950s, which she found limiting. Throughout her poetry this tension exists even after Plath became a wife and mother. Critics tend to overplay Plath’s rejection of domesticity to the point that they undermine the significance of her children in her life. But a closer look at her poems about maternity suggests that despite her ideological quibbles with intensive mothering, she found motherhood to be a rewarding, though difficult experience. Plath, therefore, doesn’t reject motherhood and maternity. Rather, she rejects an overburdensome and ultimately unrealistic version of it—intensive mothering—while celebrating the difficulties but still wholesome experiences of maternity and being a mom.

The controversy surrounding Olds is of a different nature mostly because she is still living. Olds’ frequent usage of sexual images and images of violence disqualifies her from membership in the category of nice intensive mothers. At the same time, by her own profession, motherhood is the role she takes the most seriously in her life. Thus, Olds perplexes feminists and fundamentalists alike because she espouses values in opposition to both intensive mothering and voluntary childlessness. Like Plath, Olds embraces a qualified spirit of motherhood while writing against the tyranny of intensive mothering and voluntary childlessness.

Both Plath and Olds espouse complex views of motherhood that subvert idealized and demonized versions of raising children. They represent most women who fit the standards of neither ideal but exist in a place of integrity as described by Raymond that receives little attention. Prevalent scholarship about Plath undermines the significance of her experience as a mother in her life and poetry because she critiques intensive mothering. But this is also one-sided, as it ignores Plath’s positive outlook on general experiences in motherhood. This absence of attention on Plath’s motherhood is not without consequence for women. The contemporary view of Plath as imprisoned in a cage of domestic confinement is dishonest to the account Plath presents of herself through her letters and poems. More importantly, it perpetuates the myth that it is impossible to be a writer and a mother. As Sharon Olds demonstrates so well, motherhood and poetry may sometimes compete for time and energy, but they are not mutually exclusive lifestyles. In their attempt to liberate the woman from all the confines of past oppression, some feminists inadvertently perpetuate the myth behind Picasso’s La Vie that the woman as a sexual partner and creative is entirely separate from the woman as a mother. In reality, an artist, writer, mother, and partner are all viable cohabitants in a female life with integrity. A deeper look into Plath’s struggle between extremes exposes the tightrope mothers like Olds walk today where their culture perceives them as contradictions because of the fullness of their personhood. These poets have a unique ability to speak into the complex contemporary conversation surrounding motherhood. They both acknowledge the harmful standards surrounding motherhood and persist in their belief in the significance of the maternal role as a mysterious and beautiful aspect of female life. They therefore combine, somewhat paradoxically, progressive and traditional aspirations together, which reveal the complexity of human life that ideologues of any disposition generally refuse to acknowledge. The poetry of Plath and Olds represent a beautiful and complex synthesis of the goods of modern freedom with the goods of the maternity that can help carve out a new wholesomeness for women in an age of de-humanizing and de-personalizing transformation.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

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NOTES:

[1] See Dobbs, p. 25 for an example.

[2] Van Dyne, Revising Life: Sylvia Plath’s Ariel Poems, p. 130.

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