Redefining Motherhood in Sylvia Plath’s Poetry

Known for her distinctive voice and exploration of dark, violent emotions, Sylvia Plath was one of the most acclaimed poets of the twentieth century. In her poems she discusses many common themes such as family relations, marriage, self-image and death in unique ways. Among these topics, she expresses a particularly original perspective on motherhood and its effect on the individual that often deviates completely from the traditional view of child rearing. In her poems “Moonrise,” “Heavy Woman” and “Morning Song,” Plath conveys the idea that motherhood, although necessary, is a personal as well as physical sacrifice that involves much pain and suffering.

In “Moonrise,” Plath depicts a woman contemplating her fertility. The woman “sit[s] in white…doing nothing” (“Moonrise” 2 / 3) as the “grub-white mulberries redden among leaves” (1). The mulberries are undergoing a transformation from white to red, which is the process of their ripening. Their progress is continually tracked by the speaker as she states again that the “berries redden” (13) midway through the poem, and that the “berries purple” (29) at the end. The woman is also “white” (2) waiting to ripen, in this case, to become pregnant, and at the end concludes, “The white stomach may ripen yet” (30). In this way she shows how motherhood is a necessary part of a woman’s life since she is simply waiting to “ripen” (30).

However, she also portrays pregnancy in a negative light by associating it with death and weakness. In this poem, the speaker connects whiteness with death. That connection is evident when she says that the flowers “cast a round white shadow in their dying” (“Moonrise” 6), emphasizes a falling pigeon’s white fantail, and mentions a dead “body of whiteness” (...

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...eals the mother’s attitude towards her new role. Just as in the Victorian era where women were limited in their development as individuals and mainly served as wives and mothers, the speaker feels as if she is confined to her new role as a mother and is denied her creative freedom.

Clearly, Plath’s poems take a profoundly different approach to the concepts of pregnancy and motherhood, which are usually looked upon as rewarding and fulfilling stages in a woman’s life. Instead, her poems define them by the pain and stress they lead to as well as the deterioration and eventual obliteration they cause to the mother, both as an individual and in the physical sense. This new perspective brings to light the often hidden darkness and restrictions associated with pregnancy and motherhood that many women are unaware of yet end up experiencing at some point in their lifetime.