Biographical Reading Of Three Women By Sylvia Plath

The modern conventional trend began with Robert Lowell, though some traces of this trend could be found in the works of Benjamin Franklin to Richard Wright in America. Till the mid-twentieth century, American poetry seems to have followed transcendentalists ideal. But the first surfacing of the tradition has ofren been traced to solipsistic poetry of the Romantics. The twentieth century confessional poetry of America embodies the American experience of rejecting the original situation. The poets prefer to live as lost men or the drop-outs as they hunt for alternatives. Thus the long confessional poem of Roethke is entitled as The Lost Son, while Sylvia Plath's love-hate relationship with her father becomes a destructive passion making her a lost daughter. Robert Lowell's quarrel with his family and ancestors made him a lost member.

These poets were capable of identifying themselves with a permanent principal of religion or metaphysics or even political significance. The central experience of a confessional poem is psychological. The poet of this tradition examines the psychological disintegration which results from rejection of the established norms of a judgment. There is a sense of guilt which results from the poet's inability to adopt the role prescribed by his culture. His rebellion against the established norms created in him an uncontrollable violence. In some cases it hastenes to neurosis. Hence the poetry of Robert Lowell, Theodore Roethke, Sylvia Plath, Ann Sexton and others of the tradition has to be placed not only in the context of the private confessional poetry but also with the poetry of madness. For example Theodore Roethke suffered from depression. Sylvia Plath's frequent mental breakdowns compelled her to attempt suicide a couple of times. She actually committed suicide in 1963. Here, neurosis becomes a part of the world of confessional poet grappling with the inner violence.

The disintegration of the poet's mind might also be seen against the background of the sixties in America. The sixties valued irrational experience for its own sake. It was a period of fierce individualism, Paranoid fear and drug-induced psychological trips. This period also witnessed inventions and visions. The concept of self-fulfillment was central to the American culture of this period which made confessional poetry possible. It emphasized that each individual has an element of uniqueness in his personality which must be released. This release then might find either of a way of personal mysticism or a political activity or some sort of artistic activity. This desire to fulfill oneself through self expression was then the basis of confessional spirit. During this period, the twentieth century diffusion of poet's taste and culture barriers, between high brow literature, influenced the sensibilities of the sixties. Their search of authenticity energized their minds.

It is here that the confessional poet's treatment of insanity as an essential element of contemporary culture becomes significan. The drug was used to produce psycholetic experiences in the sixties. This phenomenon points of their workship of the irrational. This was the method by which they hope to create an environment in which they could realize their identity. In fact, this was an absurd vision of the world and the confessional poets shared with it. Therefore, in the poetry of Sylvia Plath and Theodore Roethke we have the use of imagery that points out the presence of the fantastic and bizzare hallucinations as they experience these in their world. The motif of mental breakdown in the confessional poets seems to have been closely associated with the theme of death. 'Stones' and 'Tulips' describe the first mental break down of Plath.

ORR: Now, jumping the years, can you say, are there any themes which particularly attract you as a poet, things that you feel you would like to write about? PLATH: Perhaps this is an American thing: I've been very excited by what I feel is the new breakthrough that came with, say, Robert Lowell's Life Studies, this intense breakthrough into very serious, very personal, emotional experience which I feel has been partly taboo. Robert Lowell's poems about his experience in a mental hospital, for example, interested me very much. These peculiar, private and taboo subjects, I feel, have been explored in recent American poetry. I think particularly the poetess Ann Sexton, who writes about her experiences as a mother, as a mother who has had a nervous breakdown, is an extremely emotional and feeling young woman and her poems are wonderfully craftsman4ike poems and yet they have a kind of emotional and psychological depth which I think is something perhaps quite new, quite exciting.

ORR: Do your poems tend now to come out of books rather than out of your own life? PLATH: No, no: I would not say that at all. I think my poems immediately come out of the sensuous and emotional experiences I have, but I must say I cannot sympathise with these cries from the heart that are informed by nothing except a needle or a knife, or whatever it is. I believe that one should be able to control and manipulate experiences, even the most terrific, like madness, being tortured, this sort of experience, and one should be able to manipulate these experiences with an informed and an intelligent mini I think that personal experience is very important, but certainly it shouldn't be a kind of shut-box and mirror looking, narcissistic experience. I believe it should be relevant, and relevant to the larger things, the bigger things such as Hiroshima and Dachau and so on.

• 1932 born in Boston, Massachusetts
• 1940 father died of complications from diabetes
• 1950 published her first short story before entering college received a scholarship to Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts
• 1951 won the Mademoiselle fiction contest for her short story 'Sunday at the Mintons'
• 1953 suffered a nervous breakdown and attempted suicide
• 1955 submitted an honor thesis on Dostoevsky and graduated summa cum laude won a Fulbright fellowship to study at Newnham College at Cambridge
• 1956 married the Ted Hughes, a young man who had graduated from Cambridge two years earlier and would soon become a major English poet
• 1957 obtained her master's degree couple moved to the United States; she began teaching freshman writing at Smith College
• 1958 wrote, worked part-time, and attended a seminar taught by the poet Robert Lowell at Boston University
• 1959 Hughes was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship, and the couple returned to England
• 1960 birth of daughter Frieda published first poetry collection, The Colossus, and Other Poems
• 1961 family purchased a home in rural Croton, Devon began working on an autobiographical novel, The Bell Jar
• 1962 birth of son Nicholas discovered that her husband was having an affair with another woman, Assia Gutman; he soon abandoned the family to live with Gutman in London feeling isolated in Devon, moved with her children to an apartment in London
• 1963 published novel The Bell Jar; poorly reviewed committed suicide by asphyxiation from her gas oven
• 1965 publication of poetry collection Ariel
• 1971 publication of poetry collection Crossing the Water
• 1977 publication of short story volume Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams
• 1981 publication of The Collected Poems; won posthumous Pulitzer PrizeSaeede Fattahi:

It is impossible to separate her poetry from real life events. Plath used her real life events to produce poetry that is highly accomplished and innovative. Her poems are embodied with personal experiences. In the twentieth century she was the writer who dare to write against male domination. She highlighted the real picture of twentieth century woman in her poems. She used writing as a weapon and raise voice against discrimination. She beat all others like Lessing, Levertor and Sexton in the field of expressing one's inner raging world with a mystifying clarity and boldness. It may be true that according to the psycho-analysts she came to a state where she hardly saw a distinction between objectivity and subjectivity, yet her poetry came as a rescue and instrument to release her conflicts, pent up feelings and she did this in most bold confessions and fearless poetic evacuations of her intense cries.

Her poetry show an awareness of the social and political climate of the time of the time. She played a well role of daughter, wife and mother while being very much conscious that she was a brilliant, intelligent woman. She was profoundly affected by the conflicting ideologies of domesticity and achievement. The double standard of American society resulted in Plath's envy and hatred of men. The fearful and contradictory nature of American culture of the 1950s influenced her poetry and at the same time aroused anxiety in Plath's own life.

• Sylvia Plath had conflicted perspectives on motherhood.
• She showed western woman of the 50s and 60s dealing with an inner fight of feelings that makes her feel trapped in ber maternal life.
• The reality of the situation of many mothers in her context.
• She revealed tge dark truth that some mothers face.

Pregnancy, childbirth and motherhood can be terrifying prospects that leave some women feeling trapped, isolated and resentful, especially if they have had to give up on their careers by becoming mother. She lived in a society in which the manipulation of the early education, schools and universities taught women that their own fulfillment was found in being a wife and mother. Women are often presented as maternal, human beings who embrace motherhood and love taking care of their children. However, Plath's own thoughts and the characters she created in her works, give real life women a voice. She also did not hesitated to write about miscarriage which she actually experienced in 1961.

During motherhood, especially at early stages, it is really common to have different and contradictory feelings. It is an important decision and a big change to women's lives. Even meant more in the 20th century, in which women did not have as many rights as today to act freely. Normally these fears and in some cases negative feelings about motherhood were hidden to avoid being on the spotlight of society and going against the conventions. If you hide those negative feelings, the positive ones become artificial and unrealistic too. This poem ia divided into three voices, with a common setting 'Maternity ward and round about'. The first voice belongs to a pregnant woman that is looking forward to have her baby. In spite of the difficulties of giving birth, she finally takes her baby home. This voice represents motherhood as a miracle; a really hard and painful one, but that is worth it at the end. This voice would represent the part of Plath that lives her motherhood with happiness. Despite her happiness, she reflectes how nervous a woman feels before giving birth. Her range of feelings are: calmness - anxiety - pain - tenderness - hopefulness The second voice lost her child and experiences suffering and isolation but in her final words, there is a sense of hope and positivity when she states 'The little grasses crack through stones' and the word 'life' is the sign of her optimistic view about healing and giving birth. This voice demonstrates Plath's own experience of miscarriage.

The third voice is an unwed girl who underwent an unwanted pregnancy as a consequence of rape which she describes through the image of a swan. She describes the memory of rape by relating to Greek mythology (rapes of Leda and Danae by Zeus). She shows different feelings during her monologues. She wonders why her body is ready to have babies when mentally she is not. She gives her child for adoption. At the end, she re-establishes herself in her old life, which is a college life. She goes to college but the loss of baby will never leave her alone. The third voice does not reflect a situation that Plath actually experienced, but it does reproduce the insecurities she had about her life and motherhood. The insecurities come from that moment when Plath had to put aside her intellectual life after getting married and having her first child, in order to take care of them. She probably thought what would have happened if she had chosen her intellectual life over her children.

As a young woman, Plath suffered with the task of choosing between alternatives for her life. She wrote in one her journals: 'I can never be all the people I want and leave all the lives I want. [. . . ] I want to live and feel all the shades, tones and variations of mental and physical experience possible in my life. And I am sick and sad. Perhaps you could trace my feelings back to my distate at having to choose between alternatives. Perhaps that's why I I want to be every one- so no one can blame me for being I. (Sylvia Plath, 2000, p. 43-44) Plath always felt as a victim in the male dominated society. Her poetry is a well example of her feelings of victimization and she raised her voice against the brutalities of the men who were present in her life including her father and her husband. The second voice is that of a woman who has suffered a miscarriage and lashes out against not just a small fraternity that conspires against women, but all men. Men surround the Second Voice constantly and exhibit the inhuman characteristics that Plath observed in world leaders. They patronize her - the woman's boss, seeing her distraught appearance, laughs and asks, 'Have you see something awful? You are so white, suddenly. '

She describes her boss and the swarmig packs of disengaged men who surround her as 'flat. ' From their flatness, 'destructions, Bulldozers, guillotines, white chambers of shrieks proceed. ' They are 'jealous gods,' who 'would have the whole world flat because they are. ' For the Second Voice, losing a child is to lose a dimension and become flat like men. She thinks that the mechanical world of men and her associations with them as a secretary are responsible for her failure to beget children. In her anger against men, she finds men as the common reason for both her personal experience of miscarriage and imperfections in the world:

But the face was there,

The face of the unborn one that loved its perfections. . .

And then there were other faces. The faces of nations,

Governments, parliaments, societies,

The Faceless faces of important men.

Though she loathes herself for her inability to deliver a child-- 'I am found wanting'-- she blames men for her misfortune:

It is these men I mind:

They are so jealous of anything that is not so

flat! They are jealous gods

That would have the whole world flat because they are.

I see the Father conversing with the son.

such flatness cannot but be holy.

'Let us make a heaven,' they say.

'Let us flatten and launder the grossness from these souls. '

The opposition between the pregnant women and the male hospital might somehow reinforce nature/culture, mind/body and subject/object dualisms-- by placing females as nature, as the bodies in the ward, while the hospital is displayed as a locus of masculine rationality, of science--, this simplification is done with political aims, in order to criticize the ideology that identified women as bodies and nature instead of mind and culture. Furthermore, the 'minds' of the doctors and men in general are part of the poem's criticism: opposed to women's pregnant complexity, men are superficial and flat. Thus, the dramatic poem might seem to present a dualistic frame in its representation of men/ward as opposed to women/nature, which could be justified in the name of a larger goal: that of denouncing science's dualistic bias.

Sylvia Plath wrote Three Women: A Poem for Three Voices in the light of medication of childbirth, which usually took place in hospital wards--especially in the context that she knew: she lived in the United States in the 1950s and was leaving in England in 1960s. Throughout the dramatic poem, the ward is negatively represented by the three voices: it is the locus of male gaze over female bodies-- doctors are seen as 'flat', while pregnant women are round, 'mountains'. There are several images in which they identify themselves with natural elements such as seeds, through metaphors that highlight women's and earth's fertility. Thus Three Women connects women to earth-- specially in the Second Voice's monologue in oposition to male domination. The poem is set in a 'Maternity Ward and Round about' and the three voices with no actual interaction among them but some overlapping and repetition of diction ( for example 'flat' ) seem like 'variations of the same personality'( Butscher 290).

As Pamela Annas mentions, the poem is based on a 'less known' film by Bergman, Nana livet (The Brink of Life or So Close to Life) which focuses on three women in a maternity ward whose circumstances are a bit different from those of Plath's characters. In the film the three characters are the Secretary, who like Plath's Secretary, miscarries, the Worker who gives birth to a dead baby, and a younger worker who is determined to give up her baby, but changes her mind after the admonitions of the other characters. The film itself is based on a short story by Ulla Isaksson ' The Aunt of Death. '

The poem's technique is very similar to that of 'Daddy' and 'Lady Lazarus'. It shows the mask worn by the poet to disguise herself. The mask represents the transference of the internal conflicts into external dramatic terms. Here Sylvia Plath employs her conventional skill of transmutation into the created form of art, instead of the intricate blend of creation and autobiography. In 'Three Women' private and public worlds are mingled together and the dramatic situation in the poem very much dominates the personal concerns.