Just So I Don’t Forget February 8, 2007
Posted by amanda in : Uncategorized , trackbackThis is really more of a bookmark than an actual post, but I wanted to note that I read an article yesterday that stated that “Medusa” was actually written about Plath’s mother! I think this is interesting because my immediate assumption when I read such words as “umbilical” is to assume that she is speaking about her own children immediately disregarding the fact that she is someone else’s child….
*more on this later….including: the implications of this new subject and then this subject in comparison to her other poems about maternity.
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AND I’M BACK:
So this article I read gave some insight into Plath’s relationship with her mother Aurelia. Apprently in adulthood (despite kind letters) Plath and her mother did not get along. There are entire transcripts of Plath talking to her therapist about how much she hates her mother. Theoretically the problem lies in Aurelia’s attempts to live vicarioulsy through her children, which put added pressure on the already self-assured perfectionist Plath and resulted in little praise. This now makes so much more sense in terms of the poem “Medusa” which describes a blood-sucking, Life-leaching monster…tied somehow maternally to the speaker. It also helps to explain Plath’s sense of detachement in the poems she wrote about her own children. It makes perfect sense (to me at least) that if you are dissatisfied with your own mother, you would try to be the opposite kind of mother to your own children. The opposite of a mother striving to live vicariously through her children is a mother who detaches herself almost completely from the lives of her children, recognizing their individuality from her immediatly. In a way this softens my opinion about Plath maternally as well. It is less that she wished to be detached from her children and more that she was trying to detach herself from them because she saw it as the best way for them to thrive.
I could be way off base here but I think this makes sense!
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