“The Child’s cry/Melts into the wall”

This article aims at studying the representation of motherhood in the fiction and poetry of Sylvia Plath using the concept of “maternal ambivalence”, which was first explored by psychoanalyst Rozsika Parker, and which has become central in the area of maternal studies. Although Sylvia Plath often drew a parallel between creativity and fertility in her earlier poems and some of her personal writings, the poems she wrote after she became a mother display the mixture of conflicting emotions which is typical of maternal ambivalence. The conflict revolves around the difficulty for Plath to articulate her life as a poet and a mother, but also around the possibility of writing about motherhood in a way that would not relegate her work to the margins of the literary canon. I would like to contend that Plath’s poems on the topic should not be read as confessions of her individual travails, but rather as explorations of the conflict between creativity and motherhood

Ambivalence · Art · Creativity · Literature · Poetry · Political science · Psychoanalysis · Sociology · American Literature and Culture · Autobiographical and Biographical Writing · Gender Studies · Law · Poetry Analysis and Criticism · Psychology · Social Psychology

• Representations of Motherhood

  Donna Bassin, Margaret Honey et al.•Representations of Motherhood•1996

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• The Reproduction of Mothering

  Nancy J Chodorow, Nancy Chodorow et al.•Reproduction of Mothering•1978

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• Maternal Encounters

  Jane Ussher, Lisa Baraitser•Maternal Encounters•2008

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• Creativity and the Childbirth Metaphor

  Susan Stanford Friedman•Feminist Studies•1987

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