Anne Stevenson has called Three Women “the first great poem about childbirth in the language.”89 There are no speaking roles for men, who function primarily as oppressors. The play was a turning point for Plath, who harnessed and honed the freer, more intimate voice of “The Moon and the Yew Tree” to explode female taboos surrounding miscarriage, postpartum depression, and abortion.90 She was in uncharted territory, inventing a new tradition. Her previous poems, with the exceptions of “The Colossus” and “Parliament Hill Fields,” could not have been called feminist. But that February Plath was writing up her first Saxton progress report for The Bell Jar, with its condescending boyfriends, unsympathetic male doctors, vicious workplaces, mental hospitals, electric shocks, and sexual assaults.91 Prose was a better vehicle for her scathing, cynical indictment of Eisenhower’s America than poetry, whose formalist grace notes had, until now, largely checked Plath’s anger and resentments.
Plath’s neat, symmetrical stanzas muted the subversive material within. The first woman in the play who gives birth to the healthy son is initially smug, transformed by her painful labor and the massive anxiety that attends motherhood. This First Voice most closely resembles Plath’s:
How long can I be a wall, keeping the wind off?
How long can I be
Gentling the sun with the shade of my hand,
Intercepting the blue volts of a cold moon?
Plath had written about maternal anxiety before, but here the theme finds its full expression. “It is a terrible thing / To be so open,” the new mother says as she watches the dawn light up “the great elm outside the house.” “I am reassured. I am reassured,” she says, though the phrase’s repetition suggests the opposite.
The Second Voice belongs to the secretary who suffers a miscarriage. Plath had already written about miscarriage in “Parliament Hill Fields,” full of private, lyrical anguish. Here, self-blame (“I have tried and tried”) gives way to blame against patriarchal power. As the secretary watches the men who run her office, she thinks of the “flatness from which ideas, destructions, / Bulldozers, guillotines, white chambers of shrieks proceed”:
Governments, parliaments, societies,
The faceless faces of important men.
It is these men I mind:
They are so jealous of anything that is not flat! They are jealous gods
That would have the whole world flat because they are.
Plath aligns death and destruction with the male, life-giving with the female—a dichotomy that would resurface later that year in the Ariel poems.
In writing the Third Voice, of the Oxbridge student who gives up her baby girl for adoption, Plath again draws on her own experience—she had pregnancy scares as a young wife, and earlier. “I wasn’t ready. / I had no reverence,” she writes. The student charges her male doctors with a gross double standard: “They are to blame for what I am, and they know it. / They hug their flatness like a kind of health. / And what if they found themselves surprised, as I did? / They would go mad with it.” Most shocking, in this section, is the student’s regret: “I am not ready for anything to happen. / I should have murdered this, that murders me.” This speaker decides, finally, to give up her baby, yet she knows that she will carry the loss for the rest of her life. “She is a small island, asleep and peaceful, / And I am a white ship hooting: Goodbye, goodbye.”
To approach abortion with some sympathy at a time when the practice was still illegal in Britain was radical, as was the play’s focus on the darker aspects of maternity.92 Plath had first explored this theme in her journal when she wrote about the distressing birth she had seen in the Boston Lying-In Hospital with Dick Norton in February 1952.93 She probed it again in “Sweetie Pie and the Gutter Men,” and later in The Bell Jar, where Esther claims that men had invented drugs to make women forget the terrors of childbirth. Why are women forbidden to speak of such things, Plath asks in Three Women, while mass murder and nuclear annihilation make headlines? After her miscarriage, the secretary says, “This woman who meets me in the windows—she is neat. //…How shyly she superimposes her neat self / On the inferno of African oranges, the heel-hung pigs.” The “heel-hung pigs” stand as a more authentic symbol of the “inferno” she has been through than her “neat” reflection.94 Three Women opened up new poetic pathways for Plath, setting her on a course toward “Daddy” and “Lady Lazarus,” where superhuman female heroines wrest control of their destinies from the patriarchy. The play stands as a bracing antidote to a subject that is still routinely sanitized and sentimentalized.
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BY LATE MARCH, Sylvia told Aurelia, the daffodils were “coming out in their heavenly startling way, like stars.” Frieda followed her mother around the garden with a toy lawnmower, calling “Mummy’s Oodle-Ooo.” “It is so soothing & kindly to work in the earth, pruning, digging, cutting grass,” Sylvia wrote home.95 They planned to sell the daffodils at the local greengrocer, along with other crops.
Nicholas was an easier baby than Frieda. He smiled all the time and cried only when he was hungry. Sylvia, too, was now a more confident mother. “I really enjoy him—none of the harassment & worry of Frieda’s colic and my inexperience.”96 They began teaching Frieda to read, and they joked that she already knew “the tiny bird on the New Yorker masthead is an ‘Ow.’ ”97 They delighted in her unfolding personality, “very squirmy & active.”98 Sylvia told her mother, “I have the queerest feeling of having been reborn with Frieda—it’s as if my real rich happy life only started just about then.”99 She was still sending her poems out regularly. Harper’s accepted two poems; Poetry published five poems in March. She sent George MacBeth at the BBC Talks Department several new poems, remarking that two of his poems, “Mother Superior” and “Ash,” “make my hair stand on end.”100
Money was becoming less of a worry. Plath’s Saxton grant had enabled them to furnish the house, replace the old wood floors, and repay their loans to the Hugheses and Aurelia. Ted earned $730 for two broadcasts of his radio play The Wound, which aired for the second time that winter, on February 17—almost a third of their expected yearly earnings. His poems were now being translated into Swedish and included in more anthologies. But he continued turning down lucrative television appearances. Sylvia toed the family line: “Ted has just made another stand for integrity & privacy by refusing to do a TV program on the Poet in the Process of Composing a Poem from Start to Finish.”101 She probably would have jumped at such an opportunity herself.
Nicholas and Frieda were christened on March 25—he in a gown of Limerick lace Sylvia borrowed from Marjorie Tyrer, she in a delicate white and blue dress with a matching blue French coat. Sylvia held no admiration for the rector, William Lane, but she wanted her children to be part of their new community. She had stopped going to church after Lane gave “a ghastly H-bomb sermon” about how the parishioners would ascend to heaven in the event of a nuclear explosion, unlike the “pacifists & humanists & ‘educated pagans’ ” who would fear “being incinerated etc. etc.” Sylvia wrote Aurelia, “I felt it was a sin to support such insanity even by my presence.” Marcia had sent her a copy of a Unitarian sermon on fallout shelters that made her weep. “I’d really be a church-goer if I was back in Wellesley or America—the Unitarian church is my church. How I miss it!!! There is just no choice here.”102
In late March, Marvin Kane, the American playwright who had worked with Plath on her BBC Living Poet program the previous year, invited her to contribute to a BBC Home Service program about Americans in England called What Made You Stay? Plath agreed so long as Kane would interview her at Court Green; she could not leave the baby to go up to London, though she told him, “I miss London a lot more than Ted does!” To Kane she described herself with just the right amount of irony as a “loyal American housewife,” raising a garden of “Country Gentlemen corn, Kentucky wonder beans” on her two and a half acres.103 Intrigued
, he arranged a visit with his wife in early April.
Plath was upbeat during the interview. She laughed frequently as she described how she “had always idolized England…especially as an English major.” She had been “immensely excited by the historic sense of London in the first place, and then the look of it”—the black, hearse-like taxi cabs and the double-decker buses, the “Old World formality about everybody from the bobbies to the postman.” Many things about England were superior to their American counterparts, she said. English butcher shops, with the “pigs at close quarters,” were much more interesting than American supermarkets with their meat wrapped in cellophane and background Muzak. (Though she had nearly fainted the first time she saw the pigs strung up in rows.) She and Ted preferred England’s “Victorian” child-rearing sensibilities: “In America, the children have almost completely free reign [sic],” while in England, “children have to fit into the adults’ life.” Best of all was the English “ability to be eccentric.” She described her first visit to an English home (possibly Mallory Wober’s or John Lythgoe’s), where she watched her friend’s mother embroider a tapestry of a rattlesnake. Plath laughed as she recalled how, at bedtime, the woman offered her the choice between a hot-water bottle and a cat.
And then there was the weather, which “infected” her. She meant to say “affected,” caught the Freudian slip, and then laughed: “It really does infect me!” She continued, “Weather affects me intensely. I find that I just don’t observe it, I can’t make the best of it the way many people can.” She had heard “with joy” that no place in England was more than seventy miles from the sea, but she described her disappointing journey to Whitby, in Yorkshire, in the “pouring rain,” past rows of “very depressing” redbrick houses: “It rained perpetually, and there was a kind of litter underfoot of little gum wrappers and so on and I was so intensely depressed [laughs] by this vision of the sea that I retreated inland rapidly.” But there was one aspect of English life she valued unequivocally. “England seemed a great deal more hospitable to a couple of artists who wanted to be artists and at the same time lead a very normal and rather placid family life.” She could live in “the deep country” and still “get to London in a day.” In America, “The pressure for an artist, especially one that’s not commercial, to get a job, to get a regular job that then turns out to exhaust his energies, to take all his time and so on, is so great that it’s almost impossible to resist it.”104 There was no BBC in America.
Charming remarks aside, Sylvia continued to write home about the cold and the rain, and the endless housework and baby care. These burdens, the weather, and her predisposition to postpartum depression suggest that Plath was suffering both physically and psychologically during that “cold mean spring,” as she called it.105 Her housekeeper, Nancy, left in mid-April for two weeks and would not return until early May. Frieda was acting up; Sylvia told Gerald and Joan Hughes that her daughter had a “rapid, hysterical temperament.”106 The “graveyard” weather intensified her bone-weariness.107 “I have said to myself: I will write tomorrow, then it is sure to be a sunny day & how cheerful I will be. Believe it or not, we havent [sic] seen the sun for three weeks.”108 She had taken the children out for only one day in nearly a month.
April 1 was Frieda’s second birthday; April was also Otto’s birthday month. On April 2, Plath finished “Little Fugue.” The yew tree became, again, a resonant symbol, this time for her father:
Such a dark funnel, my father!
I see your voice
Black and leafy, as in my childhood,
A yew hedge of orders,
Gothic and barbarous, pure German.
It was another exercise in elegy writing, one that would bring her closer to the Nazi imagery of “Daddy.” The charges were muted, but the familial reflections were darkening.
Ten days later, she turned again to the great shadows of the trees outside her window. During a restless early dawn on April 12, she began one of her best poems, “Elm,” which she finished on April 19.109 (The poem went through at least fifteen drafts.)
I know the bottom, she says. I know it with my great tap root:
It is what you fear.
I do not fear it: I have been there.
Familiar images appear: the sea, galloping horses, hooves, echoes, poisons, hooks, clouds, shrieks, the moon, “malignity.” The voice of the elm mocks and taunts: “Love is a shadow. / How you lie and cry after it.” Plath alludes to shock treatment (“My red filaments burn and stand, a hand of wires”) and depression (“I am terrified by this dark thing / That sleeps in me”). The poem ends with a startling image of a “murderous” face in the branches of the elm that “petrifies the will” and kills.110 When Plath submitted “Elm” for the second time to The New Yorker, she told Howard Moss, “The whole poem is the elm talking & might be in quotes. The elm is talking to the woman who contemplates her—they are intimately related in mood, and the various moods, I think, of anguish, are explored in the poem….I realize it is a rather wild & desperate piece. But, I hope: clear, clear.”111
“Elm” was influenced by Ruth Fainlight’s “Sapphic Moon,” a poem about miscarriage that moved Plath when she read it in the February 18, 1962, issue of Encounter. In an April 16 letter to Fainlight—written while she was working on “Elm”—Plath expressed her deep admiration for “Sapphic Moon”: “It is a real White Goddess poem, and a voice on its weird fearsome own.”112 Plath no doubt recognized the poem’s “weirdness” as akin to her own. In Fainlight’s poem, the moon—an agent of infertility and miscarriage—appears through a window and “enters the womb like an instrument” to sow the “seeds of death.” Plath practically lifts Fainlight’s lines for the voice of the miscarrying secretary in Three Women: “There is the moon in the high window,” she writes, midway through the poem. “I feel it enter me, cold, alien, like an instrument. /…I, too, create corpses.” The word “malignity” in “Elm” echoes Fainlight’s phrase “cold malignancy,” while the third draft of “Elm” contains the excised line “a lunar Xray of barrenness,” not unlike Fainlight’s moon, which “Passes like X-ray through lovers’ caresses.”113
Plath dedicated “Elm” to Fainlight, perhaps to acknowledge her borrowings.114 But the dedication also suggests the poem’s original connection to miscarriage, which Ruth had experienced three times before the birth of her son in 1962, and Sylvia once. There is a hint of elegy, in “Elm,” for Plath’s lost baby: a line from the second draft of the poem reads, “Grieving & flat, as a mother with no children.”115 But Plath needed to differentiate her White Goddess poem from Fainlight’s; the references to grief, miscarriage, and infertility did not make the final cut. Instead, Plath gave oblique voice to her own private hells—her traumatic memories of shock treatment and debilitating depression. “Elm” was the last poem Plath wrote before Assia Wevill’s arrival at Court Green.
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On the afternoon of April 17, the Hugheses’ neighbor Percy Key had a stroke. Percy’s wife, Rose, rushed to Court Green to summon Ted. Sylvia thought that she might wait at home, “and then something in me said, now, you must see this, you have never seen a stroke or a dead person.” She followed Ted, where they found Percy in front of the television, shaking and twitching. “Rose clutched Ted,” Sylvia wrote in her journal, until the doctor came. “He said Thank you, and we melted back to the house. I have been waiting for this, I said. And Ted said he had, too.” They “hugged each other,” and Sylvia was “seized by a dry retching” over what had just happened.116 All of this occurred as Plath was revising “Elm”; the imagery of petrification, perhaps inspired by Percy’s stroke, was added late, to the penultimate draft, on April 19.
That same day, Sylvia had tea with Elizabeth Compton, who had offered her and Ted the use of her Devon farmhouse after she heard the BBC Poets in Partnership interview. Ted had remembered her offer, and invited her and her hu
sband, David, to tea at Court Green. Elizabeth recalled, “We went and sat at the playroom….Ted talked to David about money, like authors do. Sylvia was chatting to me and she said, ‘What do you do?’ And I said, ‘I go canvassing for a liberal democrat.’ She said, ‘A what?’ I said, ‘It’s a political party.’ She said, ‘Ted, I’ve found a committed woman!’ And I felt foolish, because I didn’t think of being committed, it was just something I did occasionally. But no, she was very lively, she kept dashing out because Nick was in his pram outside…it was a very sunny day….She took me round and showed me some of the rooms. ‘I’d like to have five children. I’ll have three boys up in the attic, and the girls will be down below.’ ” Sylvia did not speak of her own poetry to Elizabeth, who remembered, “No, she talked about Ted’s writing, and she said she’d been copying, typing them out, sending them off. But when I said to him, ‘I didn’t know Sylvia wrote poetry,’ he said, ‘She doesn’t, she is a poet.’ ”117 David, too, remembered Sylvia in those early days of their friendship as “an impressive, dependable, loving mother” with a well-thumbed copy of Dr. Spock. “She insisted” on this demarcation, he said, and presented Ted as “the poet.”118
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