“나는 아홉 음절로 된 수수께끼다”-실비아 플라스의 모성시 읽기

“I’m a riddle in nine syllables”: Sylvia Plath’s Motherhood Poems

Sylvia Plath was a mother of two kids and went through various reproductive situations including menstruation, pregnancy, parturition, miscarriage, as well as relational situations with her newly arrived kids and a lost kid. However, her poems have been rarely analyzed in terms of motherhood poetry. Generally, she has been discussed in the discourse of confessional poetry and her private events, mostly scandalous cases, were frequently summoned as a source of her poetics. However, her experience as a mother gives us a lens to analyze her poems from a different perspective. Focusing on the matricentric voice of Plath, I propose that her poems aimed at discussing what mothers actually feel and think, therefore, give us a chance to understand motherhood, not as a sacred experience of a glorified figure, but as a struggling and transforming experience of women’s own. Mothers go through a liminal stage once a baby comes out of their body. This strange, but oddly familiar bodily experience leads mothers to actively participate in defining what motherhood means to them as if finding an answer to a riddle, and this process made Plath write a series of maternal experiences and, at the same time, create a lyrical subject, the mother-poet that Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar called as “a significant genre for the mid- and late twentieth-century women.”