Motherhood And Varied Subjectivity In Plath's Poetry

Sylvia Plath has been marked by death complex, suicide and psychosis with her work often been overlooked. The thesis seeks to look into the mother personae in her poems through Kristeva's theory on subjectivity and abjection, exploring the notion of motherhood in her poems and elucidating the relationship between motherhood, subjectivity and literary activity in the poet's life. The thesis argues that the motherhood in Plath's poems is the very manifestation of Kristeva's abjection which highlights the instability of maternity. The mother, being a daughter at the same time, never finds her subjectivity fixed. Therefore, through the trope of motherhood, Plath displaces the dilemma in her subjectivity as well as in a linguistic subjectivity as herself being a woman poet.In motherhood experience, child has been used as a means of authentication to establish a maternal identity. By this experience, Plath hopes that the child may blossom her poetic creativity and make her speak louder. However, child provides no stable mirror for her subjectivity, and her linguistic activity is restrained since there is a incompatibility between motherhood and female creativity.Being a daughter, the daughter persona suffers from an abject motherhood in which the mother-child relationship is abjection. The mother is not an object but an abject, incompletely repressed or separated in the daughter's psyche. Therefore, she comes back and takes on a form that threatens the paternal symbolic order, which also lures the daughter to return to the maternal semiotic and achieve a reunion. The daughter figure's subjectivity is on trial under the stifling maternal intervention. She tries to fight for autonomy and independence, with the help of the Third Party, an imaginary Father. But this route is not smooth since the devaluation of the imaginary Father and her subjectivity is exiled between the maternal and the paternal.Then, the stifling maternal presence overwhelms the daughter-persona and makes it unable to breathe, and also tend to suffocate them linguistically. For Plath, it was her mother Aurelia who initiated her into language, perhaps a little prematurely, thus enabling her to achieve a precocious individuation, a linguistic subjectivity. As the mother being the phallic mother, a figure she desires and a language initiator, Plath feels her struggle with the mother is also a struggle in literary activity and language. She feels oppressed by the maternal authority over her writing and believes it to be the cause of her writing barriers. She tries to combat on linguistic level only to find the failure and impossibility of this task. Here, the maternal also refers to Plath's literary ancestors, thus bring into play a theme of poetry and the anxiety of influence.Plath's poems on motherhood depict a mother and a daughter whose subjectivity is in process and never achieves stability.