Mother Moon: Conflation of myth and motherhood in Sylvia Plath's poetry

Abstract

The theme of Plath's personal life and mental illness overshadowing her writings threads its way through most of the criticisms of her work. While a reading of her poems as strictly confessional severely limits the readers perspective, some of the parallels between the subject matter of her writing and her biography are too obvious to ignore. My thesis sets out to analyze Plath's agency in crafting the mythic aura that surrounds her work and life today. In the Ariel poems, the figure of the mythic woman, occult and religious symbolism, mythological allusions, and especially the motif of the moon dominate the imagination of her readers. I argue that by employing these mythic images and the moon in her poetry, Plath directly contributes to the mythologizing of her own life and work. This reading of Plath reveals the work she does to craft and secure her legacy, beyond Hughes and criticisms, beyond even death. Rather than rejecting these conflations of the author and her work as misreadings, this thesis will set out to prove that perhaps Plath intended for her work to be read that way. Perhaps she succeeded in shaping an authorial legacy that lives on, albeit shrouded in mists of the carefully fabricated myth of her life.