Domesticity P&H Flashcards
(14 cards)
General Thesis
Plath and Hughes present a sense of awe toward family life. However, this is undercut by a sense of insecurity and danger within domestic life. For plath this is the loss of identity through becoming a mother whilst for hughes this is the danger of manipulation within relationships.
Morning song - start quotes
‘love set you going like a fat gold watch’
‘all night your moth-breath flickers among the flat pink roses’
‘I’m no more your mother’
Full moon and Little Frieda - start quotes
‘full moon’ ‘little frieda’
‘a spider’s web, tense for the dew’s touch’
‘to tempt a first start to a tremor’
- There’s a tension between stillness and trembling in these images that captures Frieda’s sheer sensitivity to her surroundings.
**“moon! you cry suddenly, moon! moon!” **
The daughter is calling to the father in this line as the moon is symbolic of the father.
The reference to the moon is significant because it compares the father to elemental forces of natural.
Significantly, this suggest that the father’s love is everlasting and that he’ll always be there for the daughter.
Morning song - end quotes
‘whitens and swallows its dull stars’
‘the clear vowels rise like balloons’
- loss of the speaker’s identity and the child gaining her identity
Full moon and Little Frieda - end quotes
‘cows are going home’
‘a dark river of blood, many boulders, balancing unspilled milk’
‘the moon stepped back like an artist amazed at a work’
Lesbos - start quote
‘lesbos’
‘my child… little unstrung puppet’
‘flapping and sucking, blood-loving bat’
Lovesong - start quote
‘his kisses sucked out her whole past or tried to’
- Tracy Brain: ‘stereotypically gendered forms of violence’ ‘hers are manipulative and entrapping his violent’
‘Her laughs were assasins attempts’
Lesbos - end quote
‘It is all hollywood, windowless, the fluorescent light’
‘I see your cute decore close on you like the fist of a baby’
lovesong - end quote
‘she bit him she gnawed him she sucked
‘she wanted him complete inside of her
‘in the morning they wore each other’s faces
‘You’re’ (1960) - start quotes
‘feet to the stars, and moon-skulled’
- macrocosmic imagery creates sense of universality
- ‘moon’ fertility, femininity and changeability
- skeletal imagery: white, pure, innocent
- aspirant alliteration earlier on greates sense of breathless joy
‘thumbs-down on the dodo’s mode’
- playful rejection of extinction - confirming plath is referring to an unborn child since only a continuation of humanity could contradict extinction in this manner
- jovial tone created
‘wrapped up in yourself like a spool’
- wool or threat: image of the umbilical cord
- also connotes that the child is only concerned with his or her own comfort ‘in yourself’
structure: free verse allows plath to capture fluidity and instability of emotions during pregnancy
you’re - end quotes
‘Vague as fog and looked for like mail’
- ‘fog’ hinders and blinds perception but does not remoe every bit of detail
- parent waiting to understand concepts of the child before birth
-domesticity and parenthood is uncertain
‘a clean slate, with your face on’
- futility of language: none of it can correctly explain the child’s identity
- Plath’s fear of a loss of identity in the creation of the baby’s identity
Context
- 1960: plath gives birth to frieda
- 1961: Plath has a miscarriage
- 1962: Hughes leaves plath
- 1962: Plath goes to visit her friends
- ‘26 down poems are written in blood’ after Hughes leaves
- 1963: Plath commits suicide
Critics Plath
- David Trinnidad: poem is a ‘condemnation of sisterhood’
- Whitton: plath is not concerned with the ‘emotional processes of being a mother, but with the mechanical processes of the body and mind’
Critics Hughes
- ‘Diane Middlebrook: ‘call and response poems’ ‘poetic reply’ to morning song (Full moon)
- Tracy Brain: ‘stereotypically gendered forms of cruelty’ ‘hers manipulative and entrapping, his violent’
