Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking

Book excerpt: Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking delves deeply into the notion of motherhood in Sylvia Plath’s work in order to redeem Plath from the one-dimensional role assigned to her of the suicidal, father-obsessed poet. Written from the theoretical perspective of Julia Kristeva’s theory of subject formation, the book focuses on Plath’s baby poems in which mother figures are seen as subjects-in-process oscillating between authentication and non-authentication in motherhood. Furthermore, since the mother is always a daughter, part of the discussion centers on Plath’s daughterhood poetry in which daughter figures are engaged in an endless struggle to release themselves from a suffocating maternal hold and achieve their own linguistic individuation. Finally Plath’s works for children, The Bed Book, The-It-Doesn’t-Matter Suit, “Mrs. Cherry’s Kitchen”, as well as her fairy tale poems, largely ignored until now, are read as manifestations of the self’s regressive journey to “once below a time” to grasp an elusive pre-symbolic organization and take signification back to infancy. The book makes extensive use of Plath’s drafts, mainly of the Ariel poems, her recycled materials, annotated books from her personal library, published and unpublished material from The Lilly Library Archive, The Mortimer Rare Book Room, and The Ted Hughes Archive in Emory.