'Cow-heavy and floral in my Victorian nightgown': maternity and transatlanticism in Sylvia Plath's poetry and fiction.

This paper examines a transatlantic identity in the poetry and fiction of Sylvia Plath through the lens of her experiences of pregnancy and childbirth in England. Although the influence that her transatlantic movements had on her writing has attracted scholarly attention in the past 20 years, the cross-cultural dimensions of her poetic representation of maternity and motherhood have been largely ignored. Through a close reading of 'You're', 'A Life', 'Morning Song', 'Candles', and sections of The Bell Jar, I will argue that the depiction of maternal experiences is crucial to understand Plath's problematisation of the issue of identity, and especially to understand it in terms of post-war nationalist discourse rooted in the fear of the contaminated 'other'. In those works written during and after her first pregnancy in London, the female and maternal subjects are frequently displaced from their native land and situated on boundaries between two different societies and cultures. Focusing on the dual (or multiple) view of society and culture surrounding maternity that was fostered through her transatlantic movements, this paper will illuminate how Plath redefines motherhood as a ground on which one's national identity and the matter of belonging are to be radically questioned. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]