‘I am a garden of black and red agonies.’
In a maternity ward, three women contemplate their lives, the brutality of childbirth, and matters of the heart. This is the premise of Sylvia Plath’s play for voices, Three Women, written after she saw Ingmar Bergman’s 1958 film, Brink of Life (known in the U.K. as So Close to Life). In the late ‘50s and early ‘60s, the physiological process of having a baby was largely kept from women. Nowadays, we understand the purpose of contractions, the early signs of labour, and so forth. The pain of it would have come as quite the visceral shock to women who have been long since told that reproduction is their only purpose.
By the time Three Women was complete, Plath had not long since given birth to her second child, Nicholas Fararr Hughes, which happened to be the most difficult as she described in one journal entry:
‘I lifted my head and saw my first son, Nicholas Farrar Hughes, blue and glistening on the bed a foot from me, in a pool of wet, with a cross, black frown and oddly low, angry brow, looking up at me, frown-wrinkles between his eyes and his blue scrotum and penis large and blue, as if carved on a totem.’
A play for voices is a theatrical piece that does away with staging, focusing solely on the dialogue. And when you read Three Women, Sylvia Plath’s poetic stamp is crystalline. Each of the three voices are distinct, full-bodied, and powerful. They speak in verse, as opposed to a natural way of communicating, but this doesn’t make the play less effective. In fact, images such as ‘A dead sun stains the newsprint’ and ‘I am a garden of red and black agonies,’ illustrate the close relationship between birth and death. It is said that a woman is never closer to dying than when she is in the throes of labour, and plenty of mothers have gone so far as to say how they felt they would surely expire from the pain. As a woman myself, I experience excruciating period pains, which are said to be merely a fraction of what comes with having a baby.
Plath was heavily influenced by Dylan Thomas whose own play for voices, Under Milk Wood, is perhaps one of the most renowned pieces of literature in the world. But while he explores a broader landscape, Three Women is much more focused, almost claustrophobic.
‘This is a disease I carry home, this is death.’
None of Plath’s voices have names. Instead they are simply voices one, two, and three. This decision is quite a poignant one as it is common for many mothers to feel a loss of identity when they become mothers. As we have already established, some believe reproduction is all women are fit for. Throughout Sylvia Plath’s creative life, the problems of women were central to her work. She often spoke about her feelings in their clearest form in her journals:
‘Being born a woman is my awful tragedy. From the moment I was conceived I was doomed to sprout breasts and ovaries rather than penis and scrotum; to have my whole circle of action, thought and feeling rigidly circumscribed by my inescapable femininity. Yes, my consuming desire to mingle with road crews, sailors and soldiers, bar room regulars — to be part of a scene, anonymous, listening, recording — all is spoiled by the fact that I am a girl, a female always in danger of assault and battery.’
Though unnamed, each voice has a unique story. The second voice is the most agonised, which makes sense given it’s the apparent conduit for the author. The first voice belongs to a woman who has given birth to a son. She imagines the future life she will lead with this new prospect. The third voice decides to adopt her new daughter. Critics later assigned marital statuses and job roles to the second and third voices: a married secretary and a student respectively. However, I would like to posit a theory that all three women are simply different facets of Sylvia Plath herself. Could this not be a different version of the famous fig tree analogy from her novel, The Bell Jar?
First of all, she did indeed have a son and daughter, though there was no apparent intention of adoption with Frieda Hughes. In letters to Dr. Ruth Beuscher (her psychiatrist), Plath appeared to accuse her husband, Ted Hughes, of hitting her shortly before the miscarriage of her second child in 1961. Taking all of these facts into account, and the fact that there are three trimesters in a pregnancy, Three Women could simply be a disguise. When she was a student at Newnham College, Plath stayed at the Whitstead boarding-house. It was here that hers and Hughes’ relationship quickly developed.
Discussions of childbirth were taboo in the ‘50s, ‘60s, and even later. Even today, the notion of a woman choosing to forego pregnancy and childbirth is viewed by some as ‘unnatural’. But Sylvia Plath didn’t shy away from these types of conversations, evidenced not only by the play for voices I discuss here, but throughout her entire body of work. Her portrayal of mental illness in The Bell Jar was revolutionary. The relationship between Bergman’s film and Plath’s play for voices illustrates the gender gap. It was frowned upon for a woman to give credence to the horrors that befall her, but it was seemingly ok for a man such as Ingmar Bergman to portray them on screen. I suppose it was one of those ‘what you don’t know can’t you’ moments.
‘How shyly she superimposes her neat self / On the inferno of African oranges, the heel-hung pigs.’
Three Women was originally broadcast by the BBC on the 19th of August, 1962. Due to two of the original voice actors dropping out, the poetic voices were not as distinct as Plath intended, as evidenced by the audience feedback received after the broadcast. Over a decade later, another recording was made by KPFA Radio. In order of voices portrayed, the cast included: Judith Binder, Ann Bernstein, and Rachelle Towers. Following the performance, the three women discussed their own experiences of pregnancy and childbirth, effectively using Plath’s play as a springboard.
Overall, Sylvia Plath’s Three Women is one of her lesser known works, but certainly deserves to be read and heard. Since its conception and original broadcast, there have been various iterations and versions; something I suspect would have surprised Plath. Though, the world has certainly changed a good deal since 1962. There will no doubt be greater insights into the piece in years to come, as is the case with literature. Today, a play for voices seems old-fashioned, especially as there are plans to cut down on radio plays. I should like to think that poets such as myself will endeavour to carry the torch by writing our own. In doing so, we will mine the patchwork for the germs and gems of our bardish elders to stitch into us.
Courtenay's Corner 