Sylvia Plath: ‘Three Women’

Last Saturday I saw a play by a writer famous for more than just her writing. Plath is notorious for her life story, which ended tragically with her suicide in 1962. Although a poet, novelist and storywriter of great talent, until now her one surviving playscript has never been performed on a public stage. Its one major performance was on BBC Radio, six months before Plath’s death.

Originally written as a radio play, ‘Three Women’ is a play for three voices describing varying experiences of pregnancy and motherhood. The youngest, a student, has to give her baby up for adoption; there is a woman who gives birth happily, and is able to keep her newborn son, although there are slight undertones of fear running through a lot of her monologues; but the most haunting character for me was the character of the woman who is unable to carry a baby to full term.

Through certain hints Plath makes you aware that she has probably had multiple failed pregnancies, and for me she was the most affecting character because it makes you think about the biological purpose of womanhood, and how awful it must be if for some reason you are denied the chance to fulfil a natural and beautifully desirable role. Plath herself had experience of a period of ‘barrenness’, and had at least one miscarriage, and – as with most of her writing – she’s most effective when writing of the worst emotions.

As someone who has studied Plath quite intensely, hearing her work performed and spoken aloud is a bizarre and wonderful experience, because the whole play became suddenly much more arresting. Whilst this is true of a lot of dramatic work, I feel it is especially true of this one, because of the extremely personal approach, something representational of Plath’s work as a whole. This play, being about something not just personal to Plath but also directly relating to any woman in the audience, and also, indirectly to any men watching (so therefore relating to everyone) is extremely moving.

I wish she’d written more plays; I would also have loved there to have been more interaction between the characters because (as the director of this one said in an interview) there are glimpses here of what she might have become as a playwright, but she died before any more could come out, and the play as it stands is not so much a play as three monologues thematically linked, and interspersed with each other. The director managed to portray some interaction by implying that the women were all in the hospital together at one point, and although they address the audience in their monologues, for one heightened moment, they all looked at and seemed to be addressing one another.

The student herself I felt was also representative of Plath at that stage of her life. Whilst the other two characters have experiences Plath herself went through, many people say that the character of the ‘student’ is less fully-formed because Plath never experienced an unwanted pregnancy nor the struggle of giving a child up for adoption. However, if one looks at the student’s experience, of having a secret to keep from classmates, and having to take an extended break from study, before returning with a secret ‘wound’ (as Plath calls it in the play) to try and finish a degree, the experience becomes very similar to Plath’s own experience of college life. Following a breakdown during one summer, she was incarcerated in a mental hospital for several months, before being declared healed and returned to her studies. She apparently felt this keenly, since after her return she found herself feeling a little isolated from her by now younger classmates, who had no inkling of her experiences. The student therefore shares Plath’s experience of feeling old before her time, and feeling separated from her peers, whilst struggling to heal. As a character therefore, I found her very fascinating.

Being interested in the writing as well as the drama and my direct response to it, I was also listening to the words used; she’s almost Shakespearian at times, I thought, and it was beautiful. But in addition to that, the student who gives her child up for adoption gives birth to a “red daughter”, which is redolent of symbolism for Plath – red was ‘her’ colour, symbolic of her life with Hughes, and symbolic of her womanhood, and her anger. So red, at the time this play was written, is symbolic of the negativity of her marriage to him, the breakdown of a home and a relationship which had sustained her through the best times of her life; it’s also a hot, angry colour, she uses it as symbolic of her younger, angry self.

Interesting therefore that the boy who is born to the ‘mother’ character is described as ‘blue’. Blue was Plath’s colour after the breakdown of her marriage. She wrote a letter to her mother saying that she’d chosen blue to be ‘her’ colour, and to be symbolic of what she hoped would be an eventual, personal rebirth. She was full of the idea of reincarnation. Not as in proper, corporeal death, as we mean it, but ‘little deaths’. Her suicide attempt was something she saw as a ‘death’. Other similar events were equally ‘little deaths’, like the ending of her marriage to Hughes.

Therefore in the aftermath of their separation, she was undergoing a period of death and rebirth, hence blue was the colour of her newer, hopeful life. Except that when a baby’s blue that’s a sign of lifelessness, of a lack of oxygen, and although the little boy becomes a normal colour again during the course of the play, and you know it’s still alive, he is continually referred to as the little blue boy. And blue being the colour Plath chose to symbolise herself during the time that led to her suicide, although it was supposed to be a hopeful colour, considering the horror of that time for her, it really isn’t. Blue is cold and the Winter of ’61-2 was very, very cold.

And the thing which shook me most was the way the mother referred to her baby’s eyelids as being “soft as moths”. The passage in ‘The Bell Jar’ which describes her suicide attempt talks of the cobwebs and darkness brushing her eyelids with “the softness of moths”. She’d already written ‘The Bell Jar’ at this point; maybe it was just a recycling of a phrase that she liked, but if you’re aware of what ‘softness of moths’ has previously been used to describe in her work it’s a horrible foreshadowing of darkness for the baby. So is the mother’s desperate need to keep her young son unblemished by society; she wants him to retain the innocence he was born with. Any reference to male figures in the play is in a negative tone. In fact, when any of the three women mentions men they are described as being “flat”. It is perhaps because they are cut off from the intensely emotional experience of motherhood, the ultimate symbol of womanhood, which gives men this ’flatness’. They cannot feel these extremes, because they cannot experience them. Therefore, their lack of understanding, and superiority in the face of these problems (the ’barren’ woman suffers a haemorrhage at work, the first sign of her miscarriage, and is treated with absolute indifference by her male co-workers) makes men into oppressors, and sets the women up as facing the world against them. Because of this misandrist tone, there is a sense of doom for the boy, who seems to be already condemned, being male.

As an experience, ‘Three Women’ was something unmissable. Even without a wider awareness of Plath’s work, it is an extraordinarily moving piece, poignant and affecting because of its supreme relevance to everyone. Childbirth is such an emotional and intense experience; Plath captures this and the huge range of emotions which accompany it with her usual flair and directness.

‘Three Women’ runs at The Jermyn Street Theatre, 16b Jermyn Street, until 7th February. www.jermynstreettheatre.co.uk