Love, attachment, and effacement : romantic dimensions in Sylvia Plath’s children poems

Abstract

This article examines seventeen children poems by Sylvia Plath written in the years 1960 - 63, in relation to the poetics of romantic love. Drawing on motherhood studies ( Klein, 1975; O’Reilly, 2010; Rich, 1976; Winnicott , 1956, 1965, 1967), the maternal shift in psychoanalysis (see Bueskens , 2014 : 3 - 6), and attachment theory (Bowlby , 1950, 1969, 1988), it reads love as a continuous human disposition, informed by one’s attachment history, and realized at different stages of one’s life (Hazan & Shaver , 1987). It specifically refers to Daniel Stern’s and Anthony Giddens’s largely overlapping concepts of maternal and romantic love to argue that Plath’s children poems are significantly infused with a poetics of romantic love. This poetics, however, becomes gradually compromised by a poetics of ambivalence, withdrawal, and self - effac ement.