“There Is No Miracle More Cruel Than This”: Readian

Relaxation and Maternal Agency in Plath’s Three Women

Sarah A. Kuczynski

Literature and Medicine, Volume 36, Number 1, Spring 2018, pp. 146-163
(Article)

Published by Johns Hopkins University Press

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/lm.2018.0006

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/698165

Access provided by Tufts University (5 Jul 2018 12:24 GMT)

146 “THERE IS NO MIRACLE MORE CRUEL THAN THIS”

“There Is No Miracle More

Cruel Than This”: Readian
Relaxation and Maternal
Agency in Plath’s Three
Women
Sarah A. Kuczynski

No young woman who learns carefully what I have written and

who practices deep respiration and relaxation . . . should have any
trouble during pregnancy, and when she comes to labor she must
leave the birth of her child to the uterus, patiently alienating herself
from its efforts during the first stage to open the birth canal and
then assisting to expel the baby when it calls upon her to give
gentle expulsive efforts.
—Grantly Dick Read, MD1

On an August day in 1962 the opening line of Sylvia Plath’s Three

Women was broadcast over the radio waves of the BBC’s Third Pro-
gramme: “I am slow as the world. I am very patient” (176, l. 1).
Alternately referred to as a verse drama and a polyvocal poem, Three
Women traces the thoughts of three separate women through various
stages of their respective pregnancies and chronicles their emotions as
they enter the hospital maternity ward for delivery (or, in the case
of the Second Voice, for a necessary procedure following her miscar-
riage).2 We know the poet heavily annotated her copy of Dr. Grantly
Dick Read’s Childbirth Without Fear.3 Moreover, before the birth of her
daughter Frieda, Plath enrolled in relaxation classes at a local antenatal
clinic.4 So the fact that Read’s theory of natural childbirth informs Three
Women is not surprising. In a general sense, Plath’s long poem depicts
labor as a process that takes place in a hospital ward but does not

Literature and Medicine 36, no. 1 (Spring 2018) 146–163

© 2018 by Johns Hopkins University Press
Sarah A. Kuczynski 147

entail the administration of anesthesia or analgesics. As such, Plath’s

description of labor reflects the distinguishing components of the Read-
ian theory as it was popularized in the mid-1950s in Great Britain and
the United States. Additionally, the stages of labor outlined in Three
Women closely follow Read’s prescriptive directions for a natural birth-
ing experience, a regimen framed by both the obstetrician and Plath ​
as a kind of work for which extensive training is required.5 Despite
the evident significance of Childbirth Without Fear for this long poem,
Three Women has yet to be considered as a commentary on this specific
obstetrical movement.6
Following Linda Wagner-Martin’s assertion that “all the knowledge
Plath had acquired about pregnancy and childbirth, and social attitudes
toward both, came to fruition in her magnificent—and radical—radio
play,” this article attempts to re-introduce the medical discourse of
Readian natural childbirth into discussions about the nuanced depic-
tion of labor in Three Women.7 Crucially, I propose that attending to
Plath’s poem in terms of the medical intertext Childbirth Without Fear
is not just a fascinating project of intertextual recovery; instead, read-
ing the poem alongside Read’s popular manual pushes us to consider,
more broadly, poetry’s (generic) place in making legible psychologically
complex embodied states. Although it does not refer directly to Dr.
Read, I contend that Three Women is a poem that wrestles with the
psychological implications of this obstetrician’s concept of the “Fear-
Tension-Pain Syndrome” and the antenatal curriculum he developed
to end such anxiety-produced suffering. I argue more specifically that
the monologues of the First Voice comprise a thoughtful indictment of
the Readian method’s reliance on practices of self-control that (para-
doxically) empower women to disavow themselves of bodily agency.8
As this article examines the poem’s negotiation of the rhetoric of
self-control central to Readian natural childbirth, it necessarily builds
upon previous feminist analyses of Three Women that grapple with
the location of maternal agency in the poem’s postwar landscape.9
My piece continues the formalist thrust of Leah Souffrant’s treatment
of the long poem, while shifting the conversation from new poetic
modes to the intertextual density of certain formal elements—including
repetition, line length, and metaphor.10 Apart from establishing Plath’s
familiarity with the Readian method, I have made a conscious effort to
separate my consideration of the poem’s response to Readian natural
childbirth from the author’s as the latter is expressed elsewhere. That
is, I prioritize the argument about Readian natural that is formally
staged in Three Women at the level of the poetic line.
148 “THERE IS NO MIRACLE MORE CRUEL THAN THIS”

In examining Three Women as a site of critical engagement with

discourses circulating around maternity, birth, and motherhood, my
project more generally furthers efforts by scholars such as Tess Cosslett
and Krista Ratcliffe.11 Indeed, like Cosslett’s Women Writing Childbirth,
I focus on how Three Women, as a literary account of birth, “makes
use of” but also “resists” Readian natural childbirth, which falls into
the second category of what Cosslett calls the “two official stories of
childbirth: the story of medical experts, and the story of natural child-
birth experts.”12 Despite sharing this basic aim, Cosslett and I diverge
in our respective interpretations of the role of the physician in this
process.13 Cosslett frames Read’s turn toward “the subjective experi-
ence of the birthing woman” as an extension of earlier efforts by male
physicians to regulate female bodies during labor.14 I wholeheartedly
agree that the Readian method was anything but innocent in its focus
on psychological aspects of childbirth; nevertheless, I maintain that the
process by which Read aimed to regulate the female mind upsets a
straightforward model of physician-imposed control in a manner that
merits further analysis. With its emphasis on relaxation training and
antenatal education, Readian natural childbirth delegated the bulk of
the work of controlling the mind to the female patients themselves.15
It is this internalized model of self-control that Plath explores in the
monologues of the First Voice.
The first section of this article provides a necessary introduction to
Read, his concept of the Fear-Tension-Pain Syndrome, and the antenatal
curriculum he developed; this will prepare readers to appreciate the
way the First Voice strives to control her thoughts over the course of
Three Women. In section two, I home in on the mantra-like self-address
of the First Voice as a textual site where Readian teaching emerges
in the speaker’s aspiration toward non-interference in her labor, via
practices of self-control—including deep respiration and a focus upon
the miraculous nature of birth. In its discussion of the eventual failure
of these practices in the case of Plath’s First Voice, the third section
analyzes the way the poetic speaker harnesses metaphor to assuage
the mental panic resulting from her adherence to Readian teachings by
restoring an undivided sense of the self in pain. Section four examines
the way Three Women’s step-by-step depiction of childbirth reveals the
destructive afterlife of this figurative coping strategy.
Sarah A. Kuczynski 149

Read and the Campaign against Tension

“To mould the [female] mind to visualise childbirth in its correct

perspective”: throughout his medical career Read doggedly pursued
this singular goal.16 Charged by a sense of civic urgency, this British
obstetrician penned the first edition of Childbirth Without Fear and devel-
oped an antenatal education program as part of his concerted attempt
to revolutionize hospital delivery in the Western world.17 In his work,
Read was motivated by the belief—initially theorized in a monograph
in 1933 and later, he asserted, corroborated by fieldwork—that labor
was not a naturally painful process. Specifically, Read believed the
pain of which women complained was the product of a “pathologi-
cal [muscular] tension” resulting from the laboring woman’s unquiet
mind.18 What made the woman’s mind unquiet, Read charged, was
the combined influence of “superstition, civilization and culture,” so-
ciocultural forces which warped female expectations about childbirth.19
Gesturing toward female anatomy and contemporaneous accounts of
the nervous system’s effect on muscular function, the doctor argued
fear caused muscular tension and maintained that—in the absence of
this mental state—natural birth should be pain-free.20
Read introduced the term “Fear-Tension-Pain Syndrome” to de-
scribe how “the fear of pain actually produces true pain through the
medium of pathological tension.”21 In labor, Read claimed that such
anticipatory fear produced conflict between “two groups of muscles”:
“the powerful longitudinal fibres [are] struggling to dilate the cervix
and expel the child, whilst the fear-stimulated circular fibres render the
lower uterine segment and the outlet resistant to dilation.”22 Childbirth
Without Fear, then, operates on the premise that pain-free childbirth can
be achieved provided the ill-founded association of labor with agony
is dismantled through re-education of the female population. Despite
sustained opposition from the medical establishment, who felt Read
failed to present the data necessary to support his theory, Readian
natural childbirth became popular in the mid-1950s in both America
and Great Britain.23 Women weary of the stupor of the “Twilight Sleep”
and increasingly dissatisfied with the oppressive tactics of male physi-
cians turned to Childbirth Without Fear for a comparatively empowered
approach.24 This article does not concern itself with the physiological
validity of the “Fear-Tension-Pain Syndrome” or of the Readian method
of natural childbirth more generally. I suspend the question of whether
the method is medically sound because my argument is concerned
with the psychological ramifications of the method’s reliance on self-
150 “THERE IS NO MIRACLE MORE CRUEL THAN THIS”

control; what is important for my purposes is the manner in which

this obstetrician’s best-selling monograph and his antenatal curriculum
enlisted women in a campaign of non-interference by fostering in them
a reverence for the agency of their own pregnant bodies.
To instill in postwar women a positive understanding of child-
birth, Read needed to create a safe space where the subject could be
discussed—his antenatal education program was designed as a stay
against the maelstrom of misinformation that primed young women
to associate labor with torture. Ideally, women would enroll in an ap-
proved program in the early weeks of pregnancy and would progress
through a course of weekly lessons.25 These lessons combined tutorials
on the physiological phenomena of pregnancy and the relationship
between emotional states and the nervous system with physical ac-
tivities that are visually comparable to yoga.26 Although regulation of
the breath was crucial to each stage of labor in the Readian model of
natural childbirth, as I will discuss in detail later on, an emphasis on
“efficient respiration” took the place of particular breathing exercises in
antenatal teaching.27 Pedagogically, the classes were organized to foster
inquisitiveness. To compensate for curt interactions with physicians,
Read insisted that “Expectant mothers must be allowed to ask questions
freely and without any fear of being thought ignorant”; “No question
is foolish,” he maintained, “if, unanswered, it creates a doubt or fear
in a woman’s mind.”28 This is not to say that the going was easy; in
fact, antenatal instructors presented training for natural childbirth as
a rigorous personal challenge.29 Childbirth Without Fear firmly stated
that to get positive results, students must exert “effort . . . in their
preparation for parturition” and insisted that “their achievement will
be commensurate with the patience and self-control they exhibit.”30
Along these lines, Read’s eventual rival Fernand Lamaze charged
the Readian program with the crime of “giving the woman a second
place” in her birth.31 By advocating simultaneously for a “dulling of
the consciousness” through relaxation and a “mystic exaltation associ-
ated with labour in general, and uterine contractions in particular,”
Read, in Lamaze’s critique, persuaded expectant mothers to renounce
their right to be a controlling presence in their birthing experiences.32
Predictably, the same qualms about the problematic locus of control
within Readian natural childbirth are expressed in the 1959 volume
Thank You, Dr. Lamaze, in which mother-turned-advocate Marjorie Karmel
describes her conversion experience—from her initial exposure to Read’s
Childbirth Without Fear to her blissful birth under the supervision of Dr.
Lamaze himself.33 As we shall see, a related line of critique surfaces
Sarah A. Kuczynski 151

in Three Women where the focus becomes the laboring woman’s active
complicity in her own erasure of bodily agency.

Applying the Lessons of Antenatal Education

In the long poem’s first monologue, Plath’s First Voice addresses

herself in mantra-like statements: “I do not have to think, or even
rehearse. / What happens in me will happen without attention”
(176, ll. 9–10). In the first stage of her labor, this ongoing internal
conversation reflects the premium placed on self-control in the Read-
ian antenatal curriculum. Appreciation for the miracle of birth was
especially necessary in the first stage of labor, Read maintained, for it
provided patience to counter the natural flood of relieved excitement
which the first contractions bring—especially to primaparous women
who welcome the subtle early contractions as long-awaited signs that
they will soon be freed of the strain of pregnancy. In one of his few
academic publications on the subject of natural childbirth, Read frankly
admits that in these early moments of labor, the woman “not only
wants her baby but . . . wants to get rid of the pelvic burden and
to be a freely mobile person” again.34 According to Readian teachings,
this self-centered urge for physical liberation was dangerous because
excitement often produced anticipatory anxiety that, in turn, activated
muscle tension, a sure harbinger of pain. To prevent this anticipatory
anxiety from taking over, the woman had to draw upon her antenatal
instruction, which stressed respect for childbirth as a process that hap-
pens without her active direction, but at the uterus’s own particularly
determined pace.
The poise of the opening lines of Three Women—“I am slow as
the world. I am very patient”—should, then, be understood in the
context of this dynamic: the immediate response of excitement at
the prospect of a return to life as ‘a freely mobile person’ and the
cultivated patience that Readian antenatal education proposed as a
countermeasure (176, l. 1). When the First Voice compares herself to
“the world,” a rotund object whose slow rotation is imperceptible to
humans on its surface, she emphasizes her sense of being rendered
nearly immobile by her enlarged, pregnant form. The planetary conceit
continues as the First Voice (as world) envisions herself:
152 “THERE IS NO MIRACLE MORE CRUEL THAN THIS”

Turning through my time, the suns and stars

Regarding me with attention.
The moon’s concern is more personal:
She passes and repasses, luminous as a nurse.
(176, ll. 2–5)

Here, despite the personalized valence of the phrase “my time” and the
language of “attention” that initially codes as luxurious care, a darker
facet of planetary motion surfaces. The First Voice (as world) cannot
escape the gaze of the suns, stars, and moon. The description reveals
a feeling of continuous exposure to the “attention” of the planetary
forms in her orbital proximity, as their orbital paths are determined by
gravitational force fields. Through this conceit, the First Voice reflects
on her awareness of the way pregnancy traps her in similar relation-
ships of regard—with hospital staff, for example. In the closing lines
of the first monologue, the speaker communicates her latent excitement
for a birth that will free her from her planetary state. “I cannot help
smiling at what it is I know,” she coyly admits; “I am ready” (177,
ll. 13 and 14). If she is indeed “ready” to experience the liberation
of childbirth, the First Voice remains, at this point in Three Women,
devoted to the Readian agenda and determined to prevent her will
from interfering with the natural progress of labor.
Such non-interference is necessary in Readian natural childbirth
because the uterus reigns supreme—much as it does throughout
twentieth-century obstetrics, as medical anthropologist Emily Martin has
documented.35 In his narration of the first stage of labor in Childbirth
Without Fear, Read recommends the following lecture be delivered to
the mother if she is experiencing difficulty allowing her mind and
skeletal muscles to relax:

The uterus must be left alone; it can do all this without any effort
to help on your part. Consider it a machine apart from yourself,
and in due course the dilation of the outlet will be complete. There
is no hurry; the door will open, but you must not make the work
harder for the uterus by tightening the door. If you are rigid and
squeeze up your face, then the muscles of the outlet will squeeze
up too. But the uterus is astoundingly strong and persistent; the
result of your resistance will be pain.36

Plath’s First Voice aspires to similar neutrality; in fact, she declares:

Sarah A. Kuczynski 153

When I walk out, I am a great event.

I do not have to think, or even rehearse.
What happens in me will happen without attention.
(176, ll. 8–10)

We should parse these lines carefully because the declaration “I do not

have to think, or even rehearse” is potentially misleading. Although
Readian antenatal education deemed thought modification essential, this
mental restructuring was necessary only to reverse what Dr. Read saw
as the tragic (mental) deformity resulting from modern acculturation.
Convinced that respect for childbirth as a bodily miracle was pervasive
within “primitive” populations, Read was resigned to the need for ar-
tificial indoctrination to return his thoroughly modern female patients
to this original attitude.37 In her recent analysis of these contradictory
components of the method, Jane Simonsen explains that “while birthing
was ‘primitive,’” Read also “insisted that childbirth preparation was
a task to be tackled with the deliberation that characterized civilized,
conquering nations.”38 The First Voice speaks the aforementioned lines
from the position of a modern woman whose patience and self-control
are the result of rigorous antenatal preparation. By portraying labor
as an exercise in complete uterine autonomy, the speaker expresses
a re-educated view of birth wherein her need “to think” is replaced
with the need to avoid thinking so as to let the uterus proceed natu-
rally (176, l. 9). These lines, then, nod to the mechanistic opening of
the cervix by the autonomous uterus, a phenomenon that cannot be
“rehears[ed]”: it is the dilation of the cervix that the First Voice ac-
knowledges will occur “without [her] attention” (176, l. 9 and l. 10).

Relaxing the Readian Way

Relaxation techniques were the means by which women in labor

could ensure their non-interference—relaxation techniques equipped a
woman to let the first stage of labor pass “without muscular effort on
[her] part.”39 Read derived his understanding of relaxation as a medical
aid from Edmund Jacobson’s work on progressive relaxation—a regi-
men through which patients developed “muscle-sense” by attending
to the comparative sensations of muscle contraction and release.40 For
Jacobson, as well as Read, the end goal of heightened awareness was
the ability to enter a state of negligible muscle tension—“characterized
by reduction of reflex irritability” and the absence of “an emotional
state” of mind.41
154 “THERE IS NO MIRACLE MORE CRUEL THAN THIS”

Despite the fact that Read’s method did not include any par-
ticular breathing exercises, such as those associated with Lamaze, a
dedication to breath distinguished Readian relaxation training from the
Jacobsonian model. Jacobson explicitly stated that “‘controlled breath-
ing’ is not used as an aid to relaxation in the present method” but
“rather the aim is to free the respiration from voluntary influence,
leaving its regulation to the autonomic system.”42 Readian relaxation,
on the other hand, involved considerable re-education to ensure “ef-
ficient respiration” both in “abdominal respiration, that is maximum
use of the diaphragm, and in upper thoracic breathing.”43 We might
speculate that the obstetrician’s attention to respiration was the product
of his general suspicion that modern acculturation had perverted hu-
man physiological efficiency. This emphasis on respiration is apparent
when one compares the physical training outlined in Childbirth Without
Fear to the regimen described in Jacobson’s Progressive Relaxation. In
Read’s antenatal classes a string of yoga-like poses, which pair breath
with movement to encourage abdominal respiration, precede what is
for Jacobson the sole necessary exercise, namely supine progressive
relaxation.44
After months of abdominal (or diaphragmatic) breathing exercises,
a product of Readian antenatal training would be prepared to imple-
ment deep breathing the moment labor commenced.45 “If the training
that has been given in deep respiration and complete relaxation is
well and truly carried out,” the obstetrician assured readers, “this
period of waiting” (the first stage of labor) would bring “much less
strain upon the [laboring] woman’s mind.”46 Formal qualities of the
first monologue in Three Women provide evidence of the efficacy of
preparation. Self-assuredness is reflected not just in the content or the
declarative phrasing but in the sonic qualities and rhythm of the First
Voice’s opening utterances as well. While Sandra Gilbert has empha-
sized the parallels in imagery and style that connect the “incantatory
incremental repetition” of Three Women to Virginia Woolf’s The Waves,
an investigation of the formal qualities of these same repetitive lines
reveals an equally strong affiliation with the breathing strategies of
natural childbirth—specifically, the balanced inhales and exhales that
characterize abdominal respiration.47 Although Three Women is written
in free verse and thus does not employ a regular metrical pattern,
Plath frequently orders her lines with caesuras that force the reader to
voice these lines with a pause in the middle. To return to the open-
ing line: the poise that resonates in statements like “I am slow as the
world. I am very patient” partially inheres in the relative balance of
Sarah A. Kuczynski 155

the hemistiches (half-lines), which mirror the relatively equal periods

of inspiration and expiration in deep breathing (176, l. 1). Behind
the balanced lines of the opening monologue, however, is an active
mind that will struggle to assume the blank mind that is the mental
terminus of progressive relaxation.48
If no expression of pain is explicit in the first monologue, we
nevertheless detect latent anxiety as the persona of the First Voice
takes in her surroundings. Presumably looking out the window, she
notes that the moon “passes and repasses, luminous as a nurse” and
wonders to herself whether the lunar form is expressing concern for
the labor in progress—“Is she sorry for what will happen?” (176, ll.
5 and 6). Here is a twinge of anticipatory fear. Then, chiding herself
for her pessimistic interpretation, the First Voice instantly reassumes
an optimistic framework, reassuring herself that the personified lunar
body is “simply astonished by fertility” (176, l. 7). In this correction
of her initial reading of the moon, the First Voice aligns herself with
Read’s ideal modern mother who—through deliberate re-education—
transports herself to a “primitive” mindset where birth is the ultimate
miracle. As the sensations accompanying the transition between the
first and second stages of labor overcome the First Voice, she becomes
increasingly unable to disavow her mental and physical reality in this
manner. In my reading of Three Women, Plath sets the scene for this
eventual unraveling in the first monologue where she attends to the
problematic aim of Readian training: to assume a state of patient self-
control through denial of bodily agency.

The Unquiet Mind

Natural childbirth literature depicted the transition from the

first stage of labor to the second as one that profoundly altered the
woman giving birth. In fact, Read issued a warning to obstetricians,
nurses, and midwives: they should not expect that the patient they
saw through the first stage of labor would remain in the second
stage. “You are dealing with several different women during labour,”
Read mused, “she who is reacting to her social environment in the
early first stage has little physical and mental resemblance to herself
reacting to uncontrollable neuro-muscular energies of the late second
stage.”49 Plath’s First Voice undergoes a violent transformation of this
kind, as she succumbs to the anticipatory fear Read so passionately
labeled the root of all labor pain. The “controlled relaxation” of her
156 “THERE IS NO MIRACLE MORE CRUEL THAN THIS”

first stage gives way to a second stage in which the periods between
contractions are electrified with a near-hysterical sense of impending
doom; patience and self-control are dramatically compromised. While
Read stressed the problematic stretch between the first and second stage,
when “the woman . . . begins to realize that she is completely helpless
in relation to her uterine contractions,” he maintained that relaxation
techniques could ward off discomfort during this jarring transition.50
Plath is clearly less optimistic where the sustainability of relax-
ation techniques is concerned. The opening line of the First Voice’s
second monologue signals the speaker’s loss of self-composure: “I
am calm. I am calm. It is the calm before something awful” (179, l.
192). Her repetition of the phrase “I am calm” reads as a desperate
attempt to command herself into a tranquil state of mind. The sheer
length of the phrase that follows the second “I am calm” marks the
total absence of the relaxed state for which the speaker desperately
calls. While, as we observed, the opening monologue of the First Voice
contains several lines with nearly balanced halves divided by caesuras,
the second monologue is filled with uneven lines that visually dwarf
the contained lines of the previous section. Increased intralinear punc-
tuation (mostly commas and periods) creates abrupt, irregular pauses
and gives the self-addressed lines during the second stage of labor a
choppy texture. For example, the First Voice articulates her experience
of “the calm before something awful” as:

The yellow minute before the wind walks, when the leaves
Turn up their hands, their pallors. It is so quiet here.
The sheets, the faces, are white and stopped, like clocks.
Voices stand back and flatten. Their visible hieroglyphs
Flatten to parchment screens to keep the wind off.
They paint such secrets in Arabic, Chinese!
(179, ll. 93–98)

Here, multiple commas splice the string of thoughts, imbuing the

reflection with frenetic energy. Observations and qualifying remarks
are added on in the middle of thoughts not yet concluded. Enjambed
lines mark uncontainable excess. Similarly, short, full-stop sentences
such as “It is so quiet here.” or “Voices stand back and flatten.” read
as uncontrollable interjections.
Amidst her increasingly uncensored commentary, the First Voice
harnesses metaphor as a means of externalizing the uterus, the reproduc-
tive organ that Readian teaching treats as both internal to the female
body and at the same time completely autonomous. In monologues
Sarah A. Kuczynski 157

narrating her second and third stages of labor, the speaker formulates
figurative scenarios in which her self and her uterine contractions are
represented as physically distinct entities. For example, she describes
the interval between contractions in this way:

Waiting lies heavy on my lids. It lies like sleep,

Like a big sea. Far off, far off, I feel the first wave tug
Its cargo of agony toward me, inescapable, tidal.
And I, a shell, echoing on this white beach
Face the voices that overwhelm, the terrible element.
(179, ll. 108–12)

A widening simile opens the description: the weight of anticipation—

“waiting”—is compared first to sleep and then to an immense body of
water. In the postwar period, waves were commonly used as images to
help expecting mothers visualize contractions.51 What is unique about
the wave imagery in Three Women is that the First Voice specifies that
the waves are acting in opposition to her body, not along with it. In
standard descriptions of labor the wave would rise in the uterus and
move with the contraction to the terminus of the birth canal (and onto
the “shore” of the hospital bedding). In Plath’s extended metaphor the
waves are moving in the reverse direction with respect to the laboring
subject. Although the shell is diminutive and hollow, by identifying
with this object, the First Voice frees herself from the necessity of
registering a part of her own body (her uterus) as the relentless agent
of her pain. Through the extended metaphor, the speaker advances an
alternate, less insidious, model of harm whereby the uterine contractions
are visualized as turbulent waters that approach her from without. The
figurative language here possesses liberating potential.
As she passes through the third stage of labor, the First Voice
sustains her attempt to (metaphorically) expel the uterus so as to restore
an undivided sense of the self in pain. With lines like “There is no
miracle more cruel than this. / I am dragged by the horses, the iron
hooves,” the First Voice constructs a figurative realm where her pain
results from torture (180, ll. 127–28). Significantly, this second meta-
phorical externalization endows the agony of labor with an element of
human intentionality: being “dragged by the horses” is a punishment
inflicted upon an individual on whom judgment has been passed. The
natural valence of tidal waves engulfing a seashell is absent here. We
might even see Dr. Read indirectly implicated in the torture because
this second metaphor of pain follows a dismissive invocation of the
Readian notion of miraculous birth.
158 “THERE IS NO MIRACLE MORE CRUEL THAN THIS”

Erasing Labor’s Work

During the agonizing experience of labor, acts of metaphoric

externalization are productive for the First Voice: they provide her
with figurative tools to stifle the panic of self-division produced by
the Readian insistence on deference to the autonomous uterus. Refus-
ing—or unable—to adopt the empty mind of the relaxed patient, the
First Voice actively employs her imaginative faculties to combat her
sense of herself as the complicit victim of her own reproductive organ.
Nevertheless, Plath accentuates the long-term negative consequences
of this figurative strategy in the last few monologues where the First
Voice persists in externalizing the agency of labor but with a key dif-
ference: in the final sections of Three Women, the First Voice depicts
herself as the passive instrument of her newborn child.
The helpless infant becomes the ultimate self-made man, as his
mother portrays him actualizing his own birth. Observing her still-
cyanosed son, the First Voice exclaims: “who is he, this blue, furious
boy, / Shiny and strange, as if he had hurtled from a star?” (181, ll.
162–63). She then bears humbled witness to his swift entrance: “He
flew into the room, a shriek at his heel” (181, l. 165). Were this a
singular instance, we could deem the language of active achievement
merely coincidental; however, the following monologue builds upon
this image of newborn children as sole agents of their births:

Look, they are so exhausted, they are all flat out

In their canvas-sided cots, names tied to their wrists,
The little silver trophies they’ve come so far for.
(183, ll. 219–21)

Here, the First Voice figures the hospital bands bearing the infants’
names as their “silver trophies,” concretizing the notion that her son
exited the birth canal not only of his own volition but in knowing
pursuit of a prize. Just as the language of agency is transferred from
the uterus to the newborn son, the First Voice relocates the site of
the miracle, which in Readian teachings inhered in the independent
strength of the uterine muscles, to her infant. In fact, the First Voice
uses messianic imagery to describe the sleeping children who lie with
her son in the hospital nursery—they are “the miraculous ones” (183,
l. 229). Recuperating the planetary imagery she used to describe her
cumbersome, full-term physique, the First Voice labels her son he
who “hurtled from a star” and sees the infants, more generally, as
Sarah A. Kuczynski 159

“showering like stars on to the world” (181, l. 163 and 183, l. 228). In
these last monologues, the mother’s labor—her active work throughout
the birth—is entirely elided. Agency remains situated outside of the
thinking, feeling maternal subject.
Ensconced in her son’s nursery—a place of “clear bright colors,”
teeming with stuffed animals, “the talking ducks, the happy lambs”—
the First Voice utters her final thoughts in lines of balanced halves,
recapitulating the caesuras of her opening monologue (185, ll. 317 and
318). Formal parallels aside, a thematic preoccupation with calm con-
nects these closing lines to those self-addressed mantras of the early
monologues. “I am reassured. I am reassured,” the First Voice insists
(185, l. 316). The Fear-Tension-Pain Syndrome underpins the closing
scene, as the young mother makes the connection between a relaxed
mind and the prevention of suffering; only here, the suffering is not
her own but her child’s. Specifically, the First Voice reveals that she
has been having nightmares, and communicates a strong desire to
contain the negative images that terrorize her dreams. Unease must
not invade her waking life and harm her child: “I am simple again.
I believe in miracles,” this speaker firmly declares (185, l. 319). Just
as a focus on the perceived miracle of childbirth was used to calm
the mind in prenatal training, the First Voice makes her newborn
the focus of calming mental exercises in the last monologue. “I shall
meditate upon normality,” she states, “I shall meditate upon my
little son” (186, ll. 323 and 324). Like her experience with Readian
childbirth, motherhood for the First Voice is depicted as an endless
series of micro acts of refocusing toward the end of minimizing the
interference of strong emotions.

Conclusion: Poetic Form and Social Critique

In the final analysis, then, the critical contribution of the mono-

logues discussed here is the work of making visible the invisible
(because self-effacing) effort of self-control. To do this, Plath makes us
privy to the thoughts of the First Voice at each major phase of her
labor and delivery. The monologues form an internal, cognitive reel
that is riddled with dissonance, a dissonance that Plath represents
formally through repetition, changes in line length, and, most dramati-
cally, through metaphor. The intuitive reading of the moon in the first
monologue, the metaphors harnessed during the second stage of labor,
the haunting dreamscape alluded to in the final monologue: these
160 “THERE IS NO MIRACLE MORE CRUEL THAN THIS”

imaginative gestures are portrayed as organic in their emergence but

subsequently become casualties of forceful acts of self-censure. While
the First Voice’s mental panic during the second stage of labor might
surface in a furrow of the brow or a wide-eyed stare, the extent of
her efforts to return to balanced lines and sanguine calm could not
be captured externally; instead, we need verse to expose the mental
gymnastics that are carried out below the scrutable surface. In an odd
way, too, Plath’s insistence on the mental effort the First Voice must
expend over the course of the poem denaturalizes natural childbirth,
making conscious birth something that is ultimately contingent not on
the internalization of any antenatal curriculum but on the moment-to-
moment psychological labor of the patient. In so doing, Plath restores
to the laboring woman that which was forfeited in subscribing to a
birthing method that favors the blank mind and the passive body:
visibility for panic, for struggle, for fear.

NOTES

I would like to extend thanks to the journal’s editors and to my anonymous

reviewers for their helpful feedback. To my writing group—Christina Lee and Eric
Meckley—for looking at multiple drafts of this piece when they had so many other
things to do. To Professor George Lensing, for introducing me to Three Women and
for encouraging me to pursue this project in its early stages.
1. The epigraph originates in a letter the doctor wrote in response to an
anonymous woman’s inquiry. The letter is reproduced in Post-War Mothers, ed.
Mary Thomas, 114.
2. For a discussion of polyphony and Three Women, see Souffrant, 25–41.
3. Plath’s personal copy of the third and enlarged edition is housed in the
Mortimer Rare Book Room at Smith College.
4. Plath, Letters Home, 365 and 369.
5. For example, one novel aspect of Read’s labor plan, outlined in his article
“The Discomforts of Childbirth,” was the stipulation that the mother hold her
newborn prior to the expulsion of the placenta to prompt “a reflex contraction of
the uterus”; the baby would then be put in a nearby crib while the placenta was
expelled (653). Plath’s First Voice follows her description of the expulsion of her
placenta—“A red lotus opens in its bowl of blood”—with the bemused question,
“What did my fingers do before they held him?”—a poetic sequence of events
consistent with Read’s description (181, ll. 168–69; l. 170).
6. Luke Ferretter treats Plath’s familiarity with Readian natural childbirth in
his discussion of the portrayal of “Twilight Sleep” in The Bell Jar (Ferretter, 127).
7. Wagner-Martin, 101. For work on medicine and other poetry by Plath, see
Brain, “Medicine”; Didlake, “Medical Imagery.”
8. Following Souffrant, I refer to stanzas as “monologues” because nothing
in the poem indicates that the three speakers are in dialogue with one another or
with anyone, for that matter (Souffrant, 29).
9. See Peel, 198–201, and Annas, 81. For work connecting the poem to op-
pressive “technologies” in the hospital maternity ward, see Fraser, “Technologies
Sarah A. Kuczynski 161

of Reproduction” (548). Fraser’s work is a comparative piece that looks at the

poem’s relation to the Bergman film Brink of Life (1958). It has long been accepted
that Plath based Three Women on Brink of Life because in June 1962, she wrote her
mother: “I’ve had a long poem (about 378 lines!) for three voices accepted by the
BBC Third Programme (three women in a maternity ward, inspired by a Bergman
film)” (Letters Home, 456).
10. Souffrant, 25–32.
11. For Ratcliffe, first-person accounts of birth merit attention as significant
exceptions to the literary tradition of “omitting birthing women’s points of view
and representing them as observed objects” (“Bearing Witness,” 51).
12. Cosslett, 4.
13. Cosslett’s interests lie primarily with Read’s invocation of the “primi-
tive woman” (Cosslett, 8–46). Cosslett gives a brief reading of Three Women in the
context of barrenness but does not mention Read in connection with the poem
(82 and 140–41).
14. In Cosslett’s estimation, Childbirth Without Fear operates on the assumption
that “the male obstetrician must control” his female patient’s “state of mind” (15).
15. William Ray Arney underscores the shifting nature of physician control
in the postwar period when he remarks that Read “wanted to shift the balance of
power and responsibility for control from obstetricians to women”; in fact, Arney
suggests that “using natural childbirth techniques” during this period entailed sur-
render to “a panoptic regime of [social] control” (230).
16. Read, Childbirth, 195.
17. The first edition of Childbirth Without Fear was published under the title
Revelation of Childbirth in 1942. Although the Readian method of natural childbirth
was first articulated in a 1933 monograph, the rhetorical urgency increases in the
postwar volumes as the obstetrician paints maternity as a civic duty. In the 1959
edition, Read matter-of-factly states that his method “is one of the foundations of the
progressive development and philosophical stability of the future races of man” (71).
18. Read, Childbirth, 25.
19. Ibid., 10.
20. This only applied to what Read termed “normal, natural, uncomplicated
labour”: cases when “the [uterine] muscles contract well” and “there is no dispro-
portion between the baby and the birth canal” (Childbirth, 20).
21. Ibid., 25.
22. Ibid.
23. For contemporaneous criticism of Readian natural childbirth from the
medical establishment, see Reid and Cohen, “Evaluation of Present Day Trends.”
For a brief survey of Read’s precursors in mind-body theories of childbirth, see
Caton, “Who Said Childbirth Is Natural?”
24. For a reading of the empowerment associated with the instrumentaliza-
tion of medical knowledge in the postwar period, see Apple, Perfect Motherhood,
107–34. For an argument about the collusion between the medical establishment
and postwar natural birthing movements, see Oakley, Women Confined.
25. Read, Childbirth, 185–223.
26. In a letter to Read collected in Post-War Mothers, one mother derides
the originality of his preparatory exercises—comparing them to “acrobatic yoga”
(Thomas, 141).
27. Read, Childbirth, 197.
28. Ibid., 193. Antenatal classes hardly originate with Read; indeed, the ob-
stetrician begins his chapter on “Antenatal Procedures” by stating that “antenatal
care has been carried out to a certain extent by midwives, both male and female,
for many hundreds of years” (Childbirth, 185).
29. Richard and Dorothy Wertz note, “a major drawback of Read’s book . . .
was that he had described birth as an athletic contest at which one either succeeds
or fails” (Wertz and Wertz, 191).
162 “THERE IS NO MIRACLE MORE CRUEL THAN THIS”

30. Ibid., 197.

31. Lamaze, 74.
32. Ibid., 74, 45.
33. Karmel, 18–33.
34. Read, “Discomforts,” 252. See also Read, Childbirth, 93; Read, Introduction, 16.
35. Martin, 58 and 61.
36. Read, Childbirth, 138–39.
37. Ibid., 36–39.
38. Simonsen, 139.
39. Read, Childbirth, 215.
40. Jacobson, xvi.
41. Ibid., 34, 218.
42. Ibid., 60.
43. Read, Childbirth, 197.
44. Readian antenatal exercises are depicted in the insert between pages 212
and 213 of Childbirth and in Introduction, 65–75.
45. Read explains that the exercises will encourage “efficient respiration” by,
among other things, encouraging “complete exhalation,” which would prolong the
period of active expiration (Childbirth, 197).
46. Read, Introduction, 18.
47. See note 44 above.
48. In Childbirth, Read quotes Jacobson’s assertion that “an emotional state
fails to exist in the presence of complete relaxation” (200).
49. Read, Childbirth, 145.
50. Read, “Discomforts,” 653.
51. Cf. Karmel, 46 and Kitzinger, 126–27.

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