Sylvia Plath's transformations of modernist paintings

In "The Disquieting Muses," "On the Decline of Oracles, "Perseus," and "The Ghost's Leavetaking," Plath similarly transforms paintings into diatribes against her mother, for coercing her to seek feminine achievements and for being overly involved with her life, and against her dead father, for abandoning her.12

"The Disquieting Muses"

In "The Disquieting Muses," Plath is plagued by her mother's and society's expectations that a girl should be musical and graceful, and she demonstrates the suffering experienced by the girl/woman who tries desperately hard to satisfy her mother's ambitions for her but is guiltridden in her adulthood by her failures. Although Plath names the poem after de Chirico's painting (1916, Private Collection, Milan), she totally transforms its tone and meaning.Various details of the painting's perspective and shadows contradict each other and suggest a minimal sense of unease, but there is little sense of any real danger (unlike, for example de Chirico's "Melancholy and Mystery of a Street," in which the little girl rolling a hoop does seem at risk). In his "Muses," each of the three statues (which are the primary subjects and focal points of the painting) is constructed of a classical base topped with either a head or a head and torso. These inert figures pose no threat to anyone: indeed, they are not living humans, nor even realistic statues, but dressmakers' dummies which are stuffed with kapok or horsehair and whose stitching shows. So unlike Plath's muses are they that it would seem as if she was influenced more by the painting's title than by the work itself. She may also have been attracted to the painting's aggressive colors, the contrasting oranges and depressing blackness that she herself favored in some of her most powerful poems.

But Plath transforms de Chirico's passive and harmless dummies into vicious Erinyes who hound her day and night to make her try harder to fulfill her mother's ambitions and to make her feel guilty because of her inability to reach the goals her mother had set for her.13 Although the painting shows three figures, only two are foregrounded. Likewise Plath discusses only two.

At the beginning of the poem, the speaker alludes to "Sleeping Beauty," the fairy tale in which a godmother who was not invited to a christening returned to torment the infant, and makes it clear that one of these Erinyes is the vengeance-seeking godmother of the fairy tale. The old women who torment the speaker in the poem are the muses of dance (specifically, ballet) and music (specifically, piano), respectively. Their help has been enlisted by the speaker's mother to try to coerce the speaker into overcoming her lack of talent and becoming artistic.

One vengeful "godmother" is Terpsichore, the muse of dance, who watched as "on tiptoe the schoolgirls danced / Blinking flashlights like fireflies / And singing the glowworm song." But the speaker is all clumsiness. She

could

Not lift a foot in the twinkle-dress

But, heavy-footed, stood aside