19 pages • 38 minutes read
The Disquieting Muses
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Background
Authorial Context
Although influenced by fairy-tale lore, magic, and surrealism, “The Disquieting Muses” is a very personal poem. It directly references three family members: Sylvia Plath’s father Otto Plath, her brother Warren, and, most predominantly, her mother Aurelia Plath. The poet alludes to real-life experiences, such as her mother’s stories about Warren’s teddy bear Mixie Blackshort, and Plath’s challenging music lessons. Plath was known to attend piano lessons as a teenager; this, along with her father’s early death when she was a child, gives the reader an approximate timeline of the years over which the events of this poem take place.
Within the poem, it is shortly after the speaker’s music lessons that they begin distancing themselves from their mother. Although the stanza is not given a specific time or age, understanding that the image comes from a time when Plath was on the cusp of childhood and adulthood gives new dimension to the poem’s context. Known to struggle with mental illness and depression, Plath likely experienced the shadow of this battle her entire life. It was only moving into her teenage years, however, that she would have had a slightly more cognitive grasp of what was happening to her. As we move into adulthood, a natural step in adjusting to our new understanding of the world is to question the roles of one’s parents and why they didn’t do more to protect us from it. We ask them, “How could you let this happen?”
Here we see how Plath begins questioning the safety of her childhood environment and developing a resentment for how that safety wasn’t enough to protect her from herself. By the end of the poem, the speaker has shed their mother’s influence and given themself over to the darkness in their head. This age likely coincides with Plath’s suicide attempts and the way her illness became a constant companion in her day-to-day life, as well as the chapter of her life in which she began fully embracing her role in the literary community.
Ekphrastic Context
“The Disquieting Muses” is an ekphrastic poem—a work that celebrates or is directly inspired by a work of visual art. John Keats’ “Ode to a Grecian Urn” is a well-known example of an ekphrastic poem. Here Sylvia Plath’s inspiration is “The Disquieting Muses,” a surrealist painting by Italian artist Giorgio De Chirico, painted in 1918. The painting depicts the Castello Estense, a medieval castle in Northern Italy, and three figures. In the foreground are two figures in stone: Melpomene and Thalia, the Greek Muses of tragedy and comedy. Melpomene stands upright while Thalia sits on a blue box. In the background is a third stone figure: Apollo, Greek god of the sun and companion of the muses.
It is unclear whether or not Plath knew of the artist’s true intentions for the third figure in the background. Rather than illustrating them in her poem as two muses and a god, or two women and a man, she shows her figures as three ladies, three godmothers, three muses, a unified trinity. She may have been attracted to the balanced dynamic of threes so prominent in fairy tale lore. The background and setting does not appear in Plath’s poem; thus, her work is not a direct retelling of the painting but a separate work that was born in the connection between the poet and the visual work. In the poem the speaker often refers to the muses’ “heads like darning-eggs” (Line 6) and the stitching in their faces. In reality only one figure within the painting is shown with this type of face, but it became a focus point in the story Plath brought into her poem. In this way the poet was able to honor aspects of De Chirico’s work while using it as a launching point to create something new out of her own experiences.
De Chirico’s work went on to inspire several later artists of the surrealist movement. This painting in particular, “The Disquieting Muses,” also inspired another poem many years after Plath’s: the villanelle “Two de Chiricos,” by Canadian poet Mark Strand.
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By Sylvia Plath
