In poetry, turns the myth on its head. Although Plath writes of her own mother, the image of the Medusa—the petrifying gaze, the suffocating umbilical cord as a “eel-like” line—captures the son’s (or daughter’s) terror of maternal engulfment. “There is nothing between us,” Plath writes, acknowledging a bond that is both lifeline and noose.
In poetry, turns the myth on its head. Although Plath writes of her own mother, the image of the Medusa—the petrifying gaze, the suffocating umbilical cord as a “eel-like” line—captures the son’s (or daughter’s) terror of maternal engulfment. “There is nothing between us,” Plath writes, acknowledging a bond that is both lifeline and noose.