Three Women

Taking a break here in grading hell to read about other kinds of heaven and hell: The New York Times reports on the translation to stage of a radio play that Sylvia Plath wrote shortly before her death.

Called "Three Women," it invokes the voices of three women describing a wanted baby, a miscarriage, and an unintended pregnancy. (Keep in mind that roughly half of all pregnancies in the United States today are unintended, and that about half of them were conceived on birth control...) The text of "Three Women" is available here.

This stanza from the Third Voice struck me:

I am a mountain now, among mountainy women.
The doctors move among us as if our bigness
Frightened the mind. They smile like fools.
They are to blame for what I am, and they know it.
They hug their flatness like a kind of health.
And what if they found themselves surprised, as I did?
They would go mad with it.

I think it is the line, "They hug their flatness like a kind of health" that got me.