Maudlin
Maudlin - meaning Summary
Grotesque Images of Gender
Plath's poem presents a stark, grotesque tableau of bodies and gender roles. It juxtaposes violent, birthlike imagery with distorted sexual archetypes—virgin, jack, fish-tailed girls—to suggest power, commodification, and bodily cost. The scenes compress conception, performance, and degradation into compact, unsettling snapshots, implying that identities and desires are bought, worn, or sacrificed. The tone is bitter and hallucinatory, inviting readers to confront the cruelty beneath social masks.
Read Complete AnalysesMud-mattressed under the sign of the hag In a clench of blood, the sleep-talking virgin Gibbets with her curse the moon's man, Faggot-bearing Jack in his crackless egg : Hatched with a claret hogshead to swig He kings it, navel-knit to no groan, But at the price of a pin-stitched skin Fish-tailed girls purchase each white leg.
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