Silvia Plath's Relationship with God/ Her Mother : Jennifer Byerly

Plath’s complicated relationship with her mother is one she wrote about often, notably in her famous poem “Medusa.” Plath’s mother Aurelia was a devout Unitarian and even was a Sunday school teacher who instilled upon Plath a Christian background that later became influential in her work and life. While in college Plath “identified herself as an ‘agnostic humanist,’ (Hromatko) “Medusa” effectively compares her mother with powerful religious imagery, though in a negative light.
Plath first describes her mother’s influence as “Your house your unnerving head – God-ball, Lens of mercies” (815.) Her mother, like God, has the power to judge – to punish Plath or be as merciful as she sees fit. She represents a set of rules, an unmoving and instituted set of beliefs and disapproving opinions, and yet unfathomable and ever-changing like a series of shifting lenses. If her mother is to be seen as the divine, she is more like a God of the Old Testament rather than the New Testament God Julian so believes in: Plath’s mother is the supreme evaluator, taking note of every sin and misstep. Wrathful and punishing, she sends “stooges” with “Red stigmata” and “Jesus hair” (815) to spy on Plath despite an ocean of distance between them.
Plath’s mother is compared to Mary a few stanzas later, as the most famous female figure in Christianity she is also the nurturer, the mother of God. If God is born of Mary there is an implication of Jesus being part of Mary, and thus Mary being part Holy. Despite this, Plath wants nothing to do with her mother’s divine influence: “Who do you think you are? A communion wafer? Blubbery Mary? I shall take no bite of your body” (815.) By rejecting her mother (and by association God) she condemns herself to a life of fleeting and earthly pleasures. She is aware of her sinning nature and confesses that she knows her mother’s wishes are aligned with the blessed. “Ghostly Vatican, I am sick to death of hot salt, Green as Eunuchs, your wishes, Hiss at my sins…” (816.) She despises her mother’s influence because it reminds her of her own sinful nature; her mother/God is a frightening authority that she cannot seem to escape.
To deny the natural bond between herself and her mother is like a rejection of God as well for Plath. Her distrust of her mother is a metaphor for the impasse she is spiritually, it is clear both in the writings and biographies of Plath that her relationships with both her mother and God were strained. “She thought of herself as "a pagan-Unitarian at best," she enjoyed the ceremony and the music. She was driven away from the church by a sermon praising the hydrogen bomb as "the happy prospect of the Second Coming." When she read an American Unitarian sermon on fallout shelters it moved her to tears. She wrote her mother, "I'd really be a church-goer if I was back in Wellesley. . . .the Unitarian Church is my church. How I miss it! There is just no choice here" (Hromatko.) Despite her yearning for a closer connection with her Mother/God, both connections stayed strained until her untimely death.