“There Is No Miracle More Cruel Than This”: Readian Relaxation and Maternal Agency in Plath’s Three Women

In this article, I contend that Plath’s Three Women (1962) stages a poetic commentary on the theory of natural childbirth pioneered by Dr. Grantly Dick Read and popularized during the mid-1950s in Great Britain and the United States as an alternative to the “Twilight Sleep.” Plath annotated Read’s bestseller Childbirth Without Fear (1959) and attended relaxation classes before the birth of her daughter Frieda; however, the long poem has yet to be read in terms of this medical intertext. As this article demonstrates, treating Plath’s poem alongside Read’s popular manual pushes us to consider poetry’s (generic) place in making legible psychologically complex embodied states. Although Read is not directly referenced, I argue that Three Women wrestles with the psychological implications of this obstetrician’s concept of the Fear-Tension-Pain Syndrome and the antenatal curriculum he developed to end such anxiety-produced suffering.