Redefining Motherhood - An Analysis of Sylvia Plath’s Poem Metaphor and Morning Song “I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor … I couldn 't quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn 't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.”
(Plath, Sylvia. The Bell Jar) Post World War II, American society saw a rigid social structure with definite gender roles. As Vanessa Martins Lamb points out, “Have dinner ready, prepare yourself, prepare the children, minimize all noise, be happy to see him, listen to him, make the evening his”,( Evasion of Growth, 5), here is what young women learned at school in the 1950’s in America. As Plath puts it “they don’t believe marriage can work without woman becoming maid, servant, nurse, and losing brain” (461).However, slowly this structure lead to suffocation and discontentment in the women of that age.
Since centuries a man has the whole world to explore and rule, a woman on the other hand, was supposed to