The Munich Mannequins

The poem’s overwhelmingly critical and despairing tone reflects the speaker’s distressed mental state. Plath creates a fractured state of mind through her use of form. With thoughts running irregularly over lines and stanzas, jumping back and forth through images and reflections, the pace is halting and the connections between phrases obscured.

The setting on a cold, Munich street in the dead of night reflects a sense of hopelessness as well. Winter is often associated with death, or the end of the growing season when all crops have died. Here, the coldness of winter reflects the coldness of society to women. Munich itself is a “morgue between Paris and Rome” (Line 12), where it is as if the cold city holds only the dead. The snowfall is used to create a sense of isolation and alienation. The snow “drops its pieces of darkness” (Line 16). As a result of the weather, “[n]obody’s about” (Line 17). This physical isolation matches the speaker’s mental and emotional alienation from society.

This poem reflects Plath’s complex and ambiguous relationship with the expectations placed upon women. On the one hand, she is critical of the beauty standards represented by mannequins and the women who choose to work as models and attain physical perfection over becoming a mother. The speaker tells the reader that motherhood, as illustrated by menstruation, is the natural purpose for a woman. The speaker criticizes these women for being emotionally “[n]aked and bald in their furs” (Line 13); she sees them as “without mind” (Line 15), and criticizes their superficiality masked under a luxurious exterior. Yet the speaker acknowledges the objectification of this career. Her use of the slang term “mannequin” reflects the objectification of these women. They are objects for the male gaze, used to display the latest fashion trends. By comparing these women to “[o]range lollies on silver sticks” (Line 14), the speaker emphasizes how these women are meant to be consumed.

By comparison, Plath’s description of motherhood is far from glowing. The speaker claims it is  an “absolute sacrifice” (Line 7), where the child becomes the primary focus of the mother, and the mother the primary focus of the child.

An autobiographical reading of this theme adds the context of her own struggles to juggle her career, her marriage, and her motherhood.