Summer 2001
Volume 27, Number 4

What my mother knew, then, what she was saying as, keening, lamenting, she cried "I'm a widow" with that metallic edge of amazement at discovering herself in a new place--the place of death--was what I wasn't to discover until more than a quarter of a century later, when my husband died and death so surprisingly opened its dark doors to me, too.

See Also Carolyn G. Heilbrun: Marriage and Contemporary Fiction (Winter 1979) Vladimir Jankélévitch: Pelléas and Pénélope (Spring 2000) Michael Riffaterre: Syllepsis (Summer 1980) Laura Kipnis: Adultery (Winter 1998)

Not that a poet need necessarily be herself a widow to try to grasp the widow's special relationship to loss, the bereaved wife's sense of death's plausibility. In 1961, a few years before my father died, Sylvia Plath had drafted a poem on which I was to brood repeatedly over the years, as I thought about my mother's grief. Perhaps it was Plath's early, traumatic loss of her own father--or perhaps, even more likely, it was what evidently became her embittering intimacy with her own mother's mourning--that caused this acolyte of the thesaurus and the dictionary to focus the piece (simply entitled "Widow") so intensely on the dreadful etymology of the very word we use to define a woman whose husband has died.

"Widow. The word consumes itself--" is how Plath's poem begins, "consumes itself" perhaps precisely in the sense of vacating itself or emptying itself out, and she goes on to describe the word as a "dead syllable, with its shadow/Of an echo."3 Wid or widh, Oh! is what she must have been thinking of. And thinking, too, that widh leads to the French vide, meaning "empty" or, indeed, in an English word that chimes with it, "void." "Vide, Oh!" says the poet. Or "Void, Oh!" maybe even "Shad-ow" or "Shade-oh!" Yet the shade, says Plath also, is with the widow, in her and on her, as she enters the "dead syllable" of her newly empty life, "with its shadow/Of an echo." For "Death is the dress" the widow "wears," adds Plath, "her hat and collar," as if the death of the husband had annihilated, nullified, the wife, too ("W," l. 13, p. 164). Did all those growing-up years with a widowed mother, years haunted by depression and deprivation, teach this poet that?

3. Sylvia Plath, "Widow," The Collected Poems, ed. Ted Hughes (New York, 1981), ll. 1, 6Ð7, p. 164; hereafter abbreviated "W."

Sandra M. Gilbert, professor of English at the University of California, Davis, has most recently authored Kissing the Bread: New and Selected Poems, 1969Ð1999 (2000) and edited Inventions of Farewell: A Book of Elegies (2000). She is currently at work on a book tentatively entitled Death's Door: Mourning, Modernity, and the Poetics of Memory, from which "Widow" is drawn. Her email address is sgilbert@ucdavis.edu and webpage is http://www.Previewport.com/Home/gilbert.html