From her wooden sleep...Ydessa Hendeles at the ICA

Marlene Dumas and Sonia Delaunay at The tate Modern

WML Yinka Shonibare and Hannah Lowe

The poem opens ‘perfection is terrible it cannot have children’ this refers to the model German women that Plath was noticing everywhere as well as the inanimate mannequins. Using the mannequin restriction of not having a womb, live model woman risk their perfection by becoming pregnant

In "The Munich Mannequins" Plath refers to the lives of women and how they are seen by others, specifically with regard to how biological functions related to childbearing are perceived to define them. The first line of the poem, "Perfection is terrible, it cannot have children," refers both to the appearance of the culturally ubiquitous live German models and that of inanimate mannequins. Just as mannequins cannot procreate, nor can their live counterparts risk their "perfection" by becoming pregnant. Plath suggests that perfection itself "tamps the womb," and goes on to describe the emotions she associates with menstruation the cycles of menstruation symbolized by the moon.

Literary critic Pamela J. Annas argues "The Munich Mannequins" describes "particularly well the social landscape within which the "I" of Sylvia Plath's poems is trapped".She supports this ultimately through highlighting the domination of the artificial (mannequins) over the real (women) and the male society's transformation of women into puppets, and unnatural figures, representing their "disgust with" and "fear of women".She goes on to say that the winter setting in Plath's nature-themed poems represent a period of hibernation before spring and rebirth, while in the context of this city poem, a harsher, social, male-dominated setting, the winter setting represents death instead.

 

THE MUNICH MANNEQUINS

Perfection is terrible, it cannot have children.
Cold as snow breath, it tamps the womb

Where the yew trees blow like hydras,
The tree of life and the tree of life

Unloosing their moons, month after month, to no purpose.
The blood flood is the flood of love,

The absolute sacrifice.
It means no more idols but me,

Me and you.
So, in their sulphur loveliness, in their smiles

These mannequins lean tonight
In Munich, morgue between Paris and Rome,

Naked and bald in their turs,
Orange lollies on silver sacks.

Intolerable, without mind.
The snow drops its pieces of darkness,

Nobody’s about. In the hotels
Hands will be opening doors and setting

Down shoes for a polish of carbon
Into which broad toes will go tomorrow.

O the domesticity of these windows,
The baby lace, the green leaved confectionary,

The thick Germans slumbering in their bottomless Stoiz.
And the black phones on hooks

Glittering
Glittering and digesting

Voicelessness. The snow has no voice.

The next thing is a bird dressed as an old woman – on the idea of 7 shapes of women. Tonight I'm presenting mannequins and birds. Mannequins tend to be younger women. These birds are old women in diguise. This is from the magic shop

Trickster mythology.

he became and remained everything to every

 man—god, animal, human being, hero, buffoon, he who was before good and evil, denier, affirmer,

 destroyer and creator

in the collection the life and songs of the crow

Crow is wandering around the universe in search of his female Creator. In the

 second part of the collection he meets a hag by a river. He has to carry the hag across the river while trying to answer questions that she puts to him, mostly about love.

Lovesong is one of the poems which is Crow’s attempts to answer these questions. When he reaches the other side of the river the hag turns into a beautiful girl.