The Munich Mannequins

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1965

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Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Form and meter

This poem is written in free verse, with no consistent meter or rhyme. The poem has 13 couplets, or two-line stanzas, and one one-line stanza. This steady structure mimics the speaker’s footsteps as she walks through Munich. The last three stanzas have some of the shortest lines, suggesting a slowing of her pace. The shortened last stanza with only one line suggests that the speaker has stopped, caught up in thought in her meditations on snow while also appearing a mannequin herself on the street.

The poem’s form also works to reflect the speaker’s state of mind, as thoughts flow unevenly across stanzas, with only the first stanza containing a complete sentence. This fractured presentation of ideas in the poem illuminates her questioning and despairing mindset, especially in regards to the expectations placed upon women.

Personification

Plath begins her poem with an example of personification, or the giving of human characteristics to nonhuman objects. The speaker states that perfection “cannot have children” (Line 1) because the coldness “tamps the womb” (Line 2). This personification also feminizes perfection by equating it with a woman. Perfection’s femininity reflects the speaker’s complicated relationship with womanhood. On one hand, perfection is infertile and frigid. The rest of the poem shows how this perfection is embodied by models who have chosen physically perfect figures over the role of mother, which changes the body. The speaker uses this device to reckon with the impossibility of attaining two diametrically opposed expectations for women: having the beauty of models and being a mother. When models choose to make the “absolute sacrifice” (Line 7) of not having children, their lives are left empty and incomplete. As a result, this perfection is “terrible” (Line 1).

Synecdoche and metonymy

Plath uses metonymy, or when an associated object or attribute is used to stand in for the whole, to support her thematic purpose. Her use of an object to represent the whole woman illustrates the objectification of all women that she describes in the poem. The use of the term mannequin reduces models to their purpose as a sort of doll and reflects the patriarchal male gaze. The speaker reflects how the body is deeply tied to society’s understanding of femininity by using the mannequin to stand in for the women models. In this way, the woman is replaced by an object, literally objectified. Not only does the speaker reflect this objectification in the use of the word mannequin, but even mothers, whom the speaker seems to consider more favorably, are only represented by their bodily functions. Never named explicitly, mothers are represented by the “womb” (Line 2) and the “blood flow” (Line 6) that makes pregnancy possible. This paradoxical use of metonymy reflects Plath’s complex relationship with femininity and motherhood.