The speaker of "Nick and the Candlestick" feels fundamentally changed by motherhood and by the process of giving birth. She feels alienated from her own body, which she describes as an unnavigable cave. Her new life is disorienting and surreal. It's not only physical exhaustion and pain that have changed her: the experience of caring for a child is in itself transformative, prompting her to compare it to a religious epiphany or the arrival of a messiah. These feelings are neither wholly negative nor wholly positive: they have shifted the speaker's perception to such a massive degree that those labels are no longer particularly useful to her. In the outside world, trauma and emotional crisis are not uncommon reactions to giving birth or becoming a parent. In fact, in recent years, both the medical community and popular media have become more open about the complexity of reactions that follow childbirth.
The diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder, and the development of the concept of psychological trauma itself, both grew out of generally masculine experiences. Following World War I, soldiers who had fought in the war displayed strange symptoms, including fatigue, tremors, problems with sight and hearing, and debilitating nightmares. The condition was dubbed shell-shock, and was at first associated primarily with physical rather than emotional symptoms. But after careful research, the psychologist physicians Charles F. Myers and William McDougall proposed a psychological basis for these physical ailments. More specifically, researchers argued, these symptoms were in fact adaptations to help repress painful memories. Myers and his allies suggested that treatment should involve a careful unearthing of those traumatic memories, ideally as close to the site of battle as possible. Today, PTSD is broadly associated with combat. But even this association was controversial in the early twentieth century. Some physicians dismissed shell shock entirely as a sign of weakness, and suggested that Myers' treatment methods would merely indulge it. Myers' findings eventually became widely accepted, with most militaries in the West at least claiming to follow his treatment methodology. Still, the very establishment of PTSD as a diagnosis was far from simple.
In 1980, PTSD first appeared in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, a tool used by psychiatrists to diagnose mental illness. In this era, the disorder was still primarily associated with war—in this case with the Vietnam War, which had produced a new batch of traumatized fighters. Soon after, however, people who had experienced other types of traumatic events began to fight for recognition from medical and psychological professionals as well as from the public. One of these traumatic events, giving birth, had long been considered too common and mundane to warrant much attention. At the time, the American Psychological Association's diagnostic criteria for PTSD insisted that it must be caused by an event outside the normal range of human experience, thus excluding pregnancy and birth. But these dismissals ignored, among other things, the wide range of experiences accompanying childbirth. By the late twentieth century, both maternal and infant mortality were relatively rare in the United States, but not eliminated. Other complications, as well as physical pain and conflicts with medical workers, were also likely to induce trauma. Moreover, studies suggested that the people who felt traumatized by birth had often had other traumatic experiences.
Only near the turn of the twentieth century did the American psychological establishment recognize postnatal PTSD. In the following decades, a good deal of new research and advocacy has taken place on the topic. Researchers now know that the condition is fairly rare, affecting roughly 5.6% of people who have given birth. This number includes only those who meet the full diagnostic criteria for PTSD. A greater number, around 20-30%, label giving birth traumatic even if they do not meet the diagnostic requirements for PTSD. Moreover, some research suggests that giving birth is not a prerequisite for PTSD, and that fathers who are present at a medically complicated labor might develop symptoms. Many of the solutions proposed by researchers involve improving hospital care and ensuring that parents feel cared for rather than rushed or neglected by medical professionals: the sense of being treated with maliciousness appears, across situations, to increase the chance of developing PTSD. Researchers have also proposed improved screening for previous mental health problems, in order to assist parents who may be at higher risk prior to developing postnatal PTSD.
In the years following the First World War, writers like Virginia Woolf and Wilfred Owen vividly portrayed the link between the horrors of the battlefield and the symptoms of PTSD in soldiers. Today, popular media ranging from the Batman movies to the TV show Law and Order: SVU depict characters suffering from PTSD, usually after war or physical attacks. Meanwhile, public awareness of postpartum depression—a distinct mental illness , but one that also occurs in new parents—increased rapidly after actress Brooke Shields openly discussed her own struggle with it in a 2005 memoir. Prior to Shields' memoir, postnatal mental health conditions had primarily been occasionally been portrayed in horror movies like Rosemary's Baby. The late aughts and 2010s offered a more diverse range of depictions, including in popular TV shows like Girls and Jane the Virgin. Plath's poem remains somewhat unusual, however. This is in part because of how it portrays distinctive symptoms of trauma: namely, dissociation from reality and a feeling of being on edge. But it is also unusual for its emotional complexity. In "Nick and the Candlestick," trauma, joy, awe, exhaustion, and devotion blend together in an overwhelming combination.
