Who is Dodo Conway?

Dodo Conway is a minor character from Sylvia Plath's 1971 novel The Bell Jar. Plath's characterization of Dodo offers a rather unflattering portrait of motherhood.  I'll let the text speak for itself:

With great care, I raised my eyes to the level of the window-sill.  

A woman not five feel tall, with a grotesque, protruding stomach, was wheeling an old black baby carriage down the street.  Two or three small children of various sizes, all pale, with smudgy faces and bare smudgy knees, wobbled along in the shadow of her skirts.

A serene, almost religious smile lit up the woman's face.  Her head tilted happily back, like a sparrow egg perched on a duck egg, she smiled into the sun.


I knew the woman well.

It was Dodo Conway.


Dodo Conway was a Catholic who had gone to Barnard and then married an architect who had gone to Columbia and was also a Catholic.  They had a big, rambling house up the street from us, set behind a morbid facade of pine trees, and surrounded by scooters, tricycles, doll carriages, toy fire trucks, baseball bats, badminton nets, croquet wickets, hamster cages and cocker spaniel puppies - the whole sprawling paraphernalia of suburban childhood.


Dodo interested me in spite of myself....

Dodo raised her six children - and would no doubt raise her seventh - on Rice Krispies, peanut-butter-and-marshmallow sandwiches, vanilla ice cream and gallon upon gallon of Hoods milk.  She got a special discount from the local milkman...

I watched Dodo wheel the youngest Conway up and down.  She seemed to be doing it for my benefit.


Children made me sick.


A floorboard creaked, and I ducked down again, just as Dodo Conway's face, by instinct, or some gift of supernatural hearing, turned on the little pivot of its neck.


I felt her gaze pierce through the white clapboard and the pink wallpaper roses and uncover me, crouching there behind the silver pickets of the radiator. 


I crawled back into bed and pulled the sheet over my head.  But even that didn't shut out the light, so I buried my head under the darkness of the pillow and pretended it was night.  I couldn't see the point of getting up.


I had nothing to look forward to.

Based on this passage, Sylvia Plath would have us believe that motherhood is an occupation completely devoid of genuine joy and creativity, a role that, by its very nature, is at odds with the life of the mind and is deadly enough to whittle an ivy league educated woman down to a near-comatose shell of a human being.  So, in essence, being a mother means trading your ideas for peanut-butter-and-marshmallow sandwiches.  If you're a woman destined for motherhood, of course there is nothing to look forward to.

I couldn't disagree more, which is why this blog is dedicated to dispelling the Dodo Conway fallacy.