“The Rule of Three”: Textual Triads, Trialogues, and Women’s Voices in Sylvia Plath, Jackie Kay, and debbie tucker green

Chronologically separated by nearly three decades and with three distinct media (radio drama, novella poem, and play), Sylvia Plath’s “Three Women: A Poem for Three Voices” (1962), Jackie Kay’s “The Adoption Papers” (1991) and debbie tucker green’s trade (2005) each employ an arresting tripartite structure that testifies to their reformations of writing. As a dramatic device, the triad keeps any one member potentially on the edge of a group or else can create a strength through greater unity. In unique and powerful ways, the texts serve as conduits to un(der)represented experiences (childbirth, miscarriage, adoption, female sex tourism) and to socio-cultural histories (the medicalization of maternity, interracial relationships, imperial-colonial legacies of the British Empire). The socio-cultural parameters around each woman’s motherhood expectations and experiences as daughters (Plath and Kay) offer a compelling aesthetics. tucker green’s dramatis personae specifies “three black actresses” to play all roles across race, class, age and gender, ensuring the work can be accessed only through Black women: author and actors. These texts are read comparatively as literary and cultural documents, artistically archiving eras of women’s citizenship and creativities attuned to racial, economic and gendered sightlines and generic innovativeness.