When
we talk about Sylvia Plath, we talk about
Ted Hughes, the poet-husband
who nurtured and tormented her. We talk about the way she died, and
occasionally the downstairs neighbor she nearly killed in the process.
We talk about her overbearing mother and monolithic father. We talk
about her confessional style and how this relates to
Anne Sexton and
Robert Lowell. We talk about her
infamous mental health issues.
What
we discuss less often, outside of criticism and academia, is how
formidable she was as a writer. The personal struggles she faced have
eclipsed this fact in popular discourse, and as a result, the public
keeps Plath pigeonholed. Hers is the domain of
madwomen in the attic (or, in her case, the basement),
mothers needing their little helpers, females who act out when they are
spurned. While she was certainly aware of her own issues--she was often
medicated and had a close relationship with her therapist--she was far
more than a depressive girl crying huddled in her room.
Just
after they met, Plath wrote a poem about Hughes called
"Pursuit," in
which he is a panther. She knew then that Hughes was dangerous. What she
neglects to mention is that she was a God-damned tigress.
*
Tracy Brain, in her essay "Unstable
Manuscripts: The Indeterminacy of the Plath Canon," featured in Anita Helle's anthology
The Unraveling Archive, makes a compelling
case that the reader and/or scholar cannot fully rely on Plath's
published works--particularly
Ariel (including the
Restored Edition) and
The Collected Poems--because
Plath's archives reveal typographical discrepancies between manuscripts
and "finished" products as well as Plath's own working manuscripts and
notes, and those notes especially reveal contradictions and changes we
can't fully understand, as Plath was dead by the time the bulk of her
work fell onto editors' desks.
While
this issue shouldn't be dismissed out of hand, we are, thanks to Ted
Hughes, largely left to rely upon printed material as "definitive." Even
if we can never know whether
"Edge" was truly the last poem Plath wrote
(Hughes seemed to think so, based on his sequencing in
The Collected Poems, but the argument for
"Balloons" is equally valid), we must work with what we have been given and rely on Hughes' judgments.
"Her
attitude to her verse was artisan-like," he tells us, and "if she
couldn't get a table out of the material, she was quite happy to get a
chair, or even a toy." This is not the idle speculation of a husband who
took walks as his wife scratched away with her Shaeffer pen. It's the
keen observation of someone who often wrote by her side and who trusted
her with his own words, both as typist and workshopper. He knew her
prowess with words, and her capacity to wound with them: he was the
subject of many of Plath's more powerful poems
("Daddy," "Burning the Letters," "Words heard, by accident, over the phone," and more), and though he was
in a position to suppress their publication, he chose to go ahead with
them and make sure that the world knew her name.
*
No one has ever written a truly "authoritative" biography about Plath, because her legacy is complicated.
Ted
Hughes, by his own admission, destroyed her final diaries after her
death, eliminating the possibility of scholars gaining personal insights
into her final, powerful poems.
Aurelia Plath, Sylvia's mother, worked diligently to expunge certain unfavorable communiqu
és from the record when she published Plath's collected
Letters Home. (Not coincidentally, this is the same reason Plath delayed the publication of
The Bell Jar
so long: to spare feelings.) However, the originals remain largely
intact, mainly in the
Lilly Library at Indiana University but also
elsewhere; the first volume of Plath's wider collected correspondence is
set to be published this fall.
Olwyn
Hughes, Ted's sister and the executor of both estates until her death
in 2016, was notorious for refusing to cooperate with anyone who might
criticize her brother too much. Plath herself was not a fan of Olwyn,
but Hughes trusted her implicitly.
The
net result of this is that most biographies of Plath lean heavily in
favor of either her or Hughes, depending on who the author cozied up to
during the research process. Aurelia died in 1994, but not before she
assisted Paul Alexander while he collected information for
Rough Magic.
The biography is problematic in some ways for the reasons listed above,
yet it remains the best available overview of the poet's life.
Fans
of Plath almost uniformly come down on her side, and
her grave was repeatedly vandalized; rather than gravediggers, she was
disturbed by headstone editors, who would rip the "Hughes" off the
marker so it read Sylvia Plath rather than Sylvia Plath Hughes. They would rather Ted Hughes be punished
in perpetuity, Plath be rid of him in death.
For my part, I think Hughes made some mistakes. Undoubtedly, a few of them were even
cruel and contemptible. And he had no right to do what he did to
Ariel
prior to its publication, though he was, in general, a capable advocate
for Plath's work. And as a poet, he is unassailable; his work is
not my style, but he knew what the Hell he was doing.
Further
tangling the matter of biographical scholarship are two obvious
figures, one innocent toddler, and a much-maligned woman: the Hughes
children, Frieda and Nicholas; their half-sister Alexandra, called
Shura; and Assia Wevill, the most widely recognized of Ted Hughes' affair partners. Frieda Hughes has
gone on record,
sometimes in verse form, to criticize
those who are obsessed with her mother and who have fired shots at her father.
Nicholas Hughes committed suicide in 2009 after
pursuing his love of nature and ecology, no doubt following his father's example (Ted Hughes'
fascination with the outdoors is one of his trademarks); the younger
Hughes was always reluctant to discuss his mother publicly.
Shura
died at the age of four in her mother's murder-suicide. As for Wevill,
it's no secret that she was married to a poet (
David Wevill, a respected Canadian writer) before meeting Plath and Hughes and later chose gas as her
weapon of choice when she killed herself and her daughter. These are not
mere echoes of Plath, and Wevill is often a reviled figure in the Plath
mythos.
But
again: these are things people always discuss when Plath comes up in
conversation. Except for the most casual readers, everyone knows at
least that the Plath-Hughes marriage was torn asunder and that Hughes'
actions after Plath's death--all the way up to his own demise in
1998--led to controversy. What they might better discuss is how each of
these people appeared in print. (Shura, born two years after Plath's
death, is exempted.)
*
Aurelia
Plath became the focus of a few of her daughter's works, as any parent
of a serious writer might expect. Yet she attempted to be even-keeled
about the matter, at least publicly. "One observation I can make,"
Aurelia wrote in 1983, for a piece in Paul Alexander's anthology
Ariel Ascending, "[...] involves Sylvia's tendency to fuse
characters and manipulate events to achieve her own artistic ends." In
truth, this statement might apply to every writer who ever lived, and I
believe it is both a fair assumption on Aurelia's part as well as her
fervent wish as a parent that it be completely true.
Plath
could be cutting when she directed her words at specific individuals,
however obliquely. And Aurelia did feel that sting: "[...O]ther poems
[...] involve the mother figure as the whipping boy, so characteristic
of the Fifties." She also mentions that in The Bell Jar, Plath
"transformed personalities into cruel and false caricatures." However,
as one might expect of a mother, she asserts that "I had faith in [her]
genius."
No
amount of faith, though, can change the fact that the title of
"Electra on Azalea Path" contains a name that sounds awfully like Aurelia Plath,
nor the fact that Mrs. Greenwood in
The Bell Jar is, in the main, a character who hews closely to Aurelia as Plath experienced her during that electroshock summer.
*
Ronald
Hayman speculated in
The Death and Life of Sylvia Plath that Plath intended to kill her children when
she took her own life in 1963, but this is based on a reading of some of
her final poems, including "Edge," and not supported by the
documented facts of the incident. And anyway, the opposite argument can be made
using different pieces; Plath often wrote about her children, in pieces
like
"Nick and the Candlestick" and
"Morning Song." It's likely that she
did this for the same reason another writer might: they were readily
available subjects, like their father and grandmother.
If
you subscribe to the notion that turnabout is fair play, it's worth
keeping in mind that three out of those four had their own say in
various works published later, as we see above. Call it a literary circle of life.
*
In
the main, Assia Wevill has been unfairly castigated. Yes, her final
act--killing Shura--is unforgivable and must have been the source of
much anguish for Ted Hughes (who later dedicated
Crow, his 1970
collection of poetry, to the memory of both Assia and Shura). But in
life, Wevill was no different from a million other women: a little bit
wild, prone to making mistakes, desperately in love.
Of
course, one can also understand why Plath despised Wevill. She was a
woman who committed the highest form of girl-on-girl violence:
man-stealing. But Plath wasn't utterly unreasonable; she also laid the
blame at Hughes' doorstep, where it belonged. (Ultimately, neither
Wevill nor Hughes can be held more culpable than the other, but Hughes'
betrayal was worse, as he broke the vows he made to his wife.)
As in other cases, though, Plath was vicious in her descriptions of Wevill, particularly in
"The Fearful." And Wevill was not unaware of Plath's ire. She--like many others--ended up haunted by the specter of her (ostensible) rival. But like Plath, she was also haunted by her own past and by the invisible scourge of mental illness.
*
I
know what you're thinking: "Cate, please. You've only given us examples
of poems about Plath's family. So why SHOULDN'T we snoop around and
learn things about her personal life?"
And
that's totally fair, if you didn't listen to the thing Aurelia Plath
said about situations and characters transforming in Plath's--or any
writer's--imagination. And again, it's totally fair, if you're willing
to ignore Plath's craftsmanship and Hughes' statement about it. And
sure: it's totally fair, if you're willing to ignore the criticism Frieda Hughes levels at everyone she feels has co-opted her mother's legacy.
And
once more: it's totally fair, if you're willing to forsake all other
possible critical responses to Plath's work, or the multiple angles the
biographical method could use: an American woman living abroad, a
scholarship girl coming up in a privileged environment, a pre-feminist
powerhouse, a deeply academic personality, a poet living with and
surrounded by other poets.
This
is about so much more than just mental illness and interpersonal drama,
and we must acknowledge that, or we are doing Plath, and ourselves as
readers and critics, an enormous disservice.
*
Sometimes
I wonder if Plath deserves better than us: the avid, trenchant fans who
think she is somehow a projection of ourselves and that--as a
result--we can claim some ownership of her. I attempt not to be that
person, but I admit it: I get defensive of her, and I am often
dismissive of those I deem clichés--the
sad girls dressed in black trying desperately to be serious--even
though I am exactly the same. On the other hand, fame (especially the
posthumous kind) comes at a price, and devotees are one item on the bill
of sale.
And
sometimes I wonder if we deserve better than Plath: a woman who was
nearly always on the edge of becoming unhinged, who threw Holocaust
metaphors around to describe her own pain, who once destroyed some of
Ted Hughes' manuscripts in a vindictive bonfire. On the other hand, if
we threw out Plath, we would have to get rid of the Conrads and
Hemingways and Fitzgeralds of the world, as well, to avoid committing
the double crimes of sexism and hypocrisy.
*
I spend a lot of time thinking about Sylvia Plath.
It's
true that I arrived at her doorstep, as most of us do, when I was a
moody teenager struggling to fit in. This is a detail I can't help and
won't deny. But I think it's worth noting that the bulk of the time I've
spent with her was in my early 20s, near the end of my college journey,
at a juncture when people were starting to refer to me as a woman
rather than a girl. As it happens, I was also about the same age Plath
was when she made the suicide attempt later immortalized in The Bell Jar.
It
was a time when I loved boys and eyeliner and the idea that my future
might actually turn out the way I wanted. But I resembled Esther
Greenwood, the protagonist of The Bell Jar, too much for my own
comfort, so I chose to focus on Plath's poetry instead.
Years later, I return to her work again and again, and I do
so happily. And if I didn't know all the things I know, it never would
have occurred to me to write about her now.
I composed this essay, as I compose so many things, in fits and starts between other activities, and it took me about a week and a half to draft. My memory of facts learned over eight years ago was surprisingly solid, which I take to mean that Sylvia Plath has never been far from my mind. I did have to retrieve my collection of books by or about Plath (and Hughes, and Wevill): 18 in all.
For
a complete accounting of my Plath collection, see the list following this post. Some books are either out of print or difficult to locate; many of my volumes came from
Better World Books or
Thriftbooks, both excellent online sellers for academics searching for titles your average used bookstore doesn't carry. There are many, many more titles out there that I've never seen or read; Plath has her own cottage industry now.
I do encourage readers to seek out resources that will illuminate Plath's craft, as well as those which properly contextualize her in both American and British history as well as in the continuum of literature. There are so many things to explore in her work that lie outside the confines of biography.
And when you talk about her, remember that she was both human and hard-working.
*
Resources
About Plath
Ariel Ascending: Writings About Sylvia Plath (ed. Paul Alexander)
Chapters in a Mythology: The Poetry of Sylvia Plath (Judith Kroll)
The Death and Life of Sylvia Plath (Ronald Hayman)
Her Husband: Hughes and Plath: A Marriage (Diane Middlebrook)
Rough Magic (Paul Alexander)
The Savage God: A Study of Suicide (A. Alvarez)
Sylvia Plath: A Literary Life (Linda Wagner-Martin)
The Unraveling Archive: Essays on Sylvia Plath (ed. Anita Helle)
By Plath
Ariel: The Restored Edition
The Bell Jar
The Collected Poems (ed. Ted Hughes)
Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams
Letters Home (ed. Aurelia Schober Plath)
The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath (ed. Karen V. Kukil)
About Hughes
Ted Hughes: The Life of a Poet (Elaine Feinstein)
By Hughes
Birthday Letters
Difficulties of a Bridegroom
About Wevill
Lover of Unreason: Assia Wevill, Sylvia Plath's Rival and Ted Hughes' Doomed Love (Yehuda Koren and Eliat Negev)
