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Ted Hughes and the corpus of Sylvia Plath
Sarah Churchwell
And I am the cargo
Of a coffin attended by swallows.
And I am the water
Bearing the coffin that will not be silent.
--Ted Hughes
It is Plath's (Medusan) speechlessness that is the deadly, punishing
weapon.
--Janet Malcolm
1
When Sylvia Plath killed herself, soon after composing a cycle of poems that evoke suicide, she seems to have raised
the stakes of the literary venture for many of her readers. Howard Moss, Plath's poetry editor at The New Yorker, once
declared: "I don't think morbid fascination accounts for [Plath's] special position. The energy and violence of the late
poems were acted out. What their author threatened she performed, and her work gained an extra status of truth. The
connection between art and life, so often merely rhetorical, became all too visible."(1) Insisting that a threat must be
"performed" in order to be true, Moss's statement demonstrates a persistent anxiety, even (or especially) on the part of
professional poetry readers, that poetry may in fact be inconsequential, that it requires "an extra status of truth" to
buttress what otherwise is "mere rhetoric." Evaluating poetry by the degree to which it is "performed" is a precarious
position from which to defend it. But the demand for the "extra truth" of fact has, in the case of Sylvia Plath, also
resulted in heated debates over the boundaries between fact ("truth") and fiction.
A statement that attempts to maintain a distinction between Plath's poetry and her life, such as Elizabeth Hardwick's "in
her work at least, [Plath is] never a `nice person,'" is offset in the same article by assertions that entangle Plath's life,
work, and biography: "in Sylvia Plath's work and in her life the elements of pathology are ... deeply rooted" and "an
early dramatic death gives one, in a literary sense, a real life, a throbbing biography."(2) The problematic nature of
biographical "truth" in Plath studies has resulted in a widespread assumption that to study Sylvia Plath's writings is to
"take sides" and be "for" Plath or "against" her. The next step is often unspoken, but it is crucial: if a writer is
sympathetic to Plath, that writer is understood definitionally to be antagonistic to Ted Hughes, Plath's estranged
husband at the time of her death, her literary heir and executor, and for some, at least, "Plath's greatest critic, elucidator,
and (you could almost say) impresario."(3) If nothing else, the presumption that to be "for" Plath is to be "against"
Hughes oversimplifies Hughes's own, very ambivalent, very painfully and painstakingly elaborated version of Sylvia
Plath. But one reason for this presumption may be Ted Hughes's insistence on the final authority of his own
interpretations of Plath. Preemptively disavowing the very public nature of Plath's writings (she doggedly sought
publication for virtually everything she wrote), Hughes's writings on Plath foreclose the possibility of rethinking Plath's
words; they insist that he alone can author her accurately. To write on Sylvia Plath is, according to Ted Hughes, to join
"the wretched millions who have to find something to say in their papers," it is to participate in the commercialistic "reinvention" of Hughes's own "private experiences and feelings."(4) The confusion seems to arise from Ted Hughes's
refusal to be textual subject, rather than author, of writings about Sylvia Plath. Ted Hughes writes about Plath as if his
readings are definitionally textual rather than biographical and others' readings are biographical rather than textual.
Ted Hughes's writings consistently emphasize his own role in Plath's story, with two contrasting effects. Maintaining
the centrality of his position, Hughes's writings encourage readers like Janet Malcolm, in her book The Silent Woman:
Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, to grant him definitionally the "last word" in Plath studies. In discussing Plath's poetic
"breakthrough," Hughes certifies his reading on the basis of having married Plath: he says that Plath's "real self had
showed itself in her writing" and that this self was "the self [Hughes] had married, after all, and lived with and knew
well."(5) But while for some readers stressing his relationship to Plath gives Hughes's writings authority and sympathy
(Malcolm, for instance, considers him a "victim and a martyr"), for other readers such an emphasis opens the door for a
reexamination of that role. What exactly do his words claim, and what seems to be at stake in those statements? While
Hughes's insistence on the primacy of Plaths wifely, domestic, and physical identity in his interpretation of her writing
is probably unsurprising, its effects are far-reaching. Establishing a reductively gendered reading of Plath's texts,
Hughes's conflation of her written and lived selves also results in a failure to distinguish between his own written and
lived selves, and ushers in the kinds of "attacks" on Hughes that Janet Malcolm declares have "buried him alive."(6)
This essay examines Hughes's writings on Plath while trying to maintain a distinction between the lived and the written
self, to find a space between a total collapse of the two and a pietistic claim to pure separation. But Hughes's writings
on Plath take a large part in a very public debate, and have never been treated as an oeuvre in their own right, a "body"
of writings with a distinct narrative which themselves contend with Plath's writings for the right to author both Plath's
and Hughes's written lives. Perhaps most crucially, this essay will endeavor to refuse the terms set by both Hughes's
writings and The Silent Woman, and will attempt not to equate the living Ted Hughes with his written words--even as
those words tend to equate Sylvia Plath with hers. Malcolm claims that "the warily silent Ted Hughes" cannot have his
words used against him, but Hughes has been no more "silent" than Sylvia Plath, the "silent woman" of Malcolm's
title.(7) In exploring the conditions of Ted Hughes's putative "silence," this essay will examine only the debate that
surrounds Plath's name without attempting to read her own writings.(8)
In The Silent Woman, Janet Malcolm famously compares the controversy that surrounds Sylvia Plath's name to a
detective story. Reviewing The Silent Woman for The Nation, Anna Fels commented: "[The Silent Woman] is about
the crimes that people commit against one another.... Murder, burglary, brutal attacks, women brought to their knees-the metaphors [Malcolm] chooses have a striking violence. Nor is it only the metaphors ... real crimes have occurred.
There are bodies. The question of whodunit has a real as well as a psychological dimension."(9) Fels's perceptive
review omits the fact that the trope of crime and detection was employed first by Plath in her late poetry, some of
which is generally assumed to be about her relationship with Ted Hughes.(10) Using a similar lexicon for his writings
about Plath, Hughes shifts the terms of crime and detection from the fictional (Plath's poetry) to the ostensibly
nonfictional (his biographical/critical readings of Plath's writing) in order to authorize his interpretations. Upon closer
examination, it is hard to determine what crime precisely is said to have been committed in the struggle between Plath's
and Hughes's words (adultery, abandonment, murder, slander, libel). libel). The question is less "whodunit" than "what
was done?" Both Plath and Hughes employ the detection/ murder trope in order to shift from the biological body to the
biographical one.(11) A familiar comparison, to be sure, and yet, because one body is deemed "real" and the other
fictional, possession of one body has led to a struggle over ownership of the other, which would enable a claim to that
"extra status of truth." Far from starting with Janet Malcolm, the trope of murder, crime, and detection, with its crucial
invocation of truth and investigation and its search for a body, has been central to the writings of both participants in
what has become a very public struggle over authorship, characterized as a struggle over "truth." If the detective's
actions are, as Ross MacDonald suggests, "directed to putting together the stories of other people's lives and
discovering their significance," then Ted Hughes's writings on Plath present his authorial voice in the guise of the
detective who will discover the significance of the story of Plath's life and death.(12)
Shifting between author and detective, Hughes presents Plath as a body for which her poems provide a voice. To critic
A. Alvarez, in outraged response to Alvarez's memoir of Plath's death, Hughes once objected that "Sylvia now goes
through the detailed, point-by-point death of a public sacrifice. Her poems provide the vocal part for that sort of show.
Your account ... completes and concludes the performance. Now there actually is a body."(13) Hughes's writings
produce the body that they say should not be produced; they create a mystery that, in good fictional detection style, will
be solved by the author/ detective, Ted Hughes. Hughes offers Plath's journals to the reader "in the hope of providing
some ballast for our idea of the reality behind the poems.... If we read them with understanding, they can give us the
key to the most intriguing mystery about her, the key to our biggest difficulty in approaching her poetry."(14) This
"difficulty" Hughes then defines tautologically as a "singularity," "a mystery--an enigma in itself."(15) The "ballast" of
reality Hughes seeks for Plath's poetry seems akin to Moss's "extra status of truth." But as Steven Marcus suggests, the
detective story, for all its ostensible reliance upon "truth" and "reality," is more often a provisional tale, in which a
contingent story is written by the detective/writer.(16) In the "case" of Plath studies and its wrangle over the role of Ted
Hughes, this provisionality is what is at stake, and often what is lost. Anna Fels wrote of The Silent Woman that there
was a "real body"; it is precisely the reality of this body that causes so much trouble for Plath studies. Only in detective
fiction does a dead body guarantee that a "true" explanation will follow. For those who knew Sylvia Plath personally,
there was a real body, but textual accounts of it insist on their own materiality, as if to say that a real body guarantees a
real "truth." Marcus's account of the fictional detective stops short of indicating its wishfulness. The detective's claim of
a true fiction is falsifying, but Marcus offers the possibility that an ostensible truth can be provided for the reader, who
will implicitly refrain from deconstructing the "true fiction" created by the detective; fiction promises a criminal for
every dead body, but life does not. Shifting between tropes of detection, murder, aggression, and authorial insistences
on the truth or reality of a voice, a self, or a text, Hughes's writings on Plath construct himself as the author of a story
about Sylvia Plath, and as the (paradigmatically male) detective who will "solve" the mystery of the death of the
beautiful woman.
An astonishing amount of Plath criticism has been written by people who knew her, and who authorize their readings
on that basis. These are not memoirs; they implicitly (sometimes explicitly) claim to be "objective" critical readings.
The most obvious, and famous, of these readers is Ted Hughes. But Hughes is not the only reader of Plath who knew
her and might have an investment in how she is read; the critic A. Alvarez, whose reading of Plath as an "extremist
poet" in light of her suicide did much to cement the biographical reading in Plath criticism, reads her poem "Death &
Co." as a kind of legislating evidence proving that Plath "was beyond the reach of anyone" by December, 1962.(17)
Alvarez, like Hughes, is a professional reader of poetry; but what of Gordon Lameyer, neither a scholar nor a literary
critic, but a former boyfriend of Plath's, who writes self-importantly: "Sylvia called me `the major man in my life'
between the person who was the original for Esther's boyfriend, `Buddy Willard,' and Ted Hughes. "(18) This sentence
moves dizzyingly from biography to fiction (as constructed in The Bell jar) and back again without a blink.(19) It is
well worth noting for the first time how many of the men who write on Plath had sexual or quasi-sexual relationships
with her. Hughes was her estranged husband, Lameyer was an ex-boyfriend, even Alvarez implies in his memoir that
Plath was interested in pursuing a sexual relationship with him.(20) And Peter Davison, who wrote of Plath that she
"hardly waited to be asked to slip into my new bed," declares elsewhere, with authoritative condescension, that she was
a "greatly but unevenly gifted woman," and is the editor who saw Anne Stevenson's notoriously "anti-Plath" biography
Bitter Fame through to publication.(21) The men who claim to have been involved sexually with Sylvia Plath have
apparently felt it incumbent upon them to account for, while insisting that they admire, her writing, as if having known
the body authorizes their assumption of responsibility for the corpus. To have "known" Sylvia Plath (biblically) is, they
claim, to have known her best.
Addressing what has been sometimes considered the "crime" of the posthumous editing of Plath's work in the
"Archive" chapter of her landmark study, The Haunting of Sylvia Plath, Jacqueline Rose implicitly asked "cui bono?"
and answered, primarily, "Ted Hughes." But the problem for Plath studies is not merely that Ted Hughes legally owns
and strategically deploys the "body" of Plath's work, as is implicit in any discussion of his editing of that "body."
Hughes also claims authorship of both Plath's own and his representations of her body, which is always already textual,
not live. In other words, the "corpus" that Hughes accounts for is both the corpus of Plath's work and the textual corpse
that is her body. That dead body stands in as a sign for the problem of the textual body and the primacy given Plath's
presumed biographical identity over the one she authored. Hughes writes Plath back into corporeal, biological identity
whenever he presents her work (and he has mediated almost everything published in her name). Privileging an author's
biographical identity, when you knew the author personally, is understandable; insisting that your knowledge of that
identity is definitive, authoritative, and unquestionable is more problematic. That is, the "true fiction" that Marcus finds
endemic to the detective story is in Ted Hughes's writings on Plath divided into Ted Hughes's "truth" and other people's
"fictions" (what he has famously termed "the Plath `Fantasia"').
That authorship is what is at stake has not, perhaps, been fully articulated. In The Haunting of Sylvia Plath, Jacqueline
Rose notes that the argument is an argument over interpretation and over reading, but, I would add, it is also an
argument over who gets the right to be the author, over who has the final authority.(22) According to Ted Hughes, only
two voices--Plath's and his--may legitimately speak of Plath, and his has the final say. To A. Alvarez Hughes declared:
"If your intentions had been documentary style, if your respect had been for what really happened, and the way things
really went, you would have asked me to be co-author."(23) Such a statement is not merely an insistence on firsthand,
personal knowledge of a tragedy in order to write of it; Alvarez knew both Plath and Hughes personally, and witnessed
many of the events leading up to Plath's death. Hughes's demand suggests that there can be no other version of the story
because he must necessarily be granted the right of "co-authorship." Malcolm puts the problem this way: "It is Hughes's
bitter fate to be perpetually struggling with Plath over the ownership of his life, trying to wrest it back from her."(24) It
must be no accident, surely, that Malcolm's phrasing echoes the title of Anne Stevenson's "authorized" biography of
Sylvia Plath, called Bitter Fame. Hughes's "bitter fate," like Plath's "bitter fame," is to be entangled textually with
Plath's textual representation of him and of their life together; what Malcolm terms a contest over "ownership" is, in
fact, a struggle for authorship. Hughes's writings consistently assert his own role in Plath's life: "the most interesting
and dramatic part of S. P.'s life is only 1/2 S.P.--the other 1/2 is me" and "Miss Rose thought she was writing a book
about a writer dead thirty years and seems to have overlooked, as I say, the plain fact that she has ended up writing a
book largely about me."(25) The problem is that Hughes's writings do not, to date, distinguish between his private
knowledge of his relationship with Plath, which surely few would dispute, and Plath's public, textual representation of
it. When Ted Hughes states his "simple wish to recapture for [him]self ... the privacy of [his] own feelings and
conclusions about Sylvia," it seems impossible that anyone would deny him that right.(26) But Ted Hughes invokes the
"privacy" of his feelings in a letter which he then permits to be published (in The Silent Woman). When Ted Hughes
insists upon his right to adjudicate what "really" happened, insisting as it were on always being a "co-author" of
anyone's view of Sylvia Plath, he participates in a widespread conflation of the writer with the life. This confusion is
certainly not Hughes's alone. A. Alvarez told Janet Malcolm that Sylvia Plath's death "put her in the public
domain."(27) But Sylvia Plath is not, as a person, in the public domain; neither is Ted Hughes. Their writings are in the
public domain, and they were put there not by Plath's death, but by the publication of the writing. That Ted Hughes's
published writings are just as much in the public domain as Plath's tends to be overlooked. Janet Malcolm declares that
Hughes does not write about Plath, that he "touches on biography only when it relates to the work."(28) But Ted
Hughes persistently relates Plath's work back to the authority of his own biographical understanding of her.
Consequently, attempts to explicate Plath's or Hughes's writing are "libelous" because they are understood to have
made claims about the person. Writers and commenters on the Plath-Hughes melee regularly raise the question of libel.
Olwyn Hughes, Ted's sister and for some years the agent for the Plath estate, objected to Jacqueline Rose's reading of
Plath's poem "The Rabbit Catcher" on the grounds that it "goes on about Sylvia's sexual life--it's incredible, it's
libellous."(29) Malcolm responded to Olwyn, she tells the reader, with "You can't libel the dead," leaving the clear
implication that, were Plath still alive, Rose's reading would be libelous. But Rose explicitly and repeatedly reminds
her reader that she is analyzing a poem, not making claims about what Sylvia Plath did or felt, only about the words
Plath put on the page ("This is not a biography. I am never claiming to speak about the life").(30) That is, Olwyn's
reaction is based upon the equation of Plath's poem with her "self," so that a reading which locates eroticism in a poem
she wrote becomes a claim about Plath's ,sexual life." An earlier version of this article, it was suggested by one reader,
was potentially libelous for the claims it made "about Ted Hughes," when, as I understood it, the claims being made
were solely about what he had written. To examine Hughes's writings on Plath is, it seems to many readers (including,
apparently, Ted Hughes), to examine Hughes himself; for example, Olwyn Hughes characterized Rose's examination of
Hughes's editing of Plath's work as "another attack on Ted" and complained that one reviewer "treat[s] Sylvia Plath's
family as though they are characters in some work of fiction."(31)
Narratology tells us that textual frames create competing narratives: the struggle over Plath is a struggle over the right
to write the true story, rather than "fiction." For all that, Hughes's writings implicitly present his authorial intelligence
as a hero-detective who will "solve" the crime of Plath's death; the narratives with which Hughes surrounds everything
that has been published in Plath's name serve to "frame" Plath both as the tropological dead female heroine whose
corpse is the sign for the interrogation that the text will undertake, and as the culpable one "whodunit."(32) The literary
controversy surrounding Sylvia Plath and her work arises from the way in which her name--and her name as a sign for
the battle over the female body that it represents--reminds us that the body, especially the female body, is always
somehow "real," and can never escape its own corporeality. Hughes's insistence on his "co-authorship" of Plath's life
embeds itself into his writing about her far beyond the "naturalized" editing and hierarchizing that Jacqueline Rose
notes in Hughes's presentations of Plath's work.(33)
Hughes's insistence on his role in Plath's work because of his role in her life leads readers like Janet Malcolm to declare
startlingly that Hughes was "the most interesting figure in [Plath's life] during its final six years," erasing Plath from the
center even of her own life.(34) Malcolm makes her position in defense of Hughes explicit, and condemns those writers
(especially biographers) who have claimed objectivity when in fact, according to Malcolm, they take sides in what has
devolved into a tacit debate between those (like Malcolm herself) who claim to speak for Ted Hughes, and those who
claim to speak for Sylvia Plath. Having explicitly stated that she has "taken a side--that of the Hugheses" and having
denied any writer the possibility of not taking sides, Malcolm outlines the argument as follows:(35)
A paradox hedges the struggle between the Plath advocates and the
Hugheses. The advocates, whom Olwyn calls `libbers,' because many
of them are feminists, are, in this struggle, not representatives of
women's liberation so much as representatives of a kind of dead lib.
They want to restore to Plath the rights she lost when she died. They
want to wrest from Hughes the power over her literary remains which
he acquired when she died intestate.... by restoring Plath to the status
of the living, they simply achieve a substitution: they send the
Hugheses and Mrs. Plath [Sylvia Plath's mother, who died in 1994,
after The Silent Woman was published] down to take Plath's place
among the rightless dead.(36)
Besides being a specious generalization about what the unnamed and unspecified "Plath advocates" claim or want, this
statement has much to do with a conception of Ted Hughes's "power," and the question of his "right" to it (which
Malcolm implies feminists will automatically deny him). But when sides are chosen in Plath studies, the fight turns
"murderous," as if, to maintain a kind of preservation of death, there must always be a victim. Malcolm finally makes
clear at whose door this murderousness should be placed: "It is Plath's (Medusan) speechlessness that is the deadly,
punishing weapon."(37) Plath's self-destruction has often been written as murderous; Robert Lowell, for instance,
famously called her Dido--and then Phaedra and Medea, as if suicide and murder are equivalent. These, too, are
substitutions; suicide rewritten as murder, an author rewritten as a subject.
What Malcolm terms "substitution" might more accurately be named "revision" or "rewriting." The authorship contest
extends far beyond Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath; many other writers have joined the fray, and insist on the "truth" of
their own rewritings.(38) Janet Malcolm is herself a case in point. She complains of the substitution that "feminists"
effect, but in order to "side" with Ted Hughes, Malcolm performs her own substitution and simply inverts the terms of
the received debate. If Hughes has been taken by some readers to be a murderer, Malcolm will call Plath one. If Plath is
understood by some to be a "victim and a martyr" to the exigencies of gender roles in the fifties, to personal betrayal
and masculine perfidy, or to mental illness, then Malcolm declares that to write on Plath, one "must put aside pity and
sympathy for Ted Hughes, the feeling that the man is a victim and a martyr."(39) If Plath's eroticism was "quite
strong," as the Editor's Note to Plath's journals claims, then Malcolm compares herself to Plath on several occasions
and describes her feelings of "tenderness toward Hughes" and a "swelling" of "intense sympathy and affection" for
him.(40) If Hughes writes that Plath was like a "fox" pursued by his own "hounds," then Malcolm deplores her own
complicity in joining "the pack of his pursuers."(41) If the book's title, The Silent Woman, refers to Plath, within the
book Malcolm will refer to "the warily silent Ted Hughes."(42) If Plath is pathologically "the divided self par
excellence," Ted Hughes is a writer with more than one provisional, textual self.(43) After famously comparing
biographers to burglars, Malcolm defends Hughes from any potential charges of having written biography (he "touches
on biography only when it relates to [Plath's] work"), and then quotes George Steiner's famous complaint that Plath's
poem "Daddy" practices a "subtle larceny" in its appropriation of imagery from the Holocaust.(44) And finally
Malcolm declares that the "writer [is] like the murderer."(45) Plath's project is murderous, illegitimate, and larcenous,
in that it stole from her life with Hughes, and Hughes is a victim and a martyr of Plath's having made public his
biography. He didn't abandon her by leaving her for another woman, Malcolm implies; she abandoned him by killing
herself, as if one nullifies the other. The possibility that a writer might be one person in life and another person on the
page collapses in the case of Sylvia Plath, but is carefully upheld by those who feel that Ted Hughes requires their
defense. Such critical gamesmanship does not allow for the private possibility that both Plath and Hughes abandoned
each other at various times in their lives and with tragic effect, but that their public (published) writings do not abandon
each other. The texts of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes continue to "speak" to each other and for each other.
Malcolm derives her title The Silent Woman from an incident that Olwyn Hughes recounts, in which Olwyn criticized
Plath and was "unnerved" by her response: Plath "mutely glared" but refused to speak. Olwyn aggrievedly explains to
Malcolm that "it is the only tiff I have ever had in my life where the other person hadn't a word to say for themselves.
Looking back, it seems quite aggressive of her to have left at dawn the next day. Taking away from me the opportunity
to `make it up,' which I intended to do, and putting me firmly in the wrong."(46) Malcolm goes on to conclude that
Plath's suicide functions in the same way, putting the survivors in the wrong and removing the possibility of making
amends. But suicide also becomes a way of denying the other the last word; Plath's silence is unnerving because it is
perceived by the survivors as an absence that must be filled. This "silence" overwrites all of the words Plath wrote not
only because it gives people the opportunity to speak for her, but presents this opportunity as necessity. Moreover,
Plath's survivors read her silence as eliciting a response, placing the blame firmly back on Plath. Plath's silence, Olwyn
notes, was "aggressive," rather than passive. By implication, Plath's suicide becomes her cruelest act, turning her
survivors into victims of her silent, selfish destructiveness, in spite of the fact that she seems the clearest victim of her
own suicide. The struggle to control the body, both Plath's dead body and the body of her text, is reinscribed by Plath's
suicide as a struggle over self-destruction.
In her article "Muteness Envy," Barbara Johnson associates muteness with resistance and remarks that "victimhood
would seem to be the most effective model for authority, particularly literary and cultural authority. It is not that the
victim always gets to speak--far from it--but that the most highly valued speaker gets to claim victimhood."(47)
Johnson notes that muteness is "the ego ideal of the poetic voice" and traces its association with femininity: "numerous
are the Parnassian poems addressed to silent female statues, marble Venuses and granite Sphinxes whose
unresponsiveness stands as the mark of their aesthetic value . . . [there is a] normative image of a beautiful, silent
woman addressed by the idealizing rhetoric of a male poet for whom she 'seems a thing.'"(48) The battle over Plath
takes precisely the form of struggle Johnson delineates: it is a battle over poetry and representation, silence and speech,
victimhood and victory, all of which are figured in gendered terms. Even the covers of the various editions of
Malcolm's The Silent Woman will "graphically" illustrate the point. The cover to The New Yorker issue in which The
Silent Woman first appeared was a drawing of a (smiling?) woman in a coffin; the drawing was "edged" by the first
lines of Plath's late poem "Edge," which begins "The woman is perfected. / Her dead / Body wears the smile of
accomplishment." The jacket to the hardcover edition of The Silent Woman reproduces a black-and-white photograph
of a young and smiling Sylvia and Ted Hughes just after their marriage. The cover to the ensuing paperback edition
replaced this photograph of the "real" Sylvia and Ted with a reproduction of a famous "silent female statue" of just the
sort Johnson remarks upon, the headless (female) Winged Victory. It is a perfect image for Sylvia Plath as cultural
icon: a pictorial representation of a generic dead woman struggles for supremacy with a photograph of the "real" Sylvia
Plath and with a headless statue, doubly silent and doubly feminine--castrated, and yet nonetheless figured as
"victorious." That is, the statue-as-representation is more victorious than Plath "herself," who after all is only ever a
simulacrum of a woman who killed herself. This is to say that (in this example at least) the representation of the iconic
Plath is "victorious" over a photograph of the "real" Plath, itself an overdetermined illusion, a reproduction of a
photograph of a woman now dead; as Barthes points out in Camera Lucida, the fear of the photograph is that it has
already killed that which it represents.
If on the cover of the paperback The Silent Woman Plath's photographic image has been replaced by a "victorious"
statue, victorious paradoxically in achieving the victimage of silent castrated femininity--a victimage over which the
main characters in this drama contend--Hughes has been removed altogether, as if to complete Plath's ironic "win." But
the jacket to the American edition of Hughes's most recent publication, Winter Pollen: Occasional Prose, which
includes several pieces on Plath, might seem a response. This jacket shows a photograph of Hughes's face, half of
which is covered over by the handwritten manuscript of a poem, but the poem is not, as might be expected (given that
this is a collection of Hughes's own writings) a draft of a poem of Ted Hughes's; it is, instead, the first draft of Sylvia
Plath's "Sheep in Fog." The meaning of this contestation between a representation of Hughes's face and Plath's text
seems ambiguous: it might be that Plath always somehow constitutes half of Hughes, writing him over and creating
him, but this odd illustration could also be symbolic of Hughes's ubiquity in Plath studies, his ostensible position in the
background as editor, when this supposed "background" is the subject of the entire photograph; that is, he is both
author and subject--like the role of writer/ detective he takes in his writings on Plath. This second reading seems
supported by the fact that, although Hughes's face is written over by Plath's handwriting on the cover, inside the book
Hughes provides a dogmatic reading of her poem "Sheep in Fog," as if to reassert his authority (it is, appropriately
enough, a reading in which Hughes describes "patriarchs," apparently confident in the universality of his assumption, as
"benign" and "protective," in order to interpret the poem).(49) If one of the battlegrounds Plath represents is the battle
over victimage and violence, more specifically the struggle seems to be over who has more "right" to be a victim. Or,
indeed, over what constitutes a victim, putting a spin on the whodunit: here the question is who "gets" it. The ostensible
victim gains the upper hand; pain is linked with epistemology.
2
In February of 1965, the Poetry Book Society named Ariel its "Spring Choice" for the year. For the Bulletin, Ted
Hughes wrote a two-column gloss on Ariel, which is titled simply "Sylvia Plath," ushering in three decades of similar
attempts to limn textually that soon-to-be-iconic name. As it has rarely been reprinted, I quote from it at length:
Behind these poems [Ariel] there is a fierce and uncompromising
nature. There is also a child desperately infatuated with the world.
And there is a strange muse, bald, white and wild . . . floating over a
burningly luminous vision of a Paradise. A Paradise which is at the
same time eerily frightening an unalterably spot-lit vision of death.
. . . But the truly miraculous thing about [Plath] will remain the fact
that in two years, while she was almost fully occupied with children
and house-keeping, she underwent a poetic development that has
hardly any equal on record, for suddenness and completeness. The
birth of her first child seemed to start the process. All at once she
could compose at top speed, and with her full weight. Her second
child brought things a giant step forward. All the various voices of
her gift came together. . . .
Ariel is not easy poetry to criticise. It is not much like any other
poetry. It is her. Everything she did was just like this, and this is just
like her--but permanent.(50)
The clarity of Hughes's statements here is worth noting, as they will grow progressively more entangled as the years
pass. One element that has not been subject to much change over the course of his writings on Plath is the patronizing
tone Hughes's writings take toward both Plath and her poetry--which they equate. Hughes has often dissociated himself
from what he terms the Plath "Fantasia"--the myth that has grown up around her name and which he deplores. But this
early comment is very much in keeping with many of the elements of the "Fantasia," mythologizing Plath as a mystical,
fey, morbid, otherworldly "poetess." The implicit "mystery" of Ariel, in its resistance to criticism and its "strangeness"
and "eeriness," gives way before the "miracle" of Plath's composing poetry at all within the exigencies of being wife
and mother. Plath's poetic gift may seem strange and eerie, but Hughes will solve this mystery: it was "the birth of her
first child" that enabled Plath to develop poetically, and "her second child brought things a giant step forward."(51) The
famous rage of the Ariel poems is not even mentioned in a comment that emphasizes childbirth.(52) Hughes's reading
of Plath's poetry as contingent upon maternity has presumably influenced such different readers as A. Alvarez, who
declared that "the real poems began in 1960, after the birth of her daughter Frieda," and Helen Vendler, who wrote,
"Either marriage and childbearing alone or the encouragement and help of Ted Hughes--or, more probably, both-changed [Plath's] style."(53) Certainly his own influence on Plath's work is an aspect of the narrative that Hughes's
writing has consistently underplayed in its establishment of Plath's poetic blooming as a happy by-product of
childbirth.(54) Hughes declares that the Ariel collection "is her," that the "corpus" of her work is equivalent to the
person who created it, but immediately backs away from this copula, taking refuge in similitude with a difference: "this
is just like her--but permanent." Ariel in this statement is not just Plath's epitaph; it keeps her alive, giving her a textual
body. This note seems to disavow Plath's mortality by equating her with her own textual productions, understanding
immortality in traditional romantic terms of the transcendent literary work of art, but the result is that the work giving
life to Plath is not her unmediated text, but Hughes's.
A year later, in 1966, Hughes published his "Notes on the Chronological Order of Sylvia Plath's Poems," the first
ostensibly critical piece he wrote on Plath, which establishes the main themes of all of his readings. First, "the poems
are chapters in a mythology where the plot, seen as a whole and in retrospect, is strong and clear--even if the origins of
it and the dramatis personae are at bottom enigmatic." This reading of a plot which requires retrospection in order to
clarify "enigmatic" motives and characters ("dramatis personae") implicitly invokes the mystery story, with its reliance
on an apparent enigma that will give way before incontrovertible "truth." The "truth" in Hughes's writings on Plath
tends to be the equation of Plath's work with her self: "in [Plath], as with perhaps few poets ever, the nature, the poetic
genius and the active self were the same." This equivalence of "nature," "genius," and "active self," leads to readings
like this one, on the composition of "The Stones": "it is full of specific details of her experience in a mental hospital,
and is clearly enough the first eruption of the voice that produced Ariel. . . . It is the poem where the self, shattered in
1953, suddenly finds itself whole. . . . She dismissed everything prior to "The Stones" as Juvenilia, produced in the
days before she became herself. . . . With the birth of her first child she received herself."(55) Like the detective who
reconstructs, ex post facto, the story of the murder in order to make sense of a predetermined outcome, Hughes sets up
here his crucial theme, a tendentious reading of Sylvia Plath's life as a tragic narrative characterized by a struggle
between destructive and nurturing impulses. Hughes's emphasis on teleology comes as no surprise to anyone who has
read Marjorie Perloff's "The Two Ariels: The (Re)making of the Sylvia Plath Canon," in which she demonstrates how
Hughes's reordering of Plath's Ariel collection changed the trajectory of the work from a narrative that emphasizes
spring, hope, and rebirth, to one that emphasizes suicide, death, and completion. But it is important to note in this
context, valuable as Perloff's research was and convincing as her arguments are, that Hughes, too, consistently
emphasizes the theme of birth and rebirth in his writing on Plath. The "whole" self for Hughes is the nurturing,
maternal and fundamentally poetic self, though it is worth noting the passive construction: Plath does not create her
own voice, but "becomes" it and "receives" it. The destructive self is consistently produced in Hughes's constructions
only to be disavowed, rather than emphasized (as Perloff argues). The inclusion in Ariel of "Edge," one of the last two
poems Plath composed and often taken as a "suicide note,"(56) is frequently invoked as evidence of Hughes's emphasis
on suicide. But Hughes ended Ariel, not with the putatively "suicidal" "Edge," but with "Words," composed four days
earlier. "Words" explores the aggressive possibilities of language; encountered "years later," words are "dry and
riderless, / . . . indefatigable hoof-taps," or "Axes / After whose stroke the wood rings." Hughes's conception of Plath's
"last word" seems to be less interested in suicide than it is in combating the hostile effect of her echoing language, even
as he ambivalently (and thus inconsistently) attempts to protect the words she left on the page.
Hughes declares over and over again that Plath's "best" poetry is the later work, a miraculous melding of text and self,
in which Plath passively "became herself" for the first time. The literary establishment, in the shape of Robert Lowell,
A. Alvarez, George Steiner, Stephen Spender, even Hugh Kenner (much as he dislikes Plath's late poetry), among
others, has concurred with Hughes's location of Plath's "true" self in the Ariel poems, but they are quicker to equate that
true self with suicide (a comparison which in Hughes's writings is uneasy, ambiguous, and disavowed). This is so
pervasive an interpretation that at least one reader has explicitly asked what many others have implied: if Plath had not
killed herself, would she "have the standing she has"?(57) This reading of Plath, besides being overdetermined, is part
and parcel of an ideology of poetry deeply rooted in the notion of the dangerously alienated artist, a Coleridgean
concept of the poet as wild speaker with flashing eyes and floating hair who warns ordinary mortals "Beware,
beware."(58) Lowell's construction of Plath in his foreword to Ariel is notorious, so I will simply recall several of the
most striking of his claims.(59) "In these poems, written in the last months of her life and often rushed out at the rate of
two or three a day, Sylvia Plath becomes herself, becomes something imaginary, newly, wildly and subtly createdhardly a person at all, or a woman, certainly not another `poetess,' but one of those super-real, hypnotic, great classical
heroines. This character is feminine, rather than female, though almost everything we customarily think of as feminine
is turned on its head . . . [She is] a Dido, Phaedra, or Medea. . . . The manner of the feeling is controlled hallucination,
the autobiography of a fever."(60) Lowell, like Hughes, declares that Sylvia Plath became "herself," and in the next
breath asserts that she became something "imaginary." Locating Plath's "true" self as "imaginary" leads Lowell to read
Sylvia Plath as a tragic heroine, and as writing "hallucinatory" (she's delusional) "autobiography." Autobiography and
hallucination combine to create "super-reality." Lowell does not distinguish between the poems and the woman, but
writes of what Plath "becomes" in the poetry. Though Lowell emphasizes "wilderness and "imaginariness" and Hughes
emphasizes maternity, they are alike in their assertion that Ariel is Plath, that in the poems she "becomes herself,"
which is to say that she becomes a text for them to read.
In 1971, in response to an article by Alvarez, Hughes wrote a piece for The Observer called "Publishing Sylvia Plath,"
in which he discussed the complexities of his "obligations": "As I am aware of them, my obligations are not so simple
as a scholar's would be. They are, first, towards her family, second, towards her best work. Just like hers, in fact--a
point to be considered, since I feel a general first and last obligation to her." The slippage between the person and the
work in this passage seems understandable, as Hughes writes of attempts to disentangle his feelings about Plath herself
from his feelings about her "best work," although his words do seem to assume that Plath's "best work" is easily
defined. But Hughes then discusses Ariel: "The poetry of the Ariel poems was no surprise to me. It was at last the flight
of what we had been trying to get flying for a number of years. But it dawned on me only in the last months which way
it wanted to fly."(61) The final statement is strikingly like that of an author, rather than editor. From his initial claim
that he is fulfilling an editorial and executorial obligation to Plath, Hughes then shifts to claiming virtual co-authorship
for Ariel ("we had been trying to get [it] flying") until finally Plath is erased altogether when Hughes says that it
dawned on him only late where exactly the Ariel poems were going. Which is to say that it was his decision, which sets
the stage for the following three pages, in which Hughes reviews his decisions about what to include in Ariel:
I had already started rearranging the collection, cutting out some
pieces that looked as if they might let in some facile attacker, cutting
out one or two of the more openly vicious ones, and a couple of
others that I thought might conceivably seem repetitive in tone and
form. Two or three I simply lost. . . . I would have cut `Daddy' if I'd been
in time (there are quite a few things more important than giving the
world great poems). I would have cut out others if I'd thought they
would ever be decoded. I also kept out one or two that were aimed
too nakedly. . . I added about nine of the last poems, because they
seemed to me too important to leave out.(62)
Hughes consistently employs a lexicon of warfare and defense: he cut poems that might "let in" an "attacker," or were
"openly vicious" or "aimed too nakedly." He includes those that are in "code," where Hughes prefers to keep them
(safely). The hostility of the poems is disavowed even as it is insisted upon. Hughes publishes poems that are "too
important to leave out," although "there are quite a few things more important than giving the world great poems" and
Plath herself had not included them in the collection. A struggle between the private and the public ensues, in which
"nakedly aimed" poems, or poems which might be "decoded," must be withheld, but "important" poems must be
published. This rhetoric links poetic hostility (as crime), biography, and authorship: only if the poems are understood
solely in a biographical sense do questions of "aim," "decoding," "viciousness," and "nakedness" arise. Hughes lists his
decisions with simple authorial confidence: "I did this" and then "I cut that" and though he has claimed that his
obligation is to Plath, the implicit presumption is that she didn't know what was best for her own poetry, and needed to
be shown the way by Hughes. This might be called an editorial prerogative, but it is only that in the absence of an
author; Hughes is writing of authorial privilege here. Likewise his suggestion in 1995 that Plath's "final" order of Ariel
wasn't all that final, even though he had earlier commented upon the "care" with which she ordered the book.(63) It
should have been a very "final" order because she killed herself afterwards; it is rendered a provisional order only
because Hughes superseded it in his capacity as authorial detective, presenting the murder weapons.
Six years later Hughes produced the first of three pieces which, taken together, make it clear that at issue in his writings
on Plath is a troublesome tension between truth and fiction, which the writer/ detective Hughes will "solve" by writing
the "truth." In 1977, Hughes introduced a collection of Plath's prose (Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams); in 1981,
he introduced her Collected Poems; and in 1982, he wrote a foreword to her Journals. Hughes's introductions to all
three are consistent, even repetitive, in their detection of the "significance" of Plath's story. Where previously Hughes
had written in terms of "reality" (which he would later recharacterize, with more nuance, as "authenticity"), in the
Introduction to Johnny Panic he first uses the more absolutist term "truth" in regards to Plath. Now, in discussing
Plath's prose, the balance in the "true fiction" paradox that Hughes-as-detective is trying to reconstruct shifts
permanently from "fiction" to "truth": "What is especially interesting now about some of these descriptions is the way
they fed into Ariel. They are good evidence to prove that poems which seem often to be constructed of arbitrary surreal
symbols are really impassioned reorganizations of relevant fact."(64) Such a statement does not merely, as Jacqueline
Rose suggests, reinforce Hughes's teleological privileging of the Ariel poems. More importantly, these prose pieces by
Plath, grouped with her short fiction, are offered by the detective Hughes as "good evidence" to "prove" that the poems
are "really" true, as opposed to what they "seem," that they are "reorganizations of relevant fact." That is, Hughes
evaluates the poetry on the basis of its claim to tell a "true story." What makes "fact" relevant or irrelevant seems as
vexed a question as how prose pieces can provide legislative proof that poetry is "authentic" because grounded in fact.
"Fact" in this definition italicizes, as it were, the biographical, as if to concur with Howard Moss that great poetry
should not be "mere rhetoric." Hughes continues: "It seems probable that [Plath's] real creation was her own image, so
that all her writings appear like notes and jottings directing attention towards that central problem--herself. Whether
this is right or wrong, with some personalities it simply happens. As an editor of Sylvia Plaths unpublished writings,
watching this happen to her, I am more and more inclined to think that any bit of evidence which corrects and clarifies
our idea of what she really was is important."(65) "Watching this happen to her": it is something that happens passively
to Plath, that Hughes is in a privileged position to "watch" as her "editor," a construction that erases Hughes's own
agency as the authorial voice "directing attention towards that central problem--herself" and determining "what she
really was."(66) The authorial voice here transforms itself from a detective into a judge, upholding the (Symbolic, if not
civil) Law, admitting into court only those bits of "evidence" deemed appropriate. Hughes raises the issue of "right and
wrong" only to dismiss it, and the terms "right and wrong" themselves also mean "correct and incorrect," which is the
clear subtext of Hughes's writing here. The article accentuates the "real," that is to say, lived, Sylvia Plath when it
invokes "any bit of evidence which corrects and clarifies our idea of what she really was." It is "evidence" of which
Hughes now writes, proof that will cement this reading of Sylvia Plath as the only one possible, a reading that will
become more and more dogmatic as the years progress. "Our idea of what she really was" is then not so democratic as
it may at first read. Instead, the context makes it clear that this is the royal "we," assuming a tyrannical interpretation
that is so "universal" that it could not be disagreed with. And it is an "idea" of what Plath "really" was that can be
"corrected," which is to say that there must be, somewhere out there, some "correct" idea, and that it is incumbent upon
"us" to uncover it. Ironically, however, Hughes locates this supposedly Archimedean point from which one can view a
life's "truth" right within the very heart and matrix of that life, and disavows his own role in constructing that "correct"
idea of Sylvia Plath.
In 1981 and 1982, introducing the Collected Poems and the journals, Hughes continues to insist upon the "truth" or
authenticity of his definition of Plath, but in such a way as to remind the reader of the very provisionality he attempts to
deny. "Her evolution as a poet went rapidly through successive moults of style, as she realized her true matter and
voice.... At each move we made, she seemed to shed a style."(67) It seems problematic to assert that everything that
came before the Ariel poems was merely a style, but that the last style was "true." If Plath was consistently "shedding"
styles, it is surely logical to conclude that, had she lived, she would have shed the Ariel voice eventually and
discovered another (perhaps "truer") voice. The "true" voice in the Collected Poems is, we are told, maternal: Plath
finds "anxious mothering title[s] for the growing brood" of poems she was composing. Although in "Publishing Sylvia
Plath," written ten years earlier, Hughes had cited the "importance" of some of Plath's poems as the reason to overlook
their aggression, in the Introduction to The Collected Poems he states, pragmatically, that more of the "personally
aggressive" poems might have been "omitted" from Ariel had they not already been published. That is, the hostility of
the "personal" poems is not excused by their "importance," but must be endured because they had already been made
public (by Plath, which is implicit but never stated). What Hughes calls the "personal," and I have been calling the
"biographical," underlies each of these readings of Plath: the "true" voice, which is maternal, must not be admitted to
be "personally aggressive," so that Plath's own drive to make public her poetic aggression (as well as the more maternal
poetry) is abnegated.
There have been several readings of Hughes's Foreword to Plath's journals in 1982, rewritten as an article for Grand
Street, but most of these readings have focused upon either Hughes's own narratival self-construction in the two
articles, or upon his destruction of the late journals.(68) But in this article Hughes makes several other important
assertions about Plath. He authorizes his denomination of Plath's "true" or "authentic" voice on the basis of his having
married her, and then associates that voice with the female and the maternal:
There was something about her reminiscent of what one reads of
Islamic fanatic lovers of God--a craving to strip away everything from
some ultimate intensity, some communion with spirit, or with reality,
or simply with intensity itself. She showed something violent in this,
something very primitive, perhaps very female, a readiness, even a
need, to sacrifice everything to the new birth.... The negative phase
of it, logically, is suicide. But the positive phase (more familiar in
religious terms) is the death of the old false self in the birth of
the new real one. And this is what she finally did achieve, after a
long and painful labor.
Ariel and the associated later poems give us the voice of that
self. They are the proof that it arrived. All her other writings,
except these journals, are the waste products of its gestation.(69)
In the first paragraph, Plath is very "violent" and very "female," setting up the metaphor of birth ("labor" and
"gestation") that goes back all the way to 1966. Hughes compares Plath to a fanatic Islamic worshipper of God (an
unlikely simile) in her desire to "strip away" and achieve some ultimate "intensity." Certainly her poetry records such a
figurative desire, but Hughes takes Plath literally, so that "suicide," an actual physical act, becomes the "logical
negative phase" of this metaphorical construction. This reading, too, is reductively biographical: suicide is the "logical"
outcome of this metaphorical construction of Plath that Hughes insists upon. But Hughes returns to metaphor in his
reading of the positive consequence as rebirth, which he then asserts Plath achieved. The tragedy is Hughes's insistence
that Plath "achieved" this metaphorical "positive phase," as if to overwrite the inescapable fact that she much more
certainly achieved the "negative phase" of suicide. In a tautology, Hughes declares that the Ariel poems give "proof"
that Plats "true" self "arrived," once more invoking juridical language as he asserts himself the only "legitimate" reader
of Plath. The dismissal of everything else Plath ever wrote as "waste product" has been amply critiqued by Jacqueline
Rose and others.(70) But this language has seeped into other considerations of Plath: Janet Malcolm echoed Hughes's
language (but inverted his meaning) when she called Ariel "the waste product of [Plaths] madness."(71) Also worth
noting is the biologistic reductiveness at work in Hughes's writing: the link between "gestation" and "waste" would
seem to be menstruation, or (more likely given Hughes's emphasis upon childbirth), the placenta. The "true" self that
Hughes's writings seek to create is the biological maternal self, which leads the article back into biography, in a long
passage that may be the strangest in all of these strange moments:
Sylvia Plath was a person of many masks.... These were the visible
faces of her lesser selves, her false or provisional selves.... I
never saw her show her real self to anybody--except, perhaps, in the
last three months of her life.
Her real self had showed itself in her writing, just for a moment,
three years earlier, and when I heard it--the self I had married,
after all, and lived with and knew well--in that brief moment, three
lines recited as she went out through a doorway, I knew that what I
had always felt must happen had now begun to happen, that her real
self, being the real poet, would now speak for itself, and would
throw off all those lesser and artificial selves that had monopolized
the words up to that point, it was as if a dumb person suddenly spoke.
A real self, as we know, is a rare thing.... Most of us are never
more than bundles of contradictory and complementary selves. Our real
self, if our belief that we have one is true, is usually dumb.... As
if dumbness were the universal characteristic of the real self.(72)
The logical fallacy in claiming that Plath's "false or provisional selves" were opposed to a "real" self, which phrasing
alone calls into doubt the whole notion of an integrated "self," seems clear. The degree to which Hughes's writings on
Plath assert an essentialized notion of self, and particularly of female self, certainly deserves note, as does his
hierarchizing of those selves (the "provisional selves" are "false" and "lesser"). But Hughes goes on to write that Plath
never showed her real self to anyone. If no one had ever seen it before, if this "self" was never "realized" before the
Ariel poems and childbirth brought it forth, how can Hughes claim so confidently that it was the same as the "self [he]
had married, after all"? Even if the sentence is meant to imply "anyone, but me, her husband," Hughes is still insisting
that the "self" he married is the definitional self, the "real" self, the Ur-self, and that the poetry derives from and speaks
for this originary self ("her real self, being the real poet"). Hughes rarely discusses the craft of the Ariel poems; he
privileges them as an unmediated reflection of the extraordinary "self" of Sylvia Plath. Hughes says her real self had
shown itself in writing three years earlier (was this "The Stones" or another, unnamed, moment of literary selfrealization?) and then he heard it for the first time when she recited three "lines" over her shoulder as she walked out
the door. Here is the moment where it becomes difficult to separate Hughes from his writing--at the exact moment
where he claims his personal knowledge of Plath as warrant for the exclusivity of his reading. Hughes specifically
invests poetry with the liberating power to release Plath's "real" voice, which was that of his wife. "Her real self, being
the real poet": the equation is so total that the two terms are synonymous, codependent. When the writer is the real self,
the writings that real self produces are taken to be the "naked" self as well. It is this "self," on the page, the Ariel self,
that Hughes's writings recognize, claim, and try to protect. In order to protect Plath's "real" self, Hughes's writings on
her depend upon the authority of "fact," but that "fact" is solely defined by Ted Hughes.
When he rewrites the Foreword as "Sylvia Plath and Her journals," Hughes largely abandons images of Plath's
destructiveness (excising his famous description of Plath's "warring selves," for example) in favor of repeated images
of poetic nurturance and mystery. Describing Plath's recovery from her breakdown in 1953 and her simultaneous
efforts to compose poetry, Hughes declares the struggle to have possessed a "weird autonomy," that gave the
impression of taking place "in a womb, an almost biological process" and was "like a pregnancy."(73) The detective
Hughes genders Plath's mysterious uniqueness as feminine: "Maybe her singularity derives from a feminine beeline
instinct for the real priority, for what truly matters--an instinct for nursing and repairing the damaged and threatened
nucleus of the self."(74) The image of a beeline instinct is surely no accident in a discussion of the poet who figured
herself famously as a queen bee in her death throes, an image that invokes self-destruction more than self-nurturing.
The mystery is solved by inverting the terms: hostility becomes nurturing. While writers like Janet Malcolm equate
Plath's "true self" with the "`not-nice' part of herself," Hughes labors to quiet the "`not-nice'" Plath.(75) Hughes's
writing seems to search at this point for a way to reintegrate the "self" and the "voice," while disavowing the
uncertainty of words on the page and their constitutional failure to represent the self for which they purport to speak:
[Again on "The Stones"]: Among the fragments, a new self has been
put together. Or rather an old shattered self, reduced by violence to
its essential core, has been repaired and renovated and born again,
and--most significant of all--speaks with a new voice.... All her poems
are in a sense by-products. Her real creation was that inner gestation
and eventual birth of a new-conquering self to which her journal
bears witness, and which proved itself so overwhelmingly in the
Ariel poems of 1962.
That her new self, who could do so much, could not ultimately
save her, is perhaps only to say what has often been
learned on this particular field of conflict--that the moment of
turning one's back on an enemy who seems safely defeated, and is
defeated, is the most dangerous moment of all.(76)
The lexicon of warfare returns, suggesting the notorious "warring selves": Plath is her own enemy, and must be
defeated on the poetic "field of conflict." This seems a textual projection, given the way in which Hughes's writings on
Plath struggle with his own role in her writing. Who is the enemy who must be defeated on the poetic field of conflict?
Perhaps it is Plath herself who must be defeated by Hughes, when her destructive impulses have not been safely
reclaimed by the nurturing "true" textual self. The self here is just an empty house, albeit one which has the capacity to
be reborn. And a house, what's more, to be reborn with a new voice, giving us three metaphors for the price of one. If it
is an essential core, why does it need a new voice? This may seem like quibbling, but the point is serious: Hughes's
images become incoherent here because they are contradictory. The self is both hostile and nurturing, both provisional
and true in Hughes's writing and yet he is trying to privilege one aspect over the other. The detective Hughes invokes
the language of the courtroom once more: the journal "bears witness" to the birth of Plath's "real self"; the poems
"prove" her existence, as if that were in doubt. Citing an admittedly fictional construct as biographical "evidence" is
problematic enough, but this statement is also a tautology: the poems that Plath composed are invoked to prove that the
"true" Plath existed, but that existence is also the necessary a priori condition of their composition.
In 1989, in the course of a heated ad hominem battle over the care of Plath's headstone and grave, which took place
primarily in the letters-to-the-editor section of The Guardian and The Independent, Hughes's tone grew
(understandably, perhaps) considerably more embattled, and correspondingly more dogmatic in his assertion that there
is a "truth" about Sylvia Plath's life and death, and that he is its sole guardian:
In the years soon after [Plath's] death, when scholars approached me,
I tried to take their apparently serious concern for the truth about
Sylvia Plath seriously. But I learned my lesson early.... if I tried
too hard to tell them exactly how something happened, in the hope of
correcting some fantasy, I was quite likely to be accused of trying to
suppress Free Speech. In general, my refusal to have anything to do
with the Plath Fantasia has been regarded as an attempt to suppress Free
Speech. Where my correction was accepted, it rarely displaced a
fantasy. More often, it was added to the repertoire, as a variant
hypothesis. . . . The truth simply tends to produce more lies....
The Fantasia about Sylvia Plath is more needed than the facts.
Where that leaves respect for the truth of her life (and of mine), or
for her memory, or for the literary tradition, I do not know.(77)
Hughes's simple assumption that he knows the "truth about Sylvia Plath," and that only he knows it, causes as much
trouble in writings on Plath as the malfeasance of some scholars. The Plath "Fantasia" is not, for Ted Hughes, ever the
effect of a reader's or scholar's misunderstanding the "truth"; it is instead a "lie," a deliberate attempt to mislead. For
some readers, Hughes may lose whatever sympathy his evident frustration might elicit when his tone descends into
resentment that he is not given, as his due, the last word: "where my correction was accepted, it rarely displaced a
fantasy. More often, it was added to the repertoire, as a variant hypothesis." Hughes wants to hand down a judgment;
instead, he finds to his evident bafflement that readers and scholars treat his version as only one of many, all of which
are equally suspect. Not only does Hughes claim to know Plath's lived reality best, but her psychic reality as well, and
from that he derives her "real" poetic statement. The "real" Sylvia Plath is an elastic term for Ted Hughes, covering at
least three distinct entities: the woman who married him; the poetic voice with its own discrete existence; and the
cultural icon that has become "Sylvia Plath." Hughes's invocation of respect for the "literary tradition" is particularly
ironic given that he, the poet laureate of Great Britain since 1984, might easily be taken synecdochally as a prime
symbol of the tyranny of that same (masculinist) literary tradition, which likes to assert its authority in discerning the
"truth" about "fiction."
In Raritan in 1994, Hughes published his first long commentary on The Bell jar, a text in which, as in Ariel, the lines
between biography and art continue to blur. Hughes describes The Bell jar as "the author's psychic autobiography, the
creation-myth of the person that had emerged in the 'Poem for a Birthday' and that would go on in full cry through
Ariel."(78) In discussing The Bell jar and its role in Plath's efforts to break the "mysterious barriers" that blocked her
"true gift," Hughes shifts the ground of the debate a little, and now privileges biographical story ("material") as agent:
"Her materials were the real explosive experience of her own life and attempted suicide. Her bid to refashion these
materials ritually, to recreate her history and remake herself, is brilliant with a kind of desperation.... The material itself
is doing something else. It is disinterring its own actuality for the first time, and dictating its own document, telling the
simple truth."(79) The metaphor of the text "disinterring its own actuality" brings together the disinterment of Plath's
corpse and Hughes's characterization of that corpse's biographical "actuality" in a kind of summating image for the
"simple [biographical] truth" that The Bell Jar, Hughes asserts, is telling, despite the obvious ways in which The Bell
Jar is fictionalized. The "document" that is The Bell Jar tells the "simple truth" of Plath's "desperation." This use of the
word "document" recalls Hughes's earlier objection to Alvarez's piece on the grounds that it purported to be a
"documentary" but implicitly failed to live up to this pretension. Similarly, Olwyn Hughes is quoted in The Silent
Woman as differentiating between fiction (which includes poetry) and document: "'biography isn't a poem, it isn't a
novel, it's a document."(80) A "document" is evidentiary, it is legal, it is offered as proof. For the detective Hughes, a
"document" seems to be a text that disavows its textuality, it is a text to be valued to the degree to which it tells "the
simple truth," as opposed to the "mysterious barriers" that blocked access to Plath's singular self, which was also
"mysterious" and "enigmatic," although this is the self that Hughes claims to know best. If The Bell Jar tells the
author's "psychic autobiography," it also, Hughes informs us, reflects Plath's struggle to "reinterpret ... her own
history," a struggle upon which depended "her very survival." The real Plath depended upon discovering a "simple
truth," which, paradoxically, required "reinterpretation" of her history; it required that she write it. For Hughes, a text
written by Plath or by himself seems to achieve the status of truth as "document" (or it is "waste product"). Even
Hughes's description of The Bell Jar's plot echoes the terms of the detective's search for the murderous and verifiable
"true self": "the main movement of the action is the shift of the heroine, the V from artificial ego to authentic self-through a painful death."(81) Although Hughes discusses the "heroine" and the "I" of The Bell Jar, he never names her,
as if to deny the fictional Esther Greenwood any place in the narrative at all. There is only the "I" who doesn't really
"die" in Hughes's sad construction--her death is set off in quotes. The "I" in Plath's writing is never the fictional
"Esther," only ever Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes's wife, as he continues to battle the tension between author and subject.
Indeed, like the detective he writes himself as, Hughes often in his writing on Plath vacillates between author and
subject, insisting on the similarity between himself and Plath. In a recent interview, Hughes describes his relationship
with Plath as follows: "I see now that when we met, my writing, like hers, left its old path and started to circle and
search.... But our minds soon became two parts of one operation. We dreamed a lot of shared or complementary
dreams. Our telepathy was intrusive."(82) In this article, Hughes also figures Plath as a kind of poet/detective, one
trying to "reveal a secret."(83) Significantly, however, in this construction Plath is like Hughes in also considering her
"self" the "secret" that must be exposed, as if to imply that his unveiling of her is justified by her exhibitionism.(84)
This need to reveal that Hughes is describing is of course the flip side of the detective's need to discover; Hughes even
says that the "real mystery is this strange need."(85) He characterizes this "total confession" as "very naked," again
returning to corporeal metaphors--now striptease--as he explores the dual "mysteries" of poetry and Sylvia Plath and
invokes the "nakedly aimed" poems in Ariel.
In this article Hughes not only relies on the policeman's need for "confession," but also levies an accusation: the
interviewer asks, "What happened to Plath's last novel that was never published?" and Hughes's response is startling:
"Well, what I was aware of was a fragment of a novel, about seventy pages. Her mother said she saw a whole novel,
but I never knew about it. What I was aware of was sixty, seventy pages which disappeared. And to tell you the truth, I
always assumed her mother took them all, on one of her visits."(86) Several facts are crucial here: first, this accusation
that Hughes believes Mrs. Plath stole the novel comes only after her death in March, 1994. Once more Hughes figures
himself as a policeman solving crimes. However, this statement conflicts with an earlier statement made by Hughes in
the Introduction to Johnny Panic in 1977, that "after The Bell jar [Plath] began another novel, provisionally titled
Double Exposure, and had about 130 pages of it when she died. That manuscript has since disappeared."(87) Double
Exposure seems to have had a half-life. And then there is the long-debated question of lost journals. Hughes is writing a
suspense narrative: Who has the missing novel (habeas corpus)? How long was it? Did he really destroy the last
journal? Might the other, missing, journal "presumably, still turn up," as Hughes tantalizingly suggests in "Sylvia Plath
and Her Journals"?(88)
There is a striking passage in The Silent Woman, in which Malcolm quotes a letter from Hughes, where he explains his
position vis-a-vis those who attack Plath in the name of defending him. He does not thank them for this defense,
writing: "All those fierce reactions against her--which she provoked so fiercely--from people who thought, perhaps,
sometimes, that they were defending me--were from my point of view simply disasters from which I had to protect her.
It was like trying to protect a fox from my own hounds while the fox bit me. With a real fox in that situation, you
would never have any doubt why it was biting you.(89) While this is, to my mind, Hughes's most sympathetic and
touching moment in print in regard to Plath (despite its paternalism), it also calls irresistibly to mind a passage from a
short story by Dashiell Hammett, called "The Gutting of Coffignal." The similarity of the metaphors is almost certainly
a coincidence, but a striking one nevertheless; in Hammett's passage, a detective sets the guilty woman straight on the
nature of their relationship: "You think I'm a man and you're a woman. That's wrong. I'm a manhunter and you're
something that has been running in front of me. There's nothing human about it. You might as well expect a hound to
play tiddly-winks with the fox he's caught." In both passages, the fox and hound metaphor serves to naturalize the
predatory relationship of man hunting woman. Hughes is also, however, writing himself into an oxymoron: he is a
hunter claiming to protect his prey from his own agents of destruction; moreover he is a predator attacked by his prey.
Which is to say that he is the victim and she the attacker, however natural he declares her attack to have been. Most
interesting of all is that this passage is in response to the accusation that Plath destroyed Hughes's works in progress in
a jealous fit: she destroyed the body of his text and he retaliates by writing himself as a hunter hunted by the prey he is
also trying, ambivalently, to protect.
When Hughes wrote to A. Alvarez, objecting to Alvarez's memoir of Plath's death, he argued that Alvarez's memoir
was irresponsible precisely to the degree that it supplied the public with "a body":
Sylvia now goes through the detailed, point-by-point death of a
public sacrifice. Her poems provide the vocal part for that sort of
show. Your account, in apparently documentary style, of how she
lived up to her outcry inevitably completes and concludes the
performance. Now there actually is a body. The cries drew the crowd,
but they came not to hear more cries--they came to see the body. Now
they have it--they can smell its hair and its death. You present in the
flesh what the death cries were working up to. The public isn't really
interested in death cries unless they guarantee a dead body, a slow painful
death, with as many signals as possible of what it is feeling like. And you
present that, the thing the public really wants and needs--the
absolutely convincing finalised official visible gruelling death.(90)
Alvarez's memoir certainly includes physical descriptions of Plath, some of which have been seen by readers other than
Hughes as gratuitous: Alvarez's emphasis, for example, on the "sharp animal" smell of Plath's hair has received some
well-deserved feminist commentary. Certainly Alvarez's decision to write of the builders who broke in and "found
Sylvia sprawled in the kitchen. She was still warm," seems to support Hughes's claim that Alvarez supplies the public
with a body.(91) But so does Ted Hughes. The body in Hughes's texts is the body he knew, the tragically dead body,
but that body is also taken to be the "true" self, the "authentic" voice, which is nurturing, female, and mysterious--and
mysteriously hostile, a hostility which must be produced to be denied. The textual body is not separated from the
tragically dead body. There is in truth no body in either account except the textual, but Hughes's lexicon of detection,
murder, body, death cries, document, evidence, proof, and truth works to blur the line between the real body of Sylvia
Plath and these textual accounts of it. Likewise Hughes's insistence that any account of Sylvia Plath is also an account
of him, and is "re-inventing" his personal experiences, disavows the distinction between his personal, private
understanding, which is not debatable, and the textual nature of the dilemma, which is. In Hughes's detective romance,
while he and Plath are both hunter and hunted, predator and prey, he is irreducibly the author and she the body of the
text. But Sylvia Plath, in her poem "The Detective," explicitly rejects such a romance narrative:
This is a case without a body. The body
does not come into it at all.
Notes
(1.) Howard Moss, "Dying, An Introduction," in Ariel Ascending, ed. Paul Alexander (New York: Harper & Row,
1985), 129.
(2.) Elizabeth Hardwick, "On Sylvia Plath," in Ariel Ascending, ed. Alexander, 102, 100, 101.
(3.) Janet Malcolm, The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath & Ted Hughes (New York: Knopf, 1994), 155.
(4.) Ibid., 128, 125.
(5.) Ted Hughes, Foreword, The Journals of Sylvia Plath, ed. Ted Hughes and Frances McCullough (New York:
Ballantine, 1982), xiv-xv.
(6.) There have been several such attacks, including Robin Morgan's notorious poem "Arraignment," in which she
accused Ted Hughes, in so many words, of Sylvia Plath's murder, and called for his castration and lynching. While I
argue that Ted Hughes's writings have contributed to the confusion of author and text, I in no way wish to imply that he
deserved such a vacuous (and vicious) allegation.
(7.) Malcolm, 50.
(8.) I attempt such a consideration of Plath's voice, which I argue is always provisional and performative, in "`I am your
opus / I am your valuable': Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes," forthcoming in Literary Couples, ed. Marjorie Stone and
Judith Thompson.
(9.) Anna Fels, "The Flash of the Knife," The Nation (May 16, 1994), 670.
(10.) Sylvia Plath's late poetry is arguably as interested in murder as it is in suicide. See, for example, "The Detective,"
"The Other," "Burning the Letters," "The Courage of Shutting-Up," "The Bee Meeting," "A Secret," "Daddy," "The
jailer," "Cut," "Purdah," "Death & Co.," and "Totem." Plath's prose--her Journals, short stories, and, to a lesser extent,
The Bell Jar--also repeatedly employs tropes of murder, crime, and detection.
(11.) Most obviously, Plath's poem "The Detective" declares "No one is dead. / There is no body in the house at all,"
before exhorting the reader or an assumed interlocutor to "Make notes."
(12.) Ross MacDonald, "The Writer as Detective Hero," in The Mystery Writer's Art, ed. Frances M. Nevins, Jr.
(Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1971), 304.
(13.) Quoted in Malcolm, 127.
(14.) Ted Hughes, "Sylvia Plath and Her Journals," in Ariel Ascending, ed. Alexander, 153.
(15.) Ibid., 153-54.
(16.) "What he [the detective] soon discovers is that the `reality' that anyone involved will swear to is in fact itself a
construction, a fabrication, a fiction, a faked and alternate reality--and that it has been gotten together before he ever
arrived on the scene. And the [detective]'s work therefore is to deconstruct, decompose, deplot and defictionalize that
`reality' and to construct or reconstruct out of it a true fiction, i.e., an account of what `really' happened" (Steven
Marcus, Introduction to The Continental Op, by Dashiell Hammett [New York: Random House, 19741, xx).
(17.) A. Alvarez, "Prologue: Sylvia Plath," in The Savage God: A Study of Suicide (New York and London: W. W.
Norton, 1971), 48.
(18.) Gordon Lameyer, "The Double in Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar," in Sylvia Plath: The Woman and the Work, ed.
Edward Butscher (New York: Dodd Mead, 1977), 32.
(19.) Nor does Lameyer treat even the fictional characters consistently: Esther is introduced without quotes, while
"Buddy Willard" is set off. Lameyer is also collapsing pronouns pretty extensively: "she called me `the major man in
my life.'" Even the title of the collection in which this article appears enacts the conflation: Butscher is editing
discussions of Sylvia Plath: The Woman and the Work with little or no consideration of the difference among the three
(the name, the person, and the writing).
(20.) Alvarez, "Prologue," 48.
(21.) Peter Davison, Half Remembered: A Personal History (Brownsville, OR: Story Line Press, 1991), 170. Peter
Davison, "Inhabited by a Cry: The Last Poetry of Sylvia Plath," Atlantic Monthly (August 1966), 81.
(22.) In The Silent Woman there is a central exchange between Malcolm and Jacqueline Rose, in which Malcolm
concludes that the two women were fighting over Ted Hughes. Malcolm seems cannily to be masking as an erotic
contest what is more clearly a struggle over who tells the better story, who got more nearly to the "truth" of the PlathHughes dispute. By aligning herself with Hughes, Malcolm implicitly borrows weight from the authority of his "true"
version (Malcolm, 183).
(23.) Quoted in Malcolm, 129.
(24.) Ibid., 140.
(25.) Quoted in ibid., 201, 182.
(26.) Quoted in ibid., 142.
(27.) Quoted in ibid., 130.
(28.) Ibid., 12.
(29.) Ibid., 186.
(30.) Jacqueline Rose, The Haunting of Sylvia Plath (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), 11.
(31.) Quoted in Malcolm, 45, 41.
(32.) There is a typographical error that reads like a Freudian slip in a recent interview with Ted Hughes. The context
makes clear that the sentence should read "It was her growing fame, of course, that made it possible to publish [the
Ariel poems]" but the sentence actually reads "It was her growing frame," revealing that this article is the latest "side"
of the "frame" Hughes has been constructing around Plath (Ted Hughes, "The Art of Poetry," The Poetry Review 134
[spring 1995]: 79; emphases added).
(33.) Rose, 103.
(34.) Malcolm, 8.
(35.) Ibid., 177.
(36.) Ibid., 52.
(37.) Ibid., 49.
(38.) This begs the question of my own authorship, about which I can only say that I do not attempt to legislate what is
true and what is false, only what seem "interested," or strategic, claims to truth-telling.
(39.) Malcolm, 40.
(40.) Ibid., 139.
(41.) Idem.
(42.) Ibid., 50.
(43.) Ibid., 16,156.
(44.) Ibid., 12.
(45.) Ibid., 176.
(46.) Quoted in ibid., 49.
(47.) Barbara Johnson, "Muteness Envy," in Human, All Too Human, ed. Diana Fuss (New York and London:
Routledge, 1995), 28.
(48.) Ibid., 5.
(49.) Hughes, "Art of Poetry," 192.
(50.) Ted Hughes, "Sylvia Plath," Poetry Book Society Bulletin 44 (February 1965), 1.
(51.) Later, in his introduction to Plath's Journals, Hughes makes this equation in an even more astonishing manner: "In
that first month [of 1961] her collection of poems, The Colossus, was taken for publication in England by Heinemann.
With that out of the way, in April she produced a daughter" (Hughes, "Sylvia Plath and Her Journals," 160).
(52.) Certainly many of Plath's late poems focus on pregnancy, childbirth, and maternity. The point here is the
reductiveness of Hughes's reading, as if tacitly to abnegate the equally unbalanced readings of Plath as vengeful "bitchgoddess."
(53.) A. Alvarez, "Sylvia Plath," in The Art of Sylvia Plath: A Symposium, ed. Charles Newman (London: Faber &
Faber, 1966), 58, his emphasis; Helen Vendler, "An Intractable Metal," in Ariel Ascending, ed. Alexander, 5.
(54.) In "The Art of Poetry," Hughes disingenuously addresses the question as follows: "I don't know whether our verse
exchanged much, if we influenced one another that way--not in the early days. Maybe others see that differently"
(Hughes, "The Art of Poetry," 77). Compare to his statements thirty years earlier on the composition of "Flute Notes
from Reedy Pond": "At this time she was concentratedly trying to break down the tyranny, the fixed focus and public
persona which descriptive or discursive poems take as a norm. We devised exercises of meditation and invocation." Or
on "The Moon and the Yew Tree": "Early one morning, in the dark, I saw the full moon setting on to a large yew that
grows in the churchyard, and I suggested she make a poem of it.... And I had no doubt that this was ... perhaps a great
poem. She insisted that it was an exercise on the theme" (Ted Hughes, "Notes on the Chronological Order of Sylvia
Plath's Poems," in The Art of Sylvia Plath, ed. Newman, 191, 194; emphasis added). Over and over Plath records in the
journals the exercises that Hughes set for her. (Note here, too, the way that Hughes privileges the poetry his exercises
elicited as "great.")
(55.) Hughes, "Notes on Chronological Order," 187-93.
(56.) See, for instance, Alvarez: "`Edge' . . . is specifically about the act she was about to perform" ("Prologue: Sylvia
Plath," 51).
(57.) He also asks if we would read Plath if she hadn't been pretty: "Had Sylvia Plath been ugly, and not died in so
deliberate a manner, I wonder if she would have the standing she has" (Paul West, "Crossing the Water," in Sylvia
Plath: The Critical Heritage, ed. Linda Wagner-Martin [New York and London: Routledge, 19881, 157).
(58.) Plath of course utters just such a warning in "Lady Lazarus" but she, appropriately enough, enjambs the line,
figuratively breaking the masculine literary tradition apart. This point is also noted by in Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan
Gubar, "In Yeats's House: The Death and Resurrection of Sylvia Plath," in No Man's Land: The Place of the Woman
Writer in the Twentieth Century (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1994), 290.
(59.) Marjorie Perloff, "The Two Ariels: The (Re)making of the Sylvia Plath Canon," American Poetry Review
(November-December 1984): 10, where she locates the beginning of the Plath "myth" with Lowell's words. She merely
quotes, however, without commentary, the notorious statement that Plath was "hardly a person at all, or a woman,
certainly not another `poetess,' but one of those super-real hypnotic, great classical heroines," Katha Pollitt, "A Note of
Triumph," in Ariel Ascending, ed. Alexander, 94, similarly notes Lowell's comparison of Plath to "Dido, Phaedra,
Medea" without considering the implications of equating suicide and murder.
(60.) Robert Lowell, Foreword, Ariel, by Sylvia Plath (New York: Harper & Row, 1965), vii.
(61.) Ted Hughes, "Publishing Sylvia Plath," reprinted in Winter Pollen: Occasional Prose, ed. William Scammell
(New York: St. Martin's Press, 1995), 165.
(62.) Ibid., 167.
(63.) Hughes, "The Art of Poetry," 79.
(64.) Ted Hughes, Introduction, Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams and Other Prose Writings, by Sylvia Plath, ed.
Ted Hughes (London: Faber & Faber, 1977), 19.
(65.) Idem.
(66.) Hughes's self-legitimating judgments get more embedded in the texts as the years pass: in this collection (as has
been noted by Jacqueline Rose), Hughes divides Plath's writings into "The More Successful Short Stories and Prose
Pieces," and "Other Stories."
(67.) Hughes, Introduction, The Collected Poems, by Sylvia Plath, ed. Ted Hughes, (New York: HarperPerennial,
1981), 16.
(68.) See, for the first, Malcolm, 3-7; for the second, Nancy Milford, "The Journals of Sylvia Plath," in Critical Essays
on Sylvia Plath, ed. Linda W. Wagner (Boston: G. K. Hall and Company, 1984), 81-83, and Steven Gould Axelrod,
"The Second Destruction of Sylvia Plath," American Poetry Review (March-April 1985): 17-18.
(69.) Hughes, Foreword to journals, xiv-xv.
(70.) See, for example, Rose, 82: "There is, therefore, a set of decisions being taken here [in Hughes's writings on
Plath] as to whether, and to what extent, Plath can be allowed to be low-low as in nasty, low as in the degradation of
culture."
(71.) Malcolm, 66.
(72.) Hughes, Foreword to journals, xiv-xv.
(73.) Hughes, "Sylvia Plath and Her journals," 155.
(74.) Ibid., 154.
(75.) Malcolm, 158.
(76.) Hughes. "Sylvia Plath and Her Journals," 157-64.
(77.) Ted Hughes, "The Place Where Sylvia Plath Should Rest in Peace," The Guardian (April 20, 1989): 22.
(78.) Ted Hughes, "On Sylvia Plath," Raritan 14.2 (1994): 2-3.
(79.) Ibid., 9; his emphasis.
(80.) Malcolm, 45.
(81.) Hughes, "On Sylvia Plath," 4.
(82.) Hughes, "The Art of Poetry," 77.
(83.) Ibid., 75.
(84.) Plath's "need to reveal" her "true self" is not usually debated; certainly her journals record such a need (although
her letters reveal an equally desperate need to conceal her "true self"--and not just to her mother). But what is
significant here is Hughes's invocation of Plath's need as justification for his own project.
(85.) Hughes, "The Art of Poetry," 75.
(86.) Ibid., 78.
(87.) Hughes, Introduction to Johnny Panic, 11.
(88.) Hughes, "Sylvia Plath and Her journals," 152.
(89.) Quoted in Malcolm, 143.
(90.) Quoted in ibid., 127.
(91.) Alvarez, "Prologue: Sylvia Plath," 53.
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