1

SUSAN R. VAN DYNE

The problem of biography
Because the poems and novel that have made Plath’s name came to almost all
her readers as posthumous events, her work has inevitably been read through the
irrevocable, ineradicable and finally enigmatic fact of Plath’s suicide. The
challenge for her biographers has been to puzzle out the relationship not merely
of her life to her art, but of her art to her death. Biographers promise to expose
these relationships for scrutiny, and yet the genre itself is inexhaustible: there is
never an end to what the biographer cannot know. If Plath’s biographers differ
sharply in their readiness to propose definitive and sometimes reductive
explanations of her character, they also can be judged by their ability to register
the quality of her achievement, to explain what Plath’s work revealed so
compellingly to readers, particularly women, of her own and the next generation,
and why it will remain illuminating and important in the future.
Biographers of Plath demonstrate that the genre is always interested, although
hers have been more noticeably partisan than most. In fact, each of the major
biographies is in part motivated to counteract what is perceived as egregious bias
in the one before. Reading them in sequence, we hear an edgy conversation that
has lasted for three decades. Each biographer also takes up the story at a
different moment in Plath’s publication history and growing literary reputation,
and not unimportantly, in Ted Hughes’s oeuvre and reputation. In each decade
biographers gained access to new published and archival resources that
document in voluminous detail Plath’s historical context, her professional and
personal correspondence, her education and reading and her creative process in
the drafts of her Ariel poems.1
When Edward Butscher published Sylvia Plath: Method and Madness in
1975, neither Plath’s letters nor her journals had been published, nor had her
fiction beyond The Bell Jar been collected.2 By contrast, Linda Wagner-Martin
began researching her 1987 biography when Plath’s Collected Poems won the
Pulitzer Prize in 1982.3 She consulted the unedited letters from Plath to her
mother acquired in 1977 by the Lilly Library at Indiana University, along with
documentation of Plath’s life from infancy through her year teaching at Smith in
1957–8. Wagner-Martin read Plath’s poetry drafts and her censored and
incomplete journals (a much larger selection of her journals than those published
in 1982), which are among the most important materials Smith College bought
from Hughes in 1981. Anne Stevenson’s apparent mission in Bitter Fame was to
counteract what by 1989 was represented by the Plath Estate as Plath’s mistaken
status as a feminist martyr.4 In ‘The Archive’, a central chapter in The Haunting
of Sylvia Plath, Jacqueline Rose takes the Hugheses (Ted and his sister Olwyn)
to task for what she and others experienced as pressure from the Estate to adopt
their view or lose permission to quote Plath’s work.5 Against these charges of
coercion, Janet Malcolm’s The Silent Woman (1995) struggled to recuperate
Stevenson’s efforts, as well as to forefront the unavoidable partiality of
biography as a genre.6 Diane Middlebrook’s biography of the Plath–Hughes
marriage, Her Husband (2003), attempts to take the measure of both poets after
Hughes’s bombshell publication of Birthday Letters in 1998, his unanticipated
death from cancer months later, and the showering of England’s most prestigious
prizes on its poet laureate in the last years of the century.7 She was the first to
mine the Hughes archives at Emory University, a dauntingly rich and tangled
repository of Ted Hughes’s correspondence, drafts and workbooks, and of his
editorial curatorship of Plath’s work.
Finally, Ted Hughes is also Plath’s biographer, despite his insistent refusal to
be interviewed by biographers. Through his control of her archive and his own,
through more than fourteen introductions to and annotations of Plath’s work, and
in a series of litigious public and private interventions to protest against
invasions of privacy by biographers and critics, he has laid claim to irrefutable
knowledge of Plath’s inspiration, intentions and writing practices, and the
chronology of her work. His late volume, Birthday Letters was read by many as
an anguished memoir of their marriage and of her writing. Accompanying the
rise in Sylvia Plath’s stature as a major literary talent of the twentieth century is
an apparently inexhaustible market for stories of her life (which seems
emblematic of the gender norms that governed growing up talented, ambitious
and female in the postwar US) and of this marriage between professional
writers.8
Reading the life
In thinking through these biographies, I want to highlight several bad habits of
reading Sylvia Plath as woman and as writer that misunderstand the relation of
biography to art. While some of these reading fallacies are more prominent in
one biography than another, others are shared. First, beginning immediately after
her suicide and continuing through Hughes’s late poems about Plath, a
powerfully influential narrative assumes that her suicide authenticates the truth
of her poems. This reading assumes that the relation of creative writing to lived
suffering is transparent and direct, and is predetermined rather than chosen by
the poet. Further, her death is understood as a tragic but inevitable byproduct of
her poetic method; her suicide is proof that the violent unresolved materials of
her unconscious, once courted or confronted as subjects for poetry, couldn’t
finally be transmuted, ordered and contained by words. Al Alvarez launched this
demonic teleology in his memoir of Plath, The Savage God, Robert Lowell
promulgated it in his foreword to the American edition of Ariel, and Hughes
reinscribes it in Birthday Letters.
Second, Anne Stevenson’s is only the most egregious example of those who
read the poet as pathological and her writing as symptomatic of her illness.
Stevenson recycles Edward Butscher’s binary logic of true and false selves, in
which an unacknowledged, and essentially destructive true self is temporarily
constrained through verbal technical polish only to break through in the searing
denunciations of the Ariel poems. In this reading Plath’s character is fixed from
childhood by heredity, chemistry, trauma or family dynamics, and a compliant
mask is held tenuously in place by middle-class propriety and ambition, until the
mask breaks at the dissolution of her marriage.
A third misreading accepts the binary of true–false selves, but reverses their
values. Plath is the product of rigid gender norms imposed by patriarchy, her
mother’s influence and a dominant husband until his defection causes the true,
subversive, protofeminist self to erupt in fury. This reading oversimplifies the
relation between individual subject and ideology by imagining that Plath’s true
self could be immune to repressive ideology. Rather, the subject is constituted
through ideology; gender norms are not merely given and internalized, but are
apprehended, resisted and negotiated constantly in conscious and unconscious
ways.
What none of these reading habits can do justice to is Plath’s agency as
woman and artist. Perhaps because as a culture we subscribe so exclusively to
paradigms in which personality is fixed by good or bad parenting, early trauma
or brain chemistry, biography underestimates Plath’s habits of conscious
reinvention and the lucid artistic control of her poetry, even in her final days.
Rather than assume that Plath is an unusually autobiographical writer, we need
to understand that she experienced her life in unusually textual ways. In her
letters and journals as much as in her fiction and poetry, Plath’s habits of self-
representation suggest that she regarded her life as if it were a text she could
invent and rewrite. At the age of seventeen, her creation of a persona is self-
conscious and potentially omnipotent: ‘I think I would like to call myself “The
girl who wanted to be God”’ (LH, p. 40). At moments of crisis, throughout her
life, she imagines that she can erase the inscription of lived experience and
earlier textual selves and be reborn, unmarked as an infant, inviolate as a virgin.
Each of the narratives she created, whether letters, journals, prose, poetry or
interviews, served her as enabling fictions; these proliferating personae were
self-consciously chosen and personally explanatory. The dissonance and
contradictions among these self-representations are at once symptomatic, in that
they demonstrate postwar American culture’s powerful shaping influence on her
imagination, and also strategic, in that they represent her efforts to imagine,
dismantle and reconstruct her ongoing self-narrative into a script she could live
with.
While Edward Butscher has been uniformly disparaged by the Estate and
other biographers since the publication of Sylvia Plath: Method and Madness in
1976, this first full-length biography puts in circulation almost all the formulas
that later biographers would adopt and reinforce. Butscher introduces the term
‘bitch goddess’ as shorthand for Plath’s poetic persona and sometimes as a
descriptor for the woman herself. In combination, his terms evoke ‘a
discontented, tense, frequently brilliant woman goaded into fury by her repressed
or distorted status in male society’ and ‘a more creative one . . . with fierce
ambition and ruthless pursuit of success’ (pp. xi–xii).9 The bitch goddess is the
profoundly angry subconscious force that Butscher claims underlies her
overachieving adolescence, her contemptuous resentment of family and friends,
and her urge to manipulate and control everything from boyfriends and mother
figures to nature itself.
He sees Plath’s character as deformed by mental illness. Although he claims
to eschew a medical diagnosis, Butscher’s account depends on frequent
references to her split personalities, psychosis and narcissism (pp. 26–7 and 125,
among others). Like Stevenson later, he faults Plath for the unjust attack in The
Bell Jar on everyone who had supported her (p. 308). But unlike Stevenson’s
extension of the blanket of moral blame from Plath’s character to her work,
Butscher uniformly admires her craft. More than any later biographer, he praises
the accomplishment of The Bell Jar, as ‘a minor masterpiece of sardonic satire
and sincere protest’, comparing it to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and
Nathanael West’s Miss Lonelyhearts (p. 310). He recognizes in the Ariel poems
not the mistaken fury of an unreasonable wife, but ‘the fully conscious legend of
the bitch self that she would assert with calculated genius’ (p. 316).
Butscher also proposes the ‘lost little girl’ thesis of the poet arrested in her
development by the childhood trauma of her father’s death – a thesis most
vividly deployed in Hughes’s 1995 Paris Review interview ‘The Art of Poetry
LXXI’ and in Birthday Letters. Butscher imagines in Plath’s ‘The Moon and the
Yew Tree’ an ‘allegory of the lost little girl’ which he claimed Hughes also
recognized (p. 297). While he identifies the poem as a masterpiece, his reading
emphasizes Plath’s helpless passivity, even though the speaker nowhere
identifies herself as little girl.
Butscher believes that their marriage benefited them mutually as poets. As
Diane Middlebrook would argue more comprehensively three decades later,
Butscher recognizes that ‘their marriage vow above all was a mutual protection
pact against the world and for poetry’ (p. 188) and that their union ‘provided
two of the more original minds of their generation with an unprecedented and
productive opportunity to feed and grow upon one another’s stores of poetic
insight’ (p. 189). Most surprisingly, Butscher offers frequent insights that would
coalesce in 1980s and 1990s feminist readings of Plath. He catalogues her
justified resentment of male privilege in her culture, her domestic double day,
even when Hughes shared childcare (p. 290), the submerged revenge plots of her
poetry and magazine fiction (pp. 215–18, 270), and the appropriation of male
powers by the Ariel heroines (p. 339). He recognizes that she mobilized weapons
of self-defence and tools for survival in her late poetry (p. 342). Yet the latent
misogyny of Butscher’s representation is stronger than his nascent feminist
sympathies. His version attributes to Plath a strong, innate distaste for sexuality
(pp. 63, 77) and an attitude of condescension towards the men she used (pp. 95,
123). The greatest weakness of Butscher’s argument is the internal contradiction
suggested by his title. Is the repressed self articulated in the master works of the
Ariel period (and foreshadowed in the novel and the revenge plots of the
magazine stories) strategic method or symptom of madness? Is the bitch goddess
manipulated guise, self-conscious persona or ungovernable eruption of the
unconscious?
Among the valuable aspects of Butscher’s biography for later readers is his
persuasive critique of Alvarez’s deterministic model of reading Plath’s art as a
fatal gamble with her own sanity. In his frequent, detailed analysis of the form of
the poems, Butscher demonstrates that he takes all of Plath’s poetry seriously,
even the work that predates Hughes (labelled ‘Juvenilia’ in Hughes’s edition of
her Collected Poems). Butscher has unerring judgement about the important
poems from each period, and reads many carefully. More than any later
biographer, he identifies Plath’s literary influences beyond Hughes and credits
her with significant artistic growth before they met. He flags the bias in the
interviews he draws upon, although he differs from later biographers in
identifying the Comptons and Peter Davison as hostile and the Merwins as
supportive after the separation. Finally, he unearths Plath’s politics, important to
critics three decades later, and emergent in her undergraduate days when she was
part of the crowd who hissed Joseph McCarthy at Smith College (p. 69).
Although reviewers suggest that Plath has become a blameless martyr in the
accounts of feminists, Linda Wagner-Martin’s Sylvia Plath (1987) is a
responsible, temperate account. Actually the sole biographer who takes an
explicitly feminist stance, Wagner-Martin claims Plath is broadly feminist in her
belief in her own talent, her professional devotion to her calling, the importance
of female friends, mentors and artistic models, and her anger that her fame
would be more difficult to achieve and her work judged by different standards
because she was a woman (pp. 11–12).
Wagner-Martin’s ‘Preface’ is quoted more often than any other part of her
book (for example, in reviews by Alvarez, Helen Vendler and Butscher, and by
Malcolm). This is perhaps because, taking her own experience as example, she
candidly accuses the Estate of coercion and attempted censorship in withholding
permission to quote at length from Plath’s materials.10 Calculating that together
Olwyn’s and Ted’s suggested changes would have meant deleting 15,000 words
from her manuscript, Wagner-Martin gave up her intended close-readings in
favor of her argument – an argument which, in any case, is not markedly hostile
to Hughes.
Wagner-Martin’s revisions of the available narratives laid down by Butscher
and Alvarez resist monocausal explanations. Wagner-Martin recognizes that
even before Otto’s death, staged performances of precociousness and femininity
required by him in her early childhood would have disastrous developmental
consequences for her relationships with men, and that her inevitable emotional
dependency on her mother Aurelia, while at first sustaining, became deeply
resented in adulthood. Her reprise of Plath’s psychotherapy with Ruth Beuscher
in 1958–9 reminds us that Plath reassessed all her primary relationships; she not
only gained ‘“permission to hate”’ her mother (J, p. 429) but also confronted the
link between her suspicion of Hughes and her resentment of her father. Wagner-
Martin also situates Plath’s psychosexual struggles with her family and in her
intimate relationship with Hughes in a larger cultural framework. Plath’s
overclose relationship with her mother emerged in part through the fragility of
the family’s ability to preserve the middle-class façade of their Wellesley
address after Otto’s death. Despite Aurelia’s heroic efforts to provide, the house
was overcrowded with her extended family, forcing the adolescent Sylvia to
share her mother’s room, in what she would describe in her journals as a ‘stink
of women’ and a suffocating ‘smarmy matriarchy of togetherness’ (J, pp. 431,
429). Wagner-Martin does not privilege biology or childhood trauma as the
exclusive source of her mental illness (though she documents a history of
depression in Otto’s female relatives), but usefully links these to historical and
cultural pressures on Plath’s self-construction.
Benefiting from the wealth of archival material available to her that Butscher
lacked, Wagner-Martin finds more explicit trace evidence in the drafts for poems
from spring 1962 that Plath was anxiously pondering violence and death in her
relationship well before ‘The Rabbit Catcher’ articulated her anguish (pp. 202–
4). She plausibly suggests an ominous yet unspoken exchange occurring that
spring between the antifemale short stories and plays of Hughes that Plath typed
and her own artistic production in which she anticipates her discovery of his
infidelity. She finds in Plath’s extensive correspondence in the Smith archives a
circle of trusted women friends whom she reached out to in her final months and
admiration for breakthroughs in subject matter and voice by fellow poets Anne
Sexton and Stevie Smith. In retelling her final weeks, Wagner-Martin
emphasizes Plath’s plans with these female confidantes and professional
approval for her work signaled by requests from several editors for submissions.
This contrasts sharply with Hughes’s widely repeated claim that her Ariel poems
were largely rejected. She also departs from Hughes’s contention (strenuously
made to Aurelia in editing Letters Home) that far from intending to divorce him,
Plath and he were on the verge of reconciliation.
Wagner-Martin’s approach is never sensational; nor does she pretend to be
exhaustive. Her account depends on the tremendous outpouring of feminist
literary criticism that occurred in the fifteen years after Butscher’s biography,
some of which she had collected in her 1984 Critical Essays on Sylvia Plath.11
In paraphrasing the archives that she was forbidden to quote, she also opens the
way for much productive scholarship that followed in the 1990s. She offers an
accessible, unargumentative introduction to Plath’s work, with readings that are
suggestive if somewhat embryonic.
Ted Hughes had multiple reasons for wanting an authorized biography of
Plath by the mid-1980s, not least his need for control over what he emphatically
insisted was his story as much as Plath’s. Anne Stevenson began her research for
Bitter Fame in 1985, the year after Hughes was named Britain’s poet laureate.
By 1982, with publication of Plath’s Collected Poems and of the abridged
edition of Plath’s Journals (in the US only), everything Hughes intended to
publish was out, and the Plath archives had been sold off. His decisions had
made possible an avalanche of critical and popular attention to Plath’s work and
had amassed a sizeable personal fortune for Hughes. That income had been
threatened during the 1970s by back taxes he owed on royalties from her books,
reported in a letter to Lucas Myers as an oppressive debt.12 During the 1980s
Hughes’s management of the Plath estate became the object of increasingly
critical scrutiny and the source of financial anxieties that, in his letters, again
reach monumental proportions. A libel suit was filed in 1982 against the film
version of The Bell Jar (the book was by far the most lucrative of the Plath
properties). This was not resolved until 1987. The mounting ironies were not lost
on Hughes: fearing bankruptcy for the same reasons that he was wealthy beyond
his imagination; Britain’s poet laureate, but eclipsed in the US by Plath’s rising
fame, which he had helped to promote, Hughes shrank from further involvement
in Plath affairs and at the same time longed for vindication in the ceaseless
combat that had preoccupied him for the past decade.13
Stevenson’s biography Bitter Fame, when it finally appeared in 1989, bore the
wounds of another battle, the struggle between Olwyn Hughes’s version of Ted’s
story and Stevenson’s own. The equivocal author’s note by Stevenson seemed to
deny responsibility for the outcome under the guise of perhaps reluctant
collaboration with Olwyn: ‘In writing this biography, I have received a great
deal of help from Olwyn Hughes . . . Ms. Hughes’s contributions to the text have
made it almost a work of dual authorship’ (p. x). In an interview a year later,
Stevenson claims, ‘She insisted on writing the author’s note herself – on pain of
withdrawing permission for the use of quotations.’14 The equally unprecedented
inclusion of three stand-alone memoirs by several of her sources as appendices
prompted more widespread and sharply critical charges against the Estate’s bias
and editorial control than Wagner-Martin’s direct accusations. Whether
Stevenson was the helpless hostage of Olwyn Hughes or her willing
collaborator, the informants she calls ‘witnesses’ were polarized camps that she
felt forced to choose between, although Stevenson knew that each was
unreliable.15
A quarter of a century separates Stevenson’s interviews and the events she
was researching. During this time memoirs by acquaintances had been sold and
published and had become petrified in frequent rehearsals to other biographers,
accumulating ever more historically distant annotation and elaboration. The new
memoirs that Stevenson reproduces are from several peripheral witnesses who
are uniformly unsympathetic to Plath. Dido Merwin, who was their London
neighbour for a time, is unremitting in the pettiness, possessiveness and harridan
hostilities she attributes to Plath. Lucas Myers, a Cambridge friend of Hughes,
whose marriage, children and divorce paralleled Sylvia’s and Ted’s, seems to
have known the Hugheses marriage almost exclusively through Ted’s letters.
Richard Murphy, an Irish poet, who was at most a casual acquaintance, accuses
Plath of unwelcome sexual advances during a brief stay as his houseguest in
September 1962.16 For Stevenson to include these appendices as first-person
accounts seems an odd choice because their perspectives have already been
incorporated in the body of the biography. It is as if, in the contestatory battle
that biographical accounts of the marriage had already become, Stevenson wants
to buttress her own interpretation of Plath’s bad behaviour with a final chorus of
corroborating witnesses.
In a 1990 interview Stevenson claims that she willingly accepted Olwyn’s aid,
but eventually lost authorial control, as well as 45 per cent of the British
royalties, to her. She ultimately agreed to a rewrite of the last four chapters as a
‘mixture’ of her and Olwyn’s views (‘Biographer’s Dilemma’, p. 2). Stevenson
admits that Olwyn’s interventions were shadowed by Hughes, who wrote a
lengthy critical letter and reviewed two complete drafts: ‘he was more
responsible for the book than he lets on’ (‘Biographer’s Dilemma’, p. 3).
Whatever the Hugheses’ joint involvement, the biography’s central flaw is its
lack of sympathy for the poet, and, more importantly, for the poetry. Stevenson
never presents Plath’s point of view about the marriage, representing Hughes as
saintly husband and generous tutor, while she is to blame for all their troubles.
Her representation of Plath’s character combines a litany of character flaws
(narcissism, unreasonable jealousy, violent rages, perfectionism) and symptoms
of mental illness (paranoia, violent mood swings of manic-depression, a split
personality, hysteria) which, taken together, suggest a teleology that make her
unsavable in the end and consequently everyone near her blameless.17 Bitter
Fame recycles Butscher’s reductive evil twin paradigm: ‘the “real” Sylvia –
violent, subversive, moonstruck, terribly angry – fought for her existence against
a nice, bright, gifted American girl’ (Bitter Fame, p. 163). But unlike Butscher,
Stevenson seems not to fathom the greatness of the poetry this alleged split
produced. The language of moral blame affects her aesthetic judgements,
especially of the late poems: ‘What the poet seems to want is a remedy for her
inability to accept a form of truth most adult human beings have to learn: that
they are not unique or exempt from partaking in human processes’ (p. 290).
To produce Rough Magic (1991), Paul Alexander claims that he read the
entire archives at Smith and Indiana, as well as conducting 300 interviews.18
Certainly this research enables him to present a much thicker description of key
moments in Plath’s life. We learn the harrowing details of Otto’s illness and
Aurelia’s heroic homecare; we appreciate more fully the gross mismanagement
of Plath’s outpatient electroshock treatments, as well as Olive Higgins Prouty’s
interventions in her treatment after her suicide attempt. Alexander revisits the
1962 bonfire that apparently underlies Plath’s poem ‘Burning the Letters’ to
report three separate purges, the first two witnessed by Aurelia, in which Plath
burnt her second novel and later all her mother’s letters. The third, recalled by
Clarissa Roche, includes a witchlike exorcism, with Plath dancing around a fire
of Hughes’s papers, his nail clippings and other ‘scum’ from his desk (Rough
Magic, p. 286). Sometimes, though, the details he has amassed are merely
numbing in their profusion.
Many of Plath’s old boyfriends appear, mostly to testify against her. We are
told that Eddie Cohen, her Chicago correspondent, advised Plath early on that
she needed therapy and that Gordon Lameyer was deceived about Plath’s
virginity. To Alexander, Plath’s sexuality has a desperate, manipulative cast to
it, and is linked to a compensatory cycle, overfamiliar from other biographies:
‘When she felt abandoned by a male romantic figure, she subconsciously
experienced the sense of loss she harbored over the death of her father’ (p. 183).
A more serious flaw is Alexander’s apparent readiness to present several far-
fetched scenarios as fact. He does not document the source for the sexualized
scene of Hughes’s nearly strangling Plath on their honeymoon (p. 167), nor
Assia’s alleged seduction of Hughes at Court Green by dropping her nightgown
over his head at the breakfast table (p. 277).19 Although he identifies his source
for Plath’s alleged return to the US for an abortion in September 1961, and her
return to England on a ship of Fulbright students, everything about the incident
lacks credibility.
Alexander offers few new insights on the poetry, but he valuably charts the
rhythms of composition and publication in Plath’s and Hughes’s shared work
lives. For example, in August 1960 Hughes’s Lupercal was published to
excellent reviews and Plath’s third manuscript was rejected for the Yale
Younger Poets prize. Their joint BBC interview, ‘Two of a Kind’, a jolly report
on marrying because they were good for each other’s poetry, is broadcast in
1961 in the same month that Plath’s story of submerged marital rage, ‘The Fifty-
Ninth Bear’, is published. The Knopf acceptance of The Colossus probably
buoyed her writing of The Bell Jar, her secret project in spring 1961. A densely
textured record of Plath’s daily life, Alexander’s biography demonstrates the
depth of the archives he has plumbed, but he fails too often to shape what he has
retrieved into meaningful patterns.
Janet Malcolm’s The Silent Woman might well serve as the definitive
exposition and enactment of the problems of biography as a genre. Because each
liability – the tingle of voyeurism, her partisan motivation, her self-doubt as a
writer, the final unknowableness of her subject – is disarmingly revealed as her
own, Malcolm gambles that the reader will come to trust her self-conscious
fallibility as the most honest.
Like Middlebrook later, Malcolm seizes on Hughes’s invented persona as ‘her
husband’ to convey his split roles as protector of her children, destroyer of her
journals and consummate editor. Malcolm’s twin goals are to redeem Hughes as
Plath’s ‘greatest critic, elucidator and impresario’ (Silent Woman, p. 155), and to
vindicate Stevenson’s championing of the Hugheses’ version. At the heart of
Malcolm’s sympathies – and the crux of her book as well as of earlier
biographers’ battles with the Estate – is Ted Hughes’s struggle with Plath over
ownership of his own life and his attempts to wrest it back from her
representation in writing. If Plath’s life has been dragged into the public domain,
he vehemently resists the simultaneous infringement on his story: ‘“The main
problem with S. P.’s biographers is that they fail . . . to realize that the most
interesting and dramatic part of S. P.’s life is only ½ S. P. – the other ½ is me”’
(quoted p. 201).
Malcolm believes that she, Plath and Stevenson shared a common
predicament as aspiring women writers in the 1950s. She claims that women’s
self-loathing, combined with their envy and resentment of male success, led
them to believe it was ‘“the man’s fault when the writing didn’t go well”’, a
‘transferential misprision’ that Malcolm identifies as ‘the central concern of
contemporary feminism’ (pp. 87–8). To exonerate both Hughes and Stevenson,
Malcolm discredits Plath’s earlier biographers with sharp, swift strokes. First
and foremost she blames Alvarez’s The Savage God for originating the narrative
of ‘Plath as an abandoned and mistreated woman and Hughes as a heartless
betrayer’ (Silent Woman, p. 23). To demonstrate the pitfalls of the mediated
narratives collected through interviews, she revisits the pro-Plath witnesses
whom Stevenson omitted and provides vivid portraits of their fallibility. Driven
by ego, hostility or a simple need for cash, each finds the events they almost
compulsively renarrate receding further from accessibility; Clarissa Roche, for
example, is hypnotized to retrieve fresh information.
Malcolm trusts letters, over these discredited interviews, as her most reliable
sources. To her, letters are ‘fossils of feeling’, the biographer’s ‘only conduit to
unmediated experience. Everything else the biographer touches is stale, hashed
over, told and retold, dubious, unauthentic, suspect’ (p. 210). Malcolm’s
preference for letters powerfully argues for independent, detailed archival
research. She structures her apparently desultory narrative by revelations from
unpublished letters, in many of which the elusive Hughes comes forward as a
passionately definitive biographer. He chides Stevenson for claiming that he
could never forgive Plath for burning his papers: ‘“I never held that action
against [Sylvia] – then or at any other time . . . She never did anything that I held
against her”’ (quoted p. 143). Malcolm sees Hughes’s interventions as motivated
by redemptive affection for Plath that should preempt other accounts: ‘when he
writes about Plath, he renders all other writings crude and trivial. He writes with
brilliant, exasperated intelligence and a kind of Chekhovian largeheartedness and
melancholy’ (p. 123).
 Over another letter from Hughes, Malcolm does battle with Jacqueline Rose,
whom she describes as the ‘opposition’s most powerful and plausible witness’
(p. 177), ‘the libber in whom the Hugheses finally met their match’ (p. 176). Her
struggle is in part staged through an unsent letter to Rose. Through a series of
deconstructive moves intended to rival Rose’s own critical practice, Malcolm
exposes contradictions in Rose’s avowed positions, most importantly that ethics
are involved in interpretation and that Rose’s own fantasy may be to have sole
possession of the unavailable Hughes. Satisfied that she has bested the critic at
her own intellectual game, Malcolm can disavow the jealous triangle she
constructed to shame Rose as perhaps more evidence of the biographer’s
unreliability: ‘I no longer have the conviction I once had that Jacqueline Rose
and I were fighting over Ted Hughes’ (p. 183). Yet her layering of letters, sent
and unsent, suggests otherwise.
Almost a decade later, when Middlebrook resuscitates ‘her husband’ as the
image of Ted Hughes’s lifelong partnership with Plath, Hughes again comes
forward as Plath’s most admiring consort. In her biography of a marriage, Her
Husband, Middlebrook demonstrates that whatever damage their marriage
ultimately produced in their lived experience, it was a mutually productive
literary partnership of the first order. By moving discussion of their marriage
into consideration of what was good for poetry – their creation of mythic
personae – Middlebrook arranges a kind of no-fault divorce, the pain of which is
transcended by a more lasting union through poetry. To Middlebrook, the
couple’s needs were diametrically opposed. Plath needs middle-class
domesticity, with motherhood a core psychic requirement and Hughes as muse
and mentor for her writing. Hughes’s writing requires solitude and periodic
escapes into wildness, usually through extramarital sex. Her Husband replaces
blame for Hughes’s behavior with sympathy for his artistic requirements. As far
as poetry is concerned, there is no question of Hughes’s infidelity; Plath remains
his lifelong muse and most poignantly reappears to him in ‘The Offers’ to
demand their reunion.20
Middlebrook underscores earlier biographers’ and critics’ judgement that
Plath’s investment in Hughes fostered her artistic growth. She differs most from
her predecessors in the very persuasive evidence she offers of their stylistic
habits of ‘call and response’ in which images, sound patterns and phrases are
exchanged between poems, often to quite different ends. Middlebrook also
advances an alternative understanding of Plath as mother and poet. Rather than
the tension between the demands of poetry and the rigours of single-motherhood
other critics find, she argues for continuity between Plath’s prechildren
idealization of motherhood, as measure of her domestic and poetic creativity,
and the Ariel poems, which she sees as ‘bursting from her motherhood’ (p. 193.)
It was the experience of maternity, Middlebrook claims, that rescued her from
apprenticeship to Hughes (p. 153).
Middlebrook draws on new archival material, Hughes’s letters at Emory
University and the British Library, to give a fuller first-person account of
Hughes’s curatorship of the Estate than appears in any of his introductions to her
work. Through these we see, even more vividly than in Malcolm, the emotional
needs that produced the split persona, ‘her husband’, that she chooses as her title.
In place of the familiar image of Hughes as destroyer of Plath’s journals and
despoiler of her finished Ariel volume, Middlebrook evokes a picture of Hughes
as stunned participant in an ongoing conversation with Plath. Hughes’s
discovery of his poetry on her writing table after her death is evidence, she
suggests, of Plath’s ‘continuing attachment to their creative partnership’ (p.
219). Along with the carefully ordered and bound Ariel poems, Hughes found
his poem ‘Out’, which contains poppy imagery echoed in her two poppy poems,
and a typescript of his ‘Full Moon and Little Frieda’ next to reviews of The Bell
Jar (p. 220). Middlebrook offers a romantic reading of Birthday Letters as their
reunion (other Plath scholars might name it a rematch) in which Hughes
rehearses old disputes on an ‘intimate wavelength’ (p. 279). Whatever the tone
of the exchange, Middlebrook is entirely accurate in insisting on the text-based
dynamics of the book: ‘he has been prompted by her words to enter into dialogue
with that self she made in language’ (p. 279).
Given Middlebrook’s impressively extensive new research, it seems curiously
old-fashioned to appeal to Robert Graves’s ‘white goddess’ paradigm to explain
Plath’s function in Hughes’s artistic life. She is the awesome primal female
required by Hughes’s shamanistic journey: ‘her destiny [is] to inflict devastation
on Hughes as well as release his creative fluency’ (p. 283). Certainly his
accounts of Plath’s development resort to similar formulas, as Middlebrook
paraphrases: ‘an old shattered self reduced by violence to its central core, had
been repaired’ (p. 114). Middlebrook sympathetically attempts to explicate the
Gravesian worldview that she feels underlies his art, yet in granting the
explanatory power for Hughes of this cosmology, she risks losing sight of how
Plath’s might have differed. Middlebrook’s belief in the indissoluble nature of
their union is likewise evident in her retelling of the final weeks of Plath’s life.
She underscores Hughes’s later version of their potential reconciliation rather
than Plath’s letters about the finality of their separation.
Middlebrook makes a lucid and compelling argument from a wealth of new
archival sources that is generous in its admiration of both poets, yet the portrait
of the marriage that emerges is less marked by the contestation of gender norms
that has made their story so emblematic for the end of one era and the dawn of
our current age.
The uncertainty of biography
Who is the Sylvia Plath that these biographies have produced? Taken one by
one, these narrations purport to give us the real Sylvia, to penetrate the multiple
guises and arrive at certain truth, verified by a chorus of eyewitnesses. Yet my
purpose in emphasizing the contradictory stories these biographies tell is to
demonstrate that what they communicate is uncertainty.
If we hope to piece together the definitive, documented facts that provide a
causal link between Plath’s experience and her art, we are bound to be
disappointed. We need to recognize that biography produces and reproduces the
stories circulating in our culture, particularly those that are used to make female
experience legible. The credibility of the figure of Plath as psychotic, wounded,
devious, narcissistic or death-driven does not lie with the objectivity of the
witnesses the biographer draws upon, but comes from the multiple sites within
culture that give shape and meaning to women’s experience as story. These
explanatory plotlines smooth over the contradictions, dissonances and
unknowable motivations of the life in order to narrate a coherent identity
unfolding developmentally in time that we as readers recognize as familiar and
plausible.
More helpfully, feminist theorists have enriched our understanding of
selfhood, not as an experiential certainty, but as a process. The female subject,
like any other, does not preexist her awareness of culture but emerges through it,
in language and representation. Further, as Joan Scott explains, ‘it is not
individuals who have experience, but subjects who are constituted by
experience’.21 Claiming experience as a property of selfhood is thus an act of
interpretation and a process in need of interpretation. Culture itself is a site of
competing solicitations and prohibitions that shape subjectivity, but unevenly
and never completely. Plath’s subjectivity, in her private and public acts of
narration, can be read in Judith Butler’s terms as a ‘daily act of reconstitution’.
She apprehends her gender, her sexuality, her embodiment in an ‘impulsive yet
mindful process of interpreting a cultural reality laden with sanctions, taboos,
and prescriptions’. Her agency is not fully self-determining but is nonetheless
present in the improvisations and reconsiderations through which this
subjectivity is appropriated, not merely given: ‘Not wholly conscious, yet
available to consciousness, it is the kind of choice we make and only later realize
we have made.’22 The life-writing theorists Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson
explain that the interaction between experience, subjectivity and story is
constant:
Every day, all day long, the material universe affects us, literally as well as
discursively . . . But in making meaning of these events, we make that
meaning, or the ‘experience’ of those events, discursively, in language, and
as narrative. Thus, we retrospectively make experience and convey a sense
of it to others through storytelling; and as we tell our stories discursive
patterns guide, or compel, us to tell stories about ourselves in particular
ways.23
What this reconceptualization of subjectivity as a process disturbs is the neat
binary that an uncritical reading of biography rests upon; that before or behind
the art is a coherent, unified self to be laid bare as the source or motor of the
poetry. We need to resist the unexamined assumption (and often in biographies
of women what amounts to the misogynist practice) that a woman can only write
out of or about what she has actually lived. Such a premise disallows the
transformative power of a woman’s art as epistemology, as an alternative,
equally self-constituting form of knowing and being.
Can we simply forgo biography? I think not. Every literary critic must
inevitably confront what Jacqueline Rose describes as ‘something untellable, but
which has to be told, [which] enters the frame when the subject of biography
dies by her own hand’.24 We cannot simply dismiss biography; instead, we need
to situate the story of a life differently, as part of more encompassing narratives.
We need to take apart the ways that Plath’s and Hughes’s lives are forever
conjoined in material ways, in the revenue Plath’s texts generated for Hughes, as
well as in texts they generated about each other. Their intertwined literary
history suggests that Plath and Hughes were each moved to write (and to rewrite
each other’s work) because each believed that to be in possession of a story
meant to be in possession of your life. Each uses poetry as an enabling fiction;
having a story means creating a coherent narrative with an explanatory past and
a plausible future. Telling a story is interpreting your life; it also makes that life
possible. We could also use their cross-referential writing practice as a test case
to examine the limits of genres; biography necessarily interpenetrates
autobiography in the poems, as both poets tell the other’s story as a way of
telling their own. Nancy Miller, Leigh Gilmore and Paul John Eakin rightly
contend that autobiography is always relational. Their subtle and provocative
theories of life-writing scrutinize the malleability and permeability of established
genres such as biography, autobiography, confessional poetry and literary
criticism and identify new hybrid forms.25
Hughes’s public and often litigious conflicts with biographers and literary
critics demonstrate his aggrieved sense that Plath’s autobiographical acts were in
fact biography, imprisoning him in her misrepresentation. Any critical
interpretation of her work, it seemed, also harmfully interfered with his own and
his children’s possession of the woman Sylvia Plath. In her ‘Foreword’ to Ariel:
The Restored Edition, Frieda Hughes reveals what she experiences as the
incursion of literary criticism and biography into life: ‘The point of anguish at
which my mother killed herself was taken over by strangers, possessed and
reshaped by them. The collection of Ariel poems became symbolic to me of this
possession of my mother . . . and vilification of my father’ (A Rest., p. xiv).
Dramatically, both Hughes and his daughter testify to the incredible power of
texts to produce a figure with tremendous staying power, here a figure of Plath
that they claim not to recognize.
That our sphere of enquiry is steadily expanding outwards from the
hermetically sealed text, I am convinced, is a very good thing for literature. The
critical practices that appear most promising to me are those that reveal how
literary texts are illuminated by an enlarging network of other texts in which
they are embedded; these methods require that we do not set aside biography, or
history, or commercial ‘packaging’ but that we analyse their interrelation. I have
suggested how the methods of feminist criticism, cultural criticism and life-
writing theory enable us to see how artists are shaped by and reshape ideologies,
how they engage cultural anxieties about gender roles, sexuality, happiness,
materialism, politics, the environment and war – topics that recent critics have
explored in Plath. Our questions now legitimately encompass the composition of
literary texts, their publication and reception, and the cultural uses of poets as
icons or caricatures. The meanings of Plath’s poems, I am proposing, are not
fixed but change depending on our tools and the contexts in which we have
learnt, in the past four decades, to read them.
How will this change our practical reading practices, of Plath as artist and of
her biographies? I recommend four strategies. First, approach biographies with a
hermeneutics of suspicion about what we expect to find there. We need not only
to interrogate the cultural scripts that structure the biography and produce the
figure of Plath, but question as well our search for a final truth that we
mistakenly imagine exists outside of culture or before mediation by its images
and stories. Second, grant the artist her imaginative freedom to invent,
misremember, substitute and play. Emily Dickinson’s insistence on the
difference between her existence and that of the ‘supposed person’ in her art is
essential to reading Plath. Third, we need reading practices that honour the
unconscious as an integral element of subjectivity and of narration. I offer my
students Adrienne Rich’s insight, ‘Poems are like dreams in that you put in them
what you didn’t know you knew.’ Last, we can develop habits of reading more
reflexively, of including the historical moment of our own reception and
consumption of these texts as part of what must be examined.
If, in our widening understanding of multiple sites and forms of mediation,
Sylvia Plath seems to recede further and further from our comprehension, I am
heartened that these strategies will actually make her more present to us textually
– implicated, resisting, investing, improvising, revising the myriad texts around
and about her, because each of these texts is, in turn, susceptible to
interpretation.
Notes
1. See my Revising Life: Sylvia Plath’s Ariel Poems (Chapel Hill: University
of North Carolina Press, 1993), and Lynda K. Bundtzen, The Other Ariel
(Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2001).
2. Edward Butscher, Sylvia Plath: Method and Madness (New York: Seabury
Press, 1976).
3. Linda Wagner-Martin, Sylvia Plath: A Biography (New York: Simon &
Schuster, 1987).
4. Anne Stevenson, Bitter Fame: A Life of Sylvia Plath (Boston: Houghton
Mifflin, 1989).
5. Jacqueline Rose, The Haunting of Sylvia Plath (London: Virago, 1991).
6. Janet Malcolm, The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes (New
York: Vintage, 1995).
7. Diane Middlebrook, Her Husband: Hughes and Plath – A Marriage (New
York: Viking, 2003).
8. See Dale Salwak, Living with a Writer (New York: Macmillan, 2004), and
Frances Wilson, Literary Seductions (London: Faber and Faber, 1999).
9. See Rose’s discussion of the origins of this term in Haunting, pp. 165–9.
10. See A. Alvarez, ‘A Poet and Her Myths’, New York Review (28 September
1989), p. 34; Helen Hennessy Vendler, ‘Who Is Sylvia?’, New Republic (6
November 1989), p. 100; Edward Butscher, ‘Unfinished Lives of Sylvia
Plath’, Georgia Review (Spring/Summer 1990), p. 296; and Malcolm, Silent
Woman, p. 25.
11. Linda Wagner (ed.), Critical Essays on Sylvia Plath (Boston: G. K. Hall,
1984).
12. Ted Hughes letter to Lucas Myers, 16 January 1977, Emory.
13. Ibid.
14. Anne Stevenson, ‘A Biographer’s Dilemma’ (interview with Madeline
Strong Diehl), Michigan Today 22.2 (April 1990), p. 2.
15. ‘The animus of the pro-Sylvia side against Olwyn was so very great, and the
 misconception of what Sylvia was all about was so terrible, that I was
thrown back in Olwyn’s arms anyway’, ibid.
16. Middlebrook mentions that he met the couple in London (Her Husband, p.
179). Plath knew him as prizewinner in a contest she judged; later, at Plath’s
initiative, the couple were his houseguests in Ireland (September 1962).
17. Among many other references, for split selves, see p. 23, 163–4; egotism,
pp. 15, 21, 32, 164–5, 167; mood swings, pp. 15, 36, 59, 93, 298; paranoia,
pp. 129–31; and hysteria, pp. 56, 60, 138, 187.
18. Paul Alexander, Rough Magic: A Biography of Sylvia Plath (New York:
Viking, 1991), p. 1.
19. Assia Wevill and her husband David were acquaintances of Plath and
Hughes. When the latter couple left London, the Wevills took over the lease
of their flat. In May 1962 they spent a weekend with Plath and Hughes at
their North Tawton home. Later that summer, Hughes and Assia Wevill
began a relationship, which continued until 1969 when Assia died by
suicide.
20. ‘The Offers’ was published in Hughes’s limited edition Howls & Whispers
(1998) and reprinted in Ted Hughes, Collected Poems (London: Faber and
Faber, 2003).
21. Joan Scott, ‘The Evidence of Experience’, Critical Inquiry 17 (1991), p. 27.
22. Judith Butler, ‘Sex and Gender in Simone de Beauvoir’s Second Sex’, Yale
French Studies 72 (1986), p. 40.
23. Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, Reading Autobiography (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press), p. 26.
24. Jacqueline Rose, ‘Sylvia Plath – Again: This is Not a Biography’, London
Review of Books (22 August 2002), 2; reprinted in Jacqueline Rose, On Not
Being Able to Sleep: Psychoanalysis and the Modern World (London:
Chatto & Windus, 2003), pp. 49–71.
25. See Nancy K. Miller’s hybrid genre ‘personal criticism’ in Getting Personal
(London: Routledge, 1991); Leigh Gilmore’s study of the markers of
autobiographical acts in Autobiographics: A Feminist Theory of Women’s
Self-Representation (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994) and The Limits
of Autobiography (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001); and Paul John
Eakin’s How Our Lives Become Stories (Ithaca: Cornell University Press,
1999).