Plath: More than her death

**With the 50th anniversary of Sylvia Plath’s death coming up next month, no doubt there will be endless media attention focusing on her tragic life. Speculation concerning Plath’s relationship with former Poet Laureate Ted Hughes is an inevitable topic for many readers of her poetry and biography, and as such the public at large has been furnished with a vivid and dynamic representation of the poet.**

For me, this anniversary heralds the opportunity to revitalise my love of Sylvia Plath; almost everyone has some opinion of her, and when someone has been biographised to the same extent as her, one can often feel like they have her character down to a tee.

But what remains a problem in any study of Plath’s biography is the institution of the Plath Myth: after Plath’s death in 1963, Hughes retreated behind a wall of privacy in an attempt to remove himself from the public’s scrutinizing gaze, a gaze which attempts to draw links between the influence of Hughes’s adultery and Plath’s subsequent suicide.

Hughes’s silence and the accusatory discourses of writers such as Al Alvarez and Dido Merwin provided the space for the representation of Plath as a victim to Hughes’s oppression. These narratives, coupled with the anger and brutality of Plath’s Ariel poems, enabled the reading public to assume an intimate knowledge of the character of Plath as a woman who refused to be controlled.

What are perhaps less widely known and even less widely read are the documents which contradict this absolute portrayal of Plath; in 1986, Plath’s mother, Aurelia Schober Plath published Letters Home, a collection of letters written between 1950 and 1963 by Sylvia to her mother.

Mrs Plath published these letters in an attempt to revise the way in which the public viewed her daughter; having been mortified by the publication of The Bell Jar in America, Mrs Plath wished to counter the representation of Plath as an impulsive, violent, and tempestuous individual. The casual, conversational letters sought to establish Plath’s “true” character in the face of the public’s mythologised depiction; they represent a mother’s desperate appeal to separate her daughter from her poetry.

In direct contrast with Mrs Plath’s desire to downplay Plath’s notoriety, Hughes published The Journals of Sylvia Plath in 1991. These journals show a totally contradictory manifestation of Plath’s character. A particularly embellished and exaggerated entry follows the day she met Hughes at the St Botolph’s Review party in 1956: Plath narrates with unrivalled vigour the spectacle she created upon finding her powerful “equal” in Hughes, resulting in the pair stamping and screaming at each other.

However, a letter to her mother comments on the same occasion, but with nowhere near the same amount of gusto. Plath slips in the reference to Hughes at the end of the letter dated 5 March, and doesn’t mention him by name. She writes that she will probably never see him again. By looking closely at the various representations of Plath, it is remarkable that the public is able to create a tangible image of her at all.

Any biography of Plath must therefore establish the very contradictory nature of her personality. The essentialist notions which people ascribe to Plath and Hughes, whether positively or negatively, dominate their representation in contemporary culture.

She is at once victim and perpetrator, housewife and femme fatale. The way in which she represents herself in her poetry, letters and journals make it impossible to reconcile these completely different versions, and yet many readers pretend to understand Plath and to narrate her life with unjustified authority.

On February 11, 1963, Sylvia Plath killed herself with cooking gas at the age of 30.