Ted Hughes and the corpus of Sylvia Plath

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