Ted Hughes and the corpus of Sylvia Plath

[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