Ted Hughes and the corpus of Sylvia Plath

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"').