Ted Hughes and the corpus of Sylvia Plath

A paradox hedges the struggle between the Plath advocates and the

Hugheses. The advocates, whom Olwyn calls `libbers,' because many

of them are feminists, are, in this struggle, not representatives of

women's liberation so much as representatives of a kind of dead lib.

They want to restore to Plath the rights she lost when she died. They

want to wrest from Hughes the power over her literary remains which

he acquired when she died intestate.... by restoring Plath to the status

of the living, they simply achieve a substitution: they send the

Hugheses and Mrs. Plath [Sylvia Plath's mother, who died in 1994,

after The Silent Woman was published] down to take Plath's place

among the rightless dead.(36)

Besides being a specious generalization about what the unnamed and unspecified "Plath advocates" claim or want, this statement has much to do with a conception of Ted Hughes's "power," and the question of his "right" to it (which Malcolm implies feminists will automatically deny him). But when sides are chosen in Plath studies, the fight turns "murderous," as if, to maintain a kind of preservation of death, there must always be a victim. Malcolm finally makes clear at whose door this murderousness should be placed: "It is Plath's (Medusan) speechlessness that is the deadly, punishing weapon."(37) Plath's self-destruction has often been written as murderous; Robert Lowell, for instance, famously called her Dido--and then Phaedra and Medea, as if suicide and murder are equivalent. These, too, are substitutions; suicide rewritten as murder, an author rewritten as a subject.