Shots in the dark: are the stories of the 20th century's most risk-taking women artists the movie's new dramas?

Interview, Oct, 2003 by Graham Fuller

In the last few days I have seen both Christine Jeffs's film Sylvia, which depicts the blighted marriage of the poets Sylvia Plath (Gwyneth Paltrow) and Ted Hughes (Daniel Craig), and Paul Alexander's play Edge, in which Plath (Angelica Torn) bitterly recounts the story of her life on the day she commits suicide at the age of 30, with her and Hughes's two children sleeping in an adjoining room, on February 11, 1963.

Edge is scheduled to run at Manhattan's DR2 Theatre through late September; Sylvia opens this month. Seeing the film and the play back-to-back is not an experience I recommend, any more than reading in one sitting Plath's Ariel poems and Hughes's Birthday Letters. In her self-immolation, Plath wove a public myth around her marriage that has inspired inordinate side-taking and name-calling. Linger too long in its aura and you start to feel like a trespasser in a burning house. One can only inhale so much smoke from other people's combustion without feeling sick and dizzy.

Sylvia arrives in the wake of other films about brilliant, disturbed women artists of the 20th century, including Dorothy Parker (Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle, 1994), Dora Carrington (Carrington, 1995), Jacqueline du Pre (Hilary and Jackie, 1998), Frida Kahlo (Frida), and Virginia Woolf (The Hours). Tom & Viv (1994), about the tragic union of the poet T.S. Eliot and his first wife, Vivienne, herself a writer, is linked to this group; Iris (2001) stands outside it since Iris Murdoch's descent into Alzheimer's disease came at the end of a long and productive career.

Carrington, Woolf, and Plath killed themselves. Kahlo and Vivienne Eliot may have killed themselves. Parker tried to kill herself but lived on in misery. Du Pre died of multiple sclerosis, which had caused spells of aberrant behavior. Most of these women were submissively--or masochistically--involved with successful male artists, thus there is an obvious feminist imperative behind the films describing their struggles.

It may be limiting, however, to think of them only as feminist icons, as if they needed to be put in another box. The Dionysian creative power that surged through them may have been stoked by the Apollonian (and fearful) male need to confine or escape it, but we should assume that it would have surged anyway. Then again, Plath's genius, nurtured early on by Hughes, apparently was unleashed only when he left her for another woman. In his neglect, he was the muse of her greatest work, but blaming him for her death is irresponsible since individuals construct their own realities.

It is risky, too, to generalize about people's private torments. T.S. Eliot's abandonment of Vivienne cannot be spoken of in the same breath as Hughes's split from Plath, whose tragic course was set at the age of eight, when her father died. The feminist vilification of Hughes the adulterer reckons without Plath's emotional ferocity: It was she, after all, who bit his ear until it bled on their first meeting in February 1956, as Sylvia shows. Paltrow, fantastically fey here, gives one of her finest performances, but her Plath is genteel compared with the Plath who wrote so voraciously of love.

Edge is reminiscent of Mark Rappaport's film From the Journals of Jean Seberg (1995) in that its protagonist inscribes her own death. The play hangs a guilt trip on Hughes that extends to the suicide of Assia Wevill, for whom he deserted Plath; like Plath, Wevill gassed herself (and the two-year-old daughter she had with Hughes), in 1969. But that doesn't make Hughes a Nazi; Plath's empathizing with victims of the Holocaust in her poems "Daddy" and "Lady Lazarus"--the stage Plath mockingly offers a Nazi salute--earns her no extra sympathy. Jillian Becker, a friend of Plath's, contends in Giving Up: The Last Days of Sylvia Plath that "she should not have tried to dramatize her own unhappiness with such a comparison. It was enough that she was forsaken, rejected, burdened with children she could not cope with however much she loved them. She did not need a grander, more compelling explanation."

Unfolding in a gloaming of sallow skies and howling winds, Sylvia is admirably restrained and more evenhanded than the play. It sparingly depicts Plath's jealous rages and shows Hughes to be a brooding man--but as much a victim as and no more of a perpetrator than Plath in their collusion. Ultimately, it tells us we should let them alone now.

Graham Fuller is Interview's film writer at large.