Ted Hughes and the corpus of Sylvia Plath

Criticism, Wntr, 1998 by Sarah Churchwell

Consequently, attempts to explicate Plath's or Hughes's writing are "libelous" because they are understood to have made claims about the person. Writers and commenters on the Plath-Hughes melee regularly raise the question of libel. Olwyn Hughes, Ted's sister and for some years the agent for the Plath estate, objected to Jacqueline Rose's reading of Plath's poem "The Rabbit Catcher" on the grounds that it "goes on about Sylvia's sexual life--it's incredible, it's libellous."(29) Malcolm responded to Olwyn, she tells the reader, with "You can't libel the dead," leaving the clear implication that, were Plath still alive, Rose's reading would be libelous. But Rose explicitly and repeatedly reminds her reader that she is analyzing a poem, not making claims about what Sylvia Plath did or felt, only about the words Plath put on the page ("This is not a biography. I am never claiming to speak about the life").(30) That is, Olwyn's reaction is based upon the equation of Plath's poem with her "self," so that a reading which locates eroticism in a poem she wrote becomes a claim about Plath's ,sexual life." An earlier version of this article, it was suggested by one reader, was potentially libelous for the claims it made "about Ted Hughes," when, as I understood it, the claims being made were solely about what he had written. To examine Hughes's writings on Plath is, it seems to many readers (including, apparently, Ted Hughes), to examine Hughes himself; for example, Olwyn Hughes characterized Rose's examination of Hughes's editing of Plath's work as "another attack on Ted" and complained that one reviewer "treat[s] Sylvia Plath's family as though they are characters in some work of fiction."(31)

Narratology tells us that textual frames create competing narratives: the struggle over Plath is a struggle over the right to write the true story, rather than "fiction." For all that, Hughes's writings implicitly present his authorial intelligence as a hero-detective who will "solve" the crime of Plath's death; the narratives with which Hughes surrounds everything that has been published in Plath's name serve to "frame" Plath both as the tropological dead female heroine whose corpse is the sign for the interrogation that the text will undertake, and as the culpable one "whodunit."(32) The literary controversy surrounding Sylvia Plath and her work arises from the way in which her name--and her name as a sign for the battle over the female body that it represents--reminds us that the body, especially the female body, is always somehow "real," and can never escape its own corporeality. Hughes's insistence on his "co-authorship" of Plath's life embeds itself into his writing about her far beyond the "naturalized" editing and hierarchizing that Jacqueline Rose notes in Hughes's presentations of Plath's work.(33)

Hughes's insistence on his role in Plath's work because of his role in her life leads readers like Janet Malcolm to declare startlingly that Hughes was "the most interesting figure in [Plath's life] during its final six years," erasing Plath from the center even of her own life.(34) Malcolm makes her position in defense of Hughes explicit, and condemns those writers (especially biographers) who have claimed objectivity when in fact, according to Malcolm, they take sides in what has devolved into a tacit debate between those (like Malcolm herself) who claim to speak for Ted Hughes, and those who claim to speak for Sylvia Plath. Having explicitly stated that she has "taken a side--that of the Hugheses" and having denied any writer the possibility of not taking sides, Malcolm outlines the argument as follows:(35)