Ted Hughes and the corpus of Sylvia Plath

Criticism, Wntr, 1998 by Sarah Churchwell

Malcolm derives her title The Silent Woman from an incident that Olwyn Hughes recounts, in which Olwyn criticized Plath and was "unnerved" by her response: Plath "mutely glared" but refused to speak. Olwyn aggrievedly explains to Malcolm that "it is the only tiff I have ever had in my life where the other person hadn't a word to say for themselves. Looking back, it seems quite aggressive of her to have left at dawn the next day. Taking away from me the opportunity to `make it up,' which I intended to do, and putting me firmly in the wrong."(46) Malcolm goes on to conclude that Plath's suicide functions in the same way, putting the survivors in the wrong and removing the possibility of making amends. But suicide also becomes a way of denying the other the last word; Plath's silence is unnerving because it is perceived by the survivors as an absence that must be filled. This "silence" overwrites all of the words Plath wrote not only because it gives people the opportunity to speak for her, but presents this opportunity as necessity. Moreover, Plath's survivors read her silence as eliciting a response, placing the blame firmly back on Plath. Plath's silence, Olwyn notes, was "aggressive," rather than passive. By implication, Plath's suicide becomes her cruelest act, turning her survivors into victims of her silent, selfish destructiveness, in spite of the fact that she seems the clearest victim of her own suicide. The struggle to control the body, both Plath's dead body and the body of her text, is reinscribed by Plath's suicide as a struggle over self-destruction.

In her article "Muteness Envy," Barbara Johnson associates muteness with resistance and remarks that "victimhood would seem to be the most effective model for authority, particularly literary and cultural authority. It is not that the victim always gets to speak--far from it--but that the most highly valued speaker gets to claim victimhood."(47) Johnson notes that muteness is "the ego ideal of the poetic voice" and traces its association with femininity: "numerous are the Parnassian poems addressed to silent female statues, marble Venuses and granite Sphinxes whose unresponsiveness stands as the mark of their aesthetic value . . . [there is a] normative image of a beautiful, silent woman addressed by the idealizing rhetoric of a male poet for whom she 'seems a thing.'"(48) The battle over Plath takes precisely the form of struggle Johnson delineates: it is a battle over poetry and representation, silence and speech, victimhood and victory, all of which are figured in gendered terms. Even the covers of the various editions of Malcolm's The Silent Woman will "graphically" illustrate the point. The cover to The New Yorker issue in which The Silent Woman first appeared was a drawing of a (smiling?) woman in a coffin; the drawing was "edged" by the first lines of Plath's late poem "Edge," which begins "The woman is perfected. / Her dead / Body wears the smile of accomplishment." The jacket to the hardcover edition of The Silent Woman reproduces a black-and-white photograph of a young and smiling Sylvia and Ted Hughes just after their marriage. The cover to the ensuing paperback edition replaced this photograph of the "real" Sylvia and Ted with a reproduction of a famous "silent female statue" of just the sort Johnson remarks upon, the headless (female) Winged Victory. It is a perfect image for Sylvia Plath as cultural icon: a pictorial representation of a generic dead woman struggles for supremacy with a photograph of the "real" Sylvia Plath and with a headless statue, doubly silent and doubly feminine--castrated, and yet nonetheless figured as "victorious." That is, the statue-as-representation is more victorious than Plath "herself," who after all is only ever a simulacrum of a woman who killed herself. This is to say that (in this example at least) the representation of the iconic Plath is "victorious" over a photograph of the "real" Plath, itself an overdetermined illusion, a reproduction of a photograph of a woman now dead; as Barthes points out in Camera Lucida, the fear of the photograph is that it has already killed that which it represents.