This is a critique of biographies about Sylvia Plath and a sort of biography about her. If you don't know much about Miss Plath, who was a late 20th century American/English Poet, then you will learn the basic facts about her life and be able to sample some of her poems.
Basic Facts about a life never really stand on their own. They must always be interpreted by the researcher or reader or writer, and it is the very subjective nature of the interpretation that Miss Malcolm is interested in. Miss Malcolm discusses the various biographies of Sylvia Plath and whose side that they take. And they always take a side, some stridently, some with subtlety.
Miss Malcolm is straight forward about whose side she takes, she states that she is on the Hughes' side. Ted Hughes was the English Poet whom Miss Plath married and whom she lived with in England until he left her for another woman. Miss Plath committed suicide and died instate, her estranged husband inherited all of her estate and her literary works. Mr. Hughes controlled access and copyrights to Plath's works, and put his sister Olwyn Hughes in charge of Plath's literary estate.
Because a biographer is, for the most part, partial to her subject, the Hughes felt that Mr. Hughes was being unfairly judged and blamed for Miss Plath's suicide and acted accordingly with their permissions to use her works in the various biographies. Like any passive-aggressive, they withheld their approval to obtain the proper behavior from the biography authors and the proper attitude and spin to apply to the biographies. Mr. Hughes must be accounted blameless at all costs, and Miss Plath must be accountable for her suicide.
The very nature of a suicide (a person elects to kill herself) is that person's own choice. Other people may behave badly toward the suicide, but the very act of suicide is a knowing choice made by the person---her body and her choice. So, like Miss Malcolm, I am not going to blame Mr. Hughes for Miss Plath's choice, after all, she did choose him to marry. She might have made a great many bad choices in her life (but don't we all), but she lived with them until she didn't.
But as the owner of Miss Plath's literary estate, Mr. Hughes does become an agent in Miss Plath's legacy and is responsible for his own actions and those that he delegated to his sister in administering the estate. If he is responsible, then he can be criticized. And that is not what he wanted in the biographies of Miss Plath. My response to that is that it is too late for that now.
One of the excuses that Mr. Hughes and his sister used for their controlling agenda in the perception of Miss Plath and her work was the children (two, one boy and one girl) of the marriage. It is perfectly acceptable to want to shield child from an adult's bad behavior (and what is the suicide of a mother, but her bad behavior toward her children?), but Mr. Hughes and his sister were still using that excuse when the "children" were grown and in their thirties. What? No child in their maturity does not look back upon a parent and reinterpret the parent's behavior in light of their own maturity and reasoning powers?
Miss Malcolm does open up the the reader's thoughts of what a biography does for its subject and what agenda that the biographer has. Miss Malcolm does this sort of thing in all her books and is worth reading just for that. As soon as you think that you know what a noted person is like and why they acted as they did, Miss Malcolm interjects the note of uncertainty back into your conclusions. Schrödinger's Cat is still in the box. And Miss Plath is still dead.
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