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The Birthday Letters Myth by Andrew Derek Armitage a Thesis Submitted The Birthday Letters Myth By Andrew Derek Armitage A thesis submitted to the Victoria University of Wellington in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English Victoria University of Wellington 2010 1 2 Abstract Ted Hughes‘s Birthday Letters (1998) has, for the most part, been judged in terms of its autobiographical content rather than for its poetic achievement. The poems are addressed to Hughes‘s first wife Sylvia Plath, who committed suicide in 1963 shortly after they separated. The poems describe their relationship and deal with the aftermath of her suicide and Hughes‘s role in managing and promoting her writings, in many of which he was characterised as a villain. Hughes has been criticised for his subjective treatment of these events in Birthday Letters. Furthermore, the drama of the poems takes place in an apparently fatalistic universe which has led to accusations that Hughes uses fatalism in order to create a deterministic explanation for Plath‘s suicide and absolve himself. In The Birthday Letters Myth I will be arguing that Hughes‘s mythopoeia in Birthday Letters is part of his overtly subjective challenge to the discourses that have hitherto provided the ―story‖ of his life. In Birthday Letters, there are two versions of Hughes: the younger Hughes who is character involved in the drama, and the older Hughes, looking back on his life, interpreting ‗omens‘ and ‗portents‘ and creating a meaningful narrative from the chaos. By his own method, Hughes highlights the subjectivity and retrospective determinism of those narratives (or ‗myths‘) about his life that often uncritically adopt the dramatic dialectic of ‗victim‘ and ‗villain‘ in Plath‘s poems. In Birthday Letters, Hughes adopts the symbols and drama from Plath‘s writings in order to create his own dramatic ―myth‖ that resists contamination from the other discourses that have perpetuated the drama within her poems. The underlying myth of Birthday Letters is the shamanic myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. Hughes believed the role of the poet and that of the shaman were analogous and in Birthday Letters, as Orpheus, he goes on an imaginary journey to recover his private assumptions and conclusions about his relationship with Plath. In doing so, he achieves a redemptive, cathartic healing image for himself and the reader. 3 Acknowledgements I am extremely grateful for the support, criticism and encouragement from my supervisors Anna Jackson and Harry Ricketts throughout the writing of this thesis. They have been a great help in helping me to develop and formulate my ideas coherently. Thank you to Victoria University of Wellington for providing me with funding towards my trip to the Ted Hughes literary archives in Emory, Atlanta in 2005, and more recently, in providing me with a completion scholarship in the last months of writing. I am also grateful for assistance from a large number of scholars who have provided me with encouragement and support, helped me locate articles, radio broadcasts and books, and so on, during the completion of this thesis. I am particularly indebted to Claas Kazzer, Ann Skea, and the late Diane Middlebrook. Thanks to the staff at Emory University for their assistance in my research, and to Mrs Carol Hughes and Seamus Heaney for permissions to copy materials from the archives. Thanks also to Greg Martin and my partner Bec Edwards who read earlier drafts of this thesis and provided helpful feedback and advice. 4 Contents 1 Introduction.......................................................................................... 6 2 Myth ....................................................................................................58 3 Subjectivity .........................................................................................96 4 Fate ................................................................................................... 124 5 The Plath Myth ................................................................................. 161 6 Re-writing the Myth ......................................................................... 201 7 The Shamanic Journey ................................................................... 244 8 Epilogue ............................................................................................ 279 9 Appendices....................................................................................... 287 10 Bibliography ..................................................................................... 292 5 1 Introduction 1 Introduction When Birthday Letters first appeared in 1998, the majority of the book‘s reviewers focussed on the autobiographical aspect of the poems.1 This is not surprising, given Hughes‘s silence about his marriage in the preceding years. However, it has also meant that Birthday Letters has often been judged in terms of its autobiographical content rather than its poetic achievement. Katha Pollitt was one of Birthday Letters‘ most forceful critics. In her New York Times review, she suggested that getting to the ‗truth‘ of the Birthday Letters story was the reader‘s objective: Inevitably, given the claims that these poems set the record straight, the question of truth arises. Plath‘s letters and journals present her as struggling hard to be a dutiful literary wife – typing her husband‘s poems, promoting his work, rejoicing in his success and also resenting it. The difficulties – practical, social and, most of all, psychological – of being a woman of burning literary ambition preoccupied her from earliest childhood. None of this struggle is reflected in Birthday Letters. Nor does Hughes engage with the fury that suffuses Plath‘s late poems – and with which many women have identified – about being stuck at home with the babies and the housework and the boring neighbours.2 1 For reviews of Birthday Letters see: Alvarez, Al. The New Yorker. 7 February 1998; Blakely, Dianne. ‗The Birthday Letters by Ted Hughes‘. Antioch Review (Yellow Springs, OH). Winter 1999. 57:1. 117; Churchill, Sarah. ‗Secrets and Lies: Plath, Privacy, Publication and Ted Hughes‘ Birthday Letters‘. Contemporary Literature. Vol. 42, 1. 102; Fenton, James. New York Review of Books. 5 March 1998; Glover, Michael. New Statesman. 30 January 1998; Grossman, Judith. ‗Broken Silence‘. New England Review. Fall 1998. 154-60; McManus, James. ‗Black Magic‘. The American Poetry Review. Oct/Nov. 1998; 27. 6; Morgan, Robyn. Newsweek. 2 February 1998; Motion, Andrew. The Times. 17 January 1998; Pollitt, Katha. ‗Peering Into the Bell Jar‘. The New York Times. 1 March 1998; Sen, Sudeep. ‗Birthday Letters‘. World Literature Today. Summer 1998. 72-3; Warn, Emily. Seattle Weekly. 5 March 1998; Whittington-Egan, Richard. The Life After Death of Sylvia Plath. Contemporary Review. May 1998; 272, 1588; Williamson, Alan. ‗A Marriage Between Writers: Birthday Letters as Memoir and as Poetry.‘ The American Poetry Review. Sept/Oct 1998; 27, 5; Wood, James. ‗Muck Funnel: Birthday Letters by Ted Hughes‘. The New Republic. Mar 30, 199; Wright, Carolyne. ‗The Poet‘s Inquest‘ The American Scholar. Summer 1998; 67. 3. 2 Pollitt, Katha. ‗‗Peering Into the Bell Jar‘. The New York Times. 1 March 1998. Hereafter referred to as ‗Peering into the Bell Jar‘. 6 1 Introduction In her analysis, Pollitt overlooks poems such as ‗The God‘ and ‗Suttee‘, in which Hughes depicts Plath as ―a woman of burning literary ambition‖, because these poems do not contribute to her reading of Hughes as ―the most notorious literary spouse in history‖. In Pollitt‘s view, Birthday Letters is a public relations exercise and an attempt to divert attention from Hughes‘s responsibility for Plath‘s suicide: Here, we are to believe is the Truth About Sylvia, which can be summarised as: she was beautiful, brilliant, violent, crazy, doomed; I loved her, I did my best to make her happy but she was obsessed with her dead father, and it killed her… Incident after incident makes the same point: she was the sick one, I was the ―nurse and protector‖. I didn‘t kill her – poetry, Fate, her obsession with her dead father killed her. The more Hughes insists on his own good intentions and the inevitability of Plath‘s suicide, the less convincing he becomes. One starts to wonder what it means to blame a suicide on Fate, on a father who died, after all, when Plath was 8 years old, or on ―fixed stars‖. Inadequate as it is to see Plath‘s life in wholly sociological, political terms – the plight of a young female genius in the pre-feminist era – it makes more sense than astrology.3 For Pollitt, the ―astrology‖ and ―Fate‖ in Birthday Letters are ways for Hughes to depict himself and Plath in a universe in which human will is subjected to, and overwhelmed by, some cosmic force, which enables him to avoid the accusations of those who have suggested his actions drove Plath to suicide. Pollitt‘s reading indicates how the story in Birthday Letters exists within a number of discourses that each vie for status as the ‗true version‘. For Pollitt, Hughes‘s subjectivity and his intimate access to Plath do not make him a valuable witness who can tell us ‗what really happened‘ because his need to exonerate himself damages the veracity of his account. Against Birthday Letters, Pollitt offers another account of Hughes‘s and Plath‘s lives that she believes is crucially missing from Birthday Letters but can be constructed from ―Plath‘s letters and journals‖. However, Pollitt does not acknowledge the 3 ‗Peering into the Bell Jar‘. 7 1 Introduction problematic subjectivity of
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