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Her Own Words Describe Her Best? Reconstructing Plath’S Original Ariel in Sylvia (2003) and Wintering (2003) by Bethany Layne

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Her Own Words Describe Her Best? Reconstructing Plath’S Original Ariel in Sylvia (2003) and Wintering (2003) by Bethany Layne Her Own Words Describe Her Best? Reconstructing Plath’s Original Ariel in Sylvia (2003) and Wintering (2003) by Bethany Layne My mother’s poems cannot be towards reading Plath’s poems crammed into the mouths of biographically (felt since the actors in any filmic reinvention of publication of Judith Kroll’s Chapters her story in the expectation that in a Mythology (1976)), and for the they can breathe life into her favoring of formalist reading practices again, any more than literary deemed to carry greater critical fictionalization of my mother’s legitimacy (11). But, the biographical life . achieves any purpose face has argued, is popular interest in other than to parody the life she Plath’s writing not catalysed by the actually lived. Since she died my notoriety of her life and death? Ought mother has been dissected, critics not, on some level, be grateful analyzed, reinterpreted, to the “soap opera life story” for reinvented, fictionalized, and in generating an appetite for work by some cases completely and about Plath, making Plath studies fabricated. It comes down to this: a sustainable discipline? Or does her own words describe her best biographical interest serve only to (Hughes xvi-ii) “shape . and distort” (Brain, “Dangerous Confessions” 28)? In her introduction to Ariel: The Restored Edition (2004), Frieda Such questions have long been Hughes holds up a mirror to the circulating, and eddy around the Janus-face of Plath studies, a publication of the Restored Edition of discipline composed of biography and Ariel, “reinstating [Plath’s] original literary criticism. As Hughes suggests, selection and arrangement.” In her the critical face of Plath studies often Foreword, Hughes defends her fears that biographical narratives, decision to hang the blue plaque whether conventional or fictional, commemorating Plath’s life at 3 divert attention away from Plath’s Chalcot Square, where Plath had “own words.” As Janet Badia has written The Bell Jar, published The shown, such fears inform the hostility Colossus, and delivered her first child, Plath Profiles vol. 11 108 rather than at the flat around the Kate Moses’s biographical novel corner where she died. In words Wintering, the “idea” of which Hughes certain to haunt any literary pilgrim to reputedly “disliked . as its subject 23 Fitzroy Road, Hughes asserts that was ‘private’” (Moses, “Whose Plath”). “we already have a gravestone . We The content of both prioritises Plath’s don't need another” (xvi). Yet life over her work: Sylvia’s rendering of Hughes’s self-fashioning as a a seven-year love affair was, as forbidding guardian against prurient screenwriter John Brownlow interest in her mother’s life is at odds acknowledged, “only incidentally a with her presentation of Ariel: The story about two poets” (vi), while Restored Edition, a simulacrum of the Wintering focuses on the fallow period manuscript on the desk “when [Plath] between Plath’s completion of her died” (xv). Despite framing herself as Ariel manuscript and the composition resisting this aspect of “Ariel’s of her final poems. These were weeks notoriety” (xv), Hughes exploits the in which she was “wintering in a dark resemblance: the cover photograph without window” (Plath, “Wintering” reproduces the original document, l.6), the creation of new work bundled together with an elastic band, sacrificed in the face of her and she includes a facsimile of Plath’s “courageous motherly struggle to stay typewritten pages, which, with the alive” (Moses, “Baking”). Accordingly, exception of a few handwritten Moses’s Sylvia frequently prioritises corrections, merely duplicates the her children over her writing: “[her printed Ariel that precedes it. The son] needs her now. She leaves the Restored Edition thus betrays a poems where they are” (Wintering tension between form and content, its 141).1 sensationalist presentation belying its immense critical value as a document But while the content of Sylvia and Ted Hughes had supressed for more Wintering could be said to “breathe than forty years. life into” Plath as wife and mother, rather than as poet, their forms In this article, I reveal how the filmic engage intimately with her then- and literary representations criticised unpublished Ariel manuscript. The by Frieda Hughes have the opposite climax of Sylvia is a montage of the tension between form and content. By subject writing, delivering seemingly focusing on their content, and disconnected lines from Ariel in voice- overemphasising their efforts to over. When unravelled, the lines pose “breathe life into” Plath, Hughes a coded challenge to Ted Hughes’s devalues the considerable significance of their form. The works in question 1 Throughout this article, “Plath” and are Christine Jeffs’ biopic Sylvia, which “Hughes” will be used to refer to the historical Hughes feared would screen a persons and the figures in Birthday Letters, “Sylvia” and “Ted” to the fictional characters “monster,” a “Sylvia Suicide Doll” in Sylvia and Wintering, and “Paltrow” and (Hughes, “My Mother” l.100-101), and “Craig” to the actors in Sylvia. Plath Profiles vol. 11 109 rearrangement of, and additions to, first critical response was Marjorie Ariel, a challenge reiterated in the Perloff’s “The Two Ariels: The film’s ending. Moses stages a more (Re)Making of the Sylvia Plath Canon” explicit critical intervention, naming (1984), a groundbreaking study that her forty-one chapters after the Ariel revealed the radically different poems as selected and arranged by characters of the two versions. This Plath, with the intention of reminding paved the way for Lynda K. Plath’s estate “that it’s still sitting on Bundtzen’s The Other Ariel (2001), the one unpublished manuscript. the only book-length comparative study of Ariel poems in their proper order” the volumes to date. (“The Last Plath”). Sylvia and Wintering’s contributions to As Ted Hughes acknowledged, Ariel this critical field is best understood by as ordered by Plath had a “narrative of placing them in conversation with their extraordinary positive resolution” paratexts, defined by Gerard Genette (“Sheep in Fog” 191), emphasised by as “a threshold, or . a ‘vestibule’ Plath’s arrangement of the collection that offers the world at large the to begin with the word “Love” and possibility of either stepping inside or end with the word “Spring.” The turning back” (2). The paratext is poems were completed by the end of made up of two halves: the “inward 1962, and, in Hughes’s account, side,” or peritext, composed of the erupted from the fault line where the non-narrative elements of the physical crises of marital separation and a text, and the “outward side,” or resurgence in Plath’s traumatic “epitext,” which incorporates “any feelings towards her father were paratextual element not materially confronted with her “battle to create a appended to the text within the same new life, with her children” (“Sheep in volume but circulating . in a virtually Fog” 191). Yet by appending “about limitless physical and social space” nine of the last poems,” written in (344). Significant features of Sylvia’s 1963 and regarded by Plath “as the epitext include the shooting script, beginning of a new book” (Hughes, which differs significantly from the “Publishing” 167), Hughes overwrote finished film, Frieda Hughes’s poem Ariel’s triumphant “drive / Into the red “My Mother” and the two Ariels; / Eye, the cauldron of morning” with a reading Sylvia in dialogue with these narrative of despair (Plath, “Ariel” l.29- liminal texts reveals the critical 31). In the words of Moses, the version impetus behind the commercial of Ariel Hughes published in 1965 was success. Together with the peritextual “an extended suicide note,” which elements of title, intertitles, postface, made Plath’s death appear and author’s note, Wintering makes “inevitable” (“Lioness”). Hughes similar use of its epitext, which quietly acknowledged his includes Moses’s personal interviews emendations in an appendix to Plath’s and autocommentaries, the original Collected Poems (1981), to which the Ariel, and Birthday Letters. Other Plath Profiles vol. 11 110 crucial aspects of Wintering’s epitext prompted the filmmakers to approach are Perloff’s essay and Catherine her for the rights to Plath’s work, and Thompson’s article “Dawn Poems in the poem’s climax conveys her horror Blood,” texts “key to [Moses’s] at being asked “to give them my understanding of Sylvia Plath” mother’s words / To fill the mouth of (Wintering 340). The presence of these their monster” (l.42-3). Hughes’s works in the hinterland of a novel is withholding of the rights to both of indicative of “the spilling over into the her parents’ work meant that they public domain of so many scholarly could only be quoted in fragments projects attentive to Plath’s version of shorn of context, part of a long [her] manuscript,” forming a trans- tradition of withholding permission to genre dialogue that “contributed quote “when ‘the Estate’ did not toward the momentum to publish agree with the point of view being Plath’s version of Ariel” (Helle 646). In expressed” (Churchwell 112). As Sarah the process, Moses also offers a way Churchwell has noted, Plath scholars of reading that version biographically, have tended to view this (mis)use of but as a blueprint for a life rather than copyright control as a form of a record. censorship (112). *** Yet Hughes’s interdict forced Jeffs and Brownlow to devise creative strategies It was in the free-verse polemic “My to maintain the “literary” aspect of Mother” that Frieda Hughes first their biopic. Whereas Brownlow’s voiced her feelings about the ongoing original shooting script was heavily production of Sylvia. Originally reliant on Birthday Letters (1998), published in the March 2003 issue of incorporating scenes reprising the Tatler, the poem was covered by narratives of “Ouija,” “Epiphany,” and forums including the Montreal Gazette “A Table,” and others utilising and CNN, becoming, ironically, “a fragments from “The Minotaur” and publicity generator .
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