Her Own Words Describe Her Best? Reconstructing Plath’s Original 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 , published The shown, such fears inform the hostility Colossus, and delivered her first child,

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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 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 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.

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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 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

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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 . . . for the film” “Life After Death,” the finished film (Badia 163). “My Mother” rewrites was able to evade the authority of Ted Plath’s “,” figuring the Hughes. In the film as shot, his adaptive process as a repeated act of influence is detectable only on the grave-robbing through which level of image, the use of costume in Hughes’s “buried mother / is up-dug the wedding scene, for instance, for repeat performances” (l.11-12). mirroring Hughes’s “cord jacket” and Whereas resuscitation is one of the Plath’s “pink wool knitted dress” in most popular metaphors for the eponymous poem from Birthday biographical representation, through Letters. The film’s development from which the subject is “brought back to page to screen thus mirrors the life,” Hughes insists that the film is trajectory of its narrative, which charts simply “killing her again” (l.1). It is Sylvia’s attempts to establish a poetic mere prurience, Hughes implies, that identity distinct from that of her

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husband. The film’s “outgrowing” of intended for the following scene, in Hughes’s influence is also in keeping the background to which he hovers: with its contestation of his edition of Ariel. The end result is reflective of If I’ve killed one man, I’ve killed Pamela Matthews’ prognosis for the two— future of Plath criticism after Hughes’s death: “Sylvia Plath will emerge more The vampire who said he was powerfully on her own” (93). you

Sylvia’s first moment of subversion lies And drank my blood for a year, in a scene towards the end of the film, in which Gwyneth Paltrow sits at her Seven years if you want to know. desk at Court Green in the immediate aftermath of Daniel Craig’s desertion (l.71-4) and writes the word “” at the top of a blank page. The screenplay His daughter’s interventions were, reveals that the lines originally chosen however, timely enough for “Daddy” from the scene were as follows: to be excised from the film, where the lines spoken in voice-over are instead You stand at the blackboard, taken from eleven other Ariel poems. daddy, This is an interesting decision given Brownlow’s insistence that the film In the picture I have of you, should not be “dependent on the audience being interested in Sylvia A cleft in your chin instead of Plath”; such an audience could be your foot forgiven for thinking that the eleven poems were composed in a single But no less a devil for that, no night (v). While such compromises are not endemic to the literary biopic as a genre, which must appeal to audience Any less the black man who members with varying degrees of foreknowledge, they are exacerbated Bit my pretty red heart in two. by the Plath Estate’s sanction on quoting the Ariel poems in their (l.51-6) rightful context. For Al Alvarez, “Plath, however, gains by the restriction,” the Brownlow’s choice is an implicitly juxtaposition of disconnected lines seditious gesture given Ted Hughes’s convincingly representing “a creative acknowledgement that, while mind working flat-out” (“Ted, Sylvia “Daddy” was a “great poem,” he and Me” n.pag). Transcribed, the lines “would have cut [it] out” from Ariel “if read as follows: I’d been in time” (PSP 167). Hughes’s motivations are implicit in the lines

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This is the light of the so I can’t see what is in mind. (The Moon and there. (“The Arrival of the Yew Tree, l.1) the Bee Box,” l.9)

If the moon smiled, she some god got hold of would resemble you. me (“The Hanging Man,” (“The Rival,” l.1) l.1)

Their redness talks Lightly, through their (“,” l.39) white swaddlings, (“Tulips,” l.38) she would drag me Cruelly, being barren. I cannot undo myself, (“Elm,” l.22-3) and the train is steaming. (“Getting There,” l.38) Thick, red and slipping. (“Getting There,” l.36) The only poem not taken from Plath’s original arrangement of Ariel is “The your nakedness Hanging Man,” an early poem Shadows our safety. appended to Hughes’s version (“Morning Song,” l.5-6) because it “describes with only thin disguise the experience which made Whose is that long white Ariel possible” (PSP 167). Its inclusion box in the grove, (“The in the above litany is something of a Bee Meeting,” l.55) red herring, given that the film as shot omits Plath’s subjection to Electro- I need feed them Convulsive Therapy. The others lines nothing, I am the owner. are, without exception, from the wave (“The Arrival of the Bee of poems written in 1962 and Box,” l.25) arranged by Plath under the title Ariel. Significantly, none of the late poems I sizzled in his blue volts appended by Hughes is represented. (“The Hanging Man,” l.2) And, in a fascinating twist, the ending of the above “poem” reveals a Our cheesecloth decided privileging of fragments from gauntlets neat and the Bee sequence, the five poems sweet, (“Stings,” l.3) with which Plath concluded her arrangement. In a coded gesture that Bare-handed, I hand the has gone unnoticed until now, the combs. filmmakers quietly champion the The man in white smiles, authority of Plath’s original (“Stings,” l.1-2) manuscript.

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Sylvia’s critical intervention is We have come so far, it is over. emphasised when comparing the ending of the screenplay to that of the The use of lines from “Edge” to finished film. Scene 235 as scripted overlay shots of its author’s body incorporates lines and images from symbolises a stubborn critical trend, “Edge,” one of Hughes’s additions summarised by Annika Hagström: the and the penultimate poem in his poem “is directly connected to Plath’s arrangement. Dated February 5, six suicide, as if she had written it days before Plath’s death, it is widely posthumously”; it is a “prophesy” of represented as Plath’s final poem, which Plath is the “heroine” (42). This having a more conveniently interpretation is driven home in the sensational narrative than “Balloons,” previous scripted scene, in which a written on the same day (“The Last policeman at the scene of the suicide Poem”). In the screenplay, Ted visits remarks that “they usually leave a St. Pancras Mortuary, lifting “a WHITE note.” “She did,” Ted replies, SHROUD to reveal Sylvia’s body” opening the Ariel manuscript at “a (Brownlow 111), as Sylvia speaks, in poem called EDGE,” which “fills the voice over, the following lines: screen” (Brownlow 111).

The woman is perfected. In this scene, “Edge” becomes Her dead metonymically representation of the 1965 Ariel, a collection often Body wears the smile of discussed, as Tracy Brain writes in a accomplishment, different context, as though it The illusion of a Greek necessity “prefigured and caused [Plath’s] death” (“Fictionalising” 190). Philip Flows in the scrolls of her toga, French takes credit for the inception of this idea, citing a 1965 episode of (“Edge” l.1-5) New Comment, his weekly review on the Third Programme, in which “her Brownlow writes that “As we GLIDE suicide was introduced as an essential AROUND, we see that the white way of understanding these late shroud does indeed seem like some poems” (n.pag). Contrary to Hughes’s kind of toga,” a direction that insistence, in “Publishing Sylvia Plath,” transforms the subject of the poem that Ariel marked Plath’s phoenix-like into an autobiographical referent emergence from the ashes of her (111). A shot of “her naked feet” then failed relationships, this was the summons the final lines of both poem reading he ultimately confirmed in and film: Birthday Letters, which mythologizes Ariel as a poetics of disintegration that Her bare would turn upon and destroy its creator. For French and others writing Feet seem to be saying: twenty years before Hughes’s

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revelation of Plath’s original ordering the title of the scene (“No Exit”) and in his appendix to her Collected by Brownlow’s assertion that “the Poems, Ariel was irrevocably tainted audience had to feel that every door by the addition of the late works. had closed on her” (viii). Yet the Sylvia as scripted perpetuates this link poem’s ending, unlike that of “Edge,” between Ariel and Plath’s death, suggests liberation rather than wilfully misrepresenting “Edge” as hopelessness: its locked box is “only though it were included in her original temporary”; its speaker “will be sweet manuscript. God, I will set them free” (l.35-6). This moment in the film can, then, be Yet regardless of whether contextual interpreted as a move towards knowledge of Plath’s suicide aids transcendence, as supported by the interpretation of “Edge” and the other shot of the closed door dissolving into late poems, “Contusion” and an earlier, reprised shot of Paltrow’s “Words,” neither the death nor these face, “seraphic, bathed in light” poems has anything to do with Plath’s (Brownlow 107). The development of Ariel, which was complete by the end the final moments of Sylvia from page of 1962. The “fallacious link” is to screen reflects, in microcosm, the severed in the completed film (Brain, tonal contrasts between the two “Fictionalizing” 190), which dispenses Ariels, and their perceived relationship with “Edge” and the mortuary scene to their author’s death. The screenplay entirely, showing only a fleeting ends on a note of despair, glimpse of Paltrow’s body as Craig perpetuating the connection kisses the manuscript and imagines encouraged by Hughes between Ariel her peaceful face. The final lines from and Plath’s suicide. The film disrupts Ariel, spoken in voice-over as the this connection, privileging Ariel’s kitchen door closes behind Paltrow, intended drive towards renewal and are instead from “The Arrival of the allowing its subject to “taste the Bee Box”: spring” (“Wintering” l.50)

*** The box is locked, it is dangerous. (l.6) A similar effect is rehearsed when comparing Kate Moses’s title to that There are no windows, so I can’t of another biographical work see what is in there. published in the same year. Whereas Paul Alexander’s play Edge (2003) There is only a little grid, no exit. nominally affirmed Hughes’s decision (l.9-10) to append the late poems, Moses’s choice of title provides eloquent The context admittedly permits us to support for Plath’s concluding Bee read the poem as prophesy, as sequence. While Genette is alert to “Edge” has been read, supported by the potential for self-aggrandisement

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attendant upon quotation titles, desk, to reinscribe” (193). Inverting Moses use of the verb “Wintering” Hughes’s suggestive juxtaposition of thus suggests far more than the desire “Your story. My story.” in Birthday for “the prestige of a cultural filiation” Letters (“Visit” l.69), Sylvia’s (Genette 91). Her engagement with triumphant reclamation of “her page” Plath’s manuscript is confirmed by the is a synecdoche for Moses’s insistence titles of Wintering’s forty-two chapters, that Ariel must be republished to which mirror the original arrangement reveal the “woman’s story, not the of Ariel. By reconstructing Plath’s man’s.” These intended real-world original contents page, Moses frames implications are confirmed by the loss her text as an implicit “curative, or of the “genre indication” “A novel of corrective” to the image of the poet Sylvia Plath” between the American created by Hughes (Genette 239). This and British additions of Wintering image is suggestively evoked in her (Genette 97), corroborating Sandra postface, which juxtaposes a litany of Gilbert’s assertion that Moses Hughes’s additions with the statement “define(s) her task not just (or even “On February 11, 1963, Sylvia Plath principally) as the crafting of a fiction took her own life” (336). Moses’s but as a sort of critical hypothesizing” implication that Hughes’s (3). interventions fostered a relationship between Ariel and Plath’s death is Such critical impetus is also evident in made explicit in her Salon article “The Moses’s Author’s Note, an addendum Real Sylvia Plath: Part One.” There, “used most often with texts whose she accuses Hughes of “changing fictionality is very ‘impure’” (Genette [Ariel’s] tone and theme from one of 332). The note confirms her novel as a transformative rebirth to one of scholarly undertaking, detailing her inevitable self-destruction” (n.pag). independent research in the archives of Indiana University and Smith This statement frames Hughes’s College, and foregrounding her editorial interference with the Ariel dialogue with numerous other writers, manuscript as an act of critical including Perloff, Thompson, and overwriting, supported by the Plath, her “most essential source” and postface’s suggestive detail that “ultimate inspiration” (341). As “Edge” was “composed on the back suggested previously, Moses’s of a draft of ‘Wintering’” (336). popularisation of debates set in Conversely, Moses’s feminist recovery motion by Perloff had ontological sees Sylvia typing the final draft of implications, lending weight to the “Wintering” on the reverse of her argument in favour of a new edition of husband’s manuscript: “She wants a Ariel by drawing attention to “why the woman’s story, not a man’s. She wants differences between the two versions . her fingerprints all over his page, her . . matter” (Badia 162). In turn, her page, her words, her survival. His rehearsal of Thompson’s findings has manuscript was right there, under her epistemological consequences,

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helping to disentangle the vexed previously iterated in her criticism: that relationship between writing and motherhood afforded Plath access to suicide. The fundamental ideas of “the material that she had always Thompson’s essay, first published in needed” (“Lioness”). Northwestern’s journal TriQuarterly, were reproduced in “The Real Sylvia Yet while these details reflect Plath: Part Two,” helping Thompson Hughes’s emphasis on the nine-month to engage with a wider, less cycles of Plath’s respective specialised readership than she would pregnancies, Thompson also enables have reached in a graduate a narrower focus. She excavates a publication. This continues the relationship between the phases of conversation between literary criticism Plath’s menstrual cycles and the Ariel and popular culture previously poems’ vacillation between witnessed in Moses’s engagement “metaphoric renewals and optimistic with Perloff. In excavating a transformations” and “jagged, relationship between Plath’s physical seething accusations and aggression” and artistic fertility, Thompson and (“The Real SP” 2). Thompson Moses build on Ted Hughes’s ideas, combines these poetic oscillations which warrant brief attention at this with Plath’s well-documented cycles of juncture. Hughes was attuned to the insomnia to support a diagnosis of way in which Plath’s two deliveries premenstrual dysphoric disorder, for enabled her to “compose at top which Plath was awaiting a referral for speed, and with her full weight” as “all treatment at the time of her death. the various voices of her gift came Indeed, she posits that a previous together” (SP: A 162), while “suicide attempt was directly reproduction was his preferred precipitated by hormonal disruption metaphor for the development of during the late luteal phase of her Plath’s Ariel voice, “that inner menstrual cycle” (qtd. in “The Real gestation and eventual birth of a new SP” 2). Moses corroborated self-conquering self” (SP: J 189). The Thompson’s findings against Plath’s influence of these writings is felt in unabridged journals, which confirmed Wintering, in which Sylvia recognises the link between her menstrual cycles the birth of Frieda as “the beginning and the waves of Ariel poems (“The of her real existence” (11), and Real SP” 2). She states that she found produces “a spurt of good poems” the possibility of a bodily explanation after the birth of each child (231). Her for Plath’s changes in poetic tone experience of labour is then “breathtaking,” insofar as it integrated symbolically conflated with the act of her “life as a woman and as a writer . . writing to form a unique bodily poetic: . without diminishing [her] “the plates of the skull folding, achievement in any way” (“The Real slipping tectonically like a world, to SP” 2). The impact of Thompson’s get through her bones” (126). Moses findings is palpable in Wintering, in thus confirms in fiction what she had which the suggestion that “twenty-

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one” of the Ariel poems were amounted to a mythic completed in “twenty-eight days” performative utterance. conflates the “agony drag” of She was putting them in menstruation with the “real red thing” an order that would tell of poetry (124-5). her the story of her own survival, her phoenixlike When situated in dialogue with eruption from the ashes Perloff’s essay, Thompson’s findings of her destroyed inflect Moses’s project of feminist marriage and the shed reconstruction in two important ways. skin of her “false” selves. Firstly, they provides physiological (“The Real SP” 2) evidence for the thematic differences between the two Ariels, explaining the At the root of this mythologizing of abrupt change in trajectory when the subject is the suggestion that the poems written at the nadir of Plath’s “other” Ariel should be read cycle were appended to the Bee biographically, that the reader’s sequence, and supporting Moses’s proper task is to excavate a “parallel belief that the two arrangements were track to what was going on in [her] life radically different entities. Secondly, at the time” (“Lioness”). For Brain, the suggestion that “Plath’s true such a mode of reading does a demon was not something of her own disservice to Plath, implying that she making but a force or forces she was was “too unimaginative to make quite powerless against” connects her anything up, or too self-obsessed to suicide to physiological imbalances consider anything of larger historical (“The Real SP” 2), contesting its or cultural importance” (“Dangerous attribution to her writing, implicit in Confessions” 28). Conversely, for Hughes’s Ariel and directly stated in Badia, the critical resistance to Birthday Letters. It resists the considering Plath as a confessional “hystericis[ing]” of Plath by “a male poet is unhelpfully reductive, closing literary tradition” (Rose 28), and down autobiographical and feminist liberates her writing to tell “the story approaches rather than encouraging of her own survival” (“The Real SP” 2). “the diversity of interpretations surely made possible by the impressive For Moses, Plath’s Ariel is nothing less nature of Plath’s body of work” (15). than an “encoded autobiography” While Plath herself was adamant that (“The Real SP” 1), with a narrative “personal experience shouldn’t be a “embedded almost anagrammatically kind of shut-box and mirror-looking within the . . . poems if you put them narcissistic experience” and must be back in their order” (“Lioness”). The “generally relevant, to such things as poems have, she suggests, Hiroshima and Dachau, and so on,” she implicitly licenced biographical a logical sequence, a readings by acknowledging that her narrative cohesion that poems “come immediately out of the

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senseless and emotional experience I passage describing the arrangement have” (qtd. in Alvarez, “Sylvia Plath” of the Ariel poems: 64). She knows the story she Moses evokes this tension between wants them to tell. It is the general and the personal in the her story. It is where she image that occurs to Sylvia to describe wills herself to go; it is an her breast milk leaking into the incantation. She’s giving bathwater: “a tiny Hiroshima as it shape to her life, past penetrated the surface,” dissolving and future, with these into “spreading grayish lacework” poems. Like the (16). Just as Alvarez accused Plath, in arrangement of cards in an early draft of “Lady Lazarus,” of a Tarot deck as they are “trying to hitch an easy lift by turned up, it is not just dragging in the atomic victims” the poems but their (Savage God 32), the introjection of relation to each other historical event into personal that matters. experience arguably denudes the (10-11) atrocity of the event described. Nevertheless, the image heralds a new The depiction of Ariel as a kind of and different kind of biographical prophesy inverts the conventional reading to that criticised by Brain, one dynamics governing biographical that is attentive to Plath’s commitment readings, while Sylvia’s emphasis on to engaging her lived experience as a the ordering of the poems is a female body with events of moment of skilful ventriloquism on international significance. Moses’s Moses’s part, allowing the subject to emphasis on productive, open-ended lend her voice to the call for a biographical readings reopens Restored Edition. These twinned interpretative avenues closed down in concerns with writing as prolepsis and the 1970s, when the publication of with the importance of poetic Kroll’s Chapters in a Mythology sequencing converge in the chapter effectively discredited the detailing the composition of Ariel’s biographical. Far from suggesting that eponymous poem. This chapter Plath was “too unimaginative to make functions as a synecdoche for Moses’s anything up” (Brain, “Dangerous attitude to Ariel as a whole. Its effect is Confessions” 28), Wintering troubles reliant on pagination and sequencing, the distinction between lived and thereby demonstrating what thus far narrated experience, suggesting that has been merely stated: that the Plath used her writing to imagine a organisation of Ariel was as future as much as to record a past. fundamental to its character as its content. This revised understanding of the autobiographical is evident in the

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The chapter is dated 29 October poet of “effortless inspiration” whose 1962, Plath’s thirtieth birthday, and wording “arrive[s], wherever it arrives, takes as its starting point her fully-formed” (“Sheep in Fog” 211). introduction to “Ariel” for the BBC. They favour Alvarez’s emphasis on her With the enigmatic reserve typical of “hard-earned skills and discipline,” her introductions, she described the whose poems may have “flowed piece as “another horseback riding effortlessly,” but who still “rewrote poem,” named in honour of a mount and rewrote” (The Savage God 36). that she was “especially fond of” Whereas Hughes’s suggestion that the (“New Poems” 194). While citing Ariel poems effectively wrote Sylvia’s grandiose plans of riding to themselves has the effect of de-skilling the highest point of Dartmoor, Plath, Moses’s prioritising of the “arriving with the sun on . . . the craftswoman over the visionary grants morning of her rebirth: the start of her full ownership of the finished another life” (Wintering 156), Moses poem. emphasises the prosaic details of a novice rider hacking out on an elderly In light of these subtleties, the horse, occupied with the beginners’ penultimate paragraph of the “Ariel” litany of “heels down, toes up, weight chapter feels both reductive and on stirrups” (159). The horse herself, redundant, transforming the poem’s recently “dozing in oak straw and climax into a lived experience that crumbly fresh manure” is a pathetic Sylvia has only to transcribe: counterpart to the “God’s lioness” of the poem, emphasising Sylvia’s Ariel rears. Sylvia lets her imaginative transformation of lived go, striking off in a experience into verse (154). When bounding canter, a lines and images from the finished gallop, all four feet in the poem “occur” to Sylvia as she rides, air at once, momentum they appear in an altered form snatching her, propelling suggestive of a previous draft. Her her forward. The rush, vision of “stripping off expectations, the drive, the muscular the dead rules, the hands of all who inevitability of it, the would hold her back” (165) is a looser, throb of the horse’s more discursive version of “White / motion under her too Godiva, I unpeel-- / Dead hands, dead late to stop, her body lit, stringencies” (l.19-21), while her self- sparking at every nerve, image as an “arrow . . . come through flying - her body, this a kesselschlaft, a burning cauldron of heedless pounding hell” (158) rehearses the poem’s speed. She believes in climactic “drive / Into the red // Eye, what she feels. She the cauldron of morning” (l.26-8). belongs to no one. These paraphrased images resist (167; emphasis added) Hughes’s construction of Plath as a

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Unlike the previous details, this and the poppies; Ariel’s gallop, by, paragraph rehearses both the implication, was not experienced but narrative of Ariel, and also its symbolic imagined. This is confirmed in a emphasis. It effectively denies Plath’s subsequent chapter, “Poppies in literary authority, suggesting that both October,” in which Sylvia recalls her the events of the poem and their birthday flowers, “their truth in her sexualised inflection were experienced cells, pumping through her veins,” rather than imagined. Yet the and struggles to accept that they had implausibility of a rider of two-months’ “only been flowers, not what she had experience attaining “this heedless made of them” (205). Moses’s pounding speed” is explained over biographical reading thus places the the page, in a passage that works to utmost emphasis on the symbolic play frame the previous climax as illusory: of Sylvia’s imagination. The imagistic resonance between “her children stir She is thirty years old. in their sleep, in the room beyond the She is sitting at her desk, wall” and “the child’s cry / Melts in the her toes buried in the wall” then transcends the boundaries red wool plush of an of the text to inform a reading of Oriental rug, a cup of hot “Ariel” itself. It situates the speaker in black coffee smoking at a similar position to Sylvia, seated at a her wrist. Free. Daylight desk rather than on horseback, her rises like a curtain children in the next room (Clark 105). beyond the curtains of This conclusively emphasises the her study. Her children metaliterary over the biographical, sigh in their sleep, stir framing “Ariel” as “a comment upon under their blankets, in the imaginative ascent engendered by the room beyond the poetic inspiration” (Clark 103), less wall. A purple dawn, a about riding than about writing. toppled graveyard, a vision she bows her head Moses’s exploitation of pagination before. Blue cornflowers, and sequencing to effect this red poppies mouth her revelation symbolises her belief that name, cascade across the arrangement of Ariel was key to the stage at her feet. Plath’s attempt at “imagining a future” (168) (“Lioness”):

Having constructed the pinnacle of Her book begins with Sylvia’s vision from a perspective of ‘love’. It ends with complete immersion, Moses pans ‘spring’. The bees will fly back to reveal its mundane from their combs past foundations. The “cauldron of winter, housekeeping at morning” was “a cup of black coffee,” the door of the hive, the “red Eye” suggested by the rug sipping the roses. The

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hellebore, the snow rose, conflicting elements in harmony, while will bloom out of the reaching beyond the thresholds of her darkest months - the text to engage in dialogue with legend of a simple faith. Birthday Lettters. (326-7) In the poem “Robbing Myself,” The declarative structure of this Hughes describes how he returned to passage offers an optimistic answer to Court Green midwinter to retrieve for the questions posed by Plath in the Plath the potatoes and apples that final stanza of “Wintering”: appear to offer futurity and reconciliation. The potatoes are “the Will the hive survive, will eggs of my coming year” (l.17), the the gladiolas apples “spring prayers” (l.24); Succeed in the banking together they promise a “summer their fires intact in spite of everything” (l.25). To enter another year? Like a ghostly visitant, Hughes walks What will they taste of, the floors of the house, cataloguing the Christmas roses? the furniture that “waited only for us” (l.46-9) (l.40), and describes how, before leaving, Building on the hope contained in the final line of the manuscript, “The bees I peered awhile, as are flying. They taste the spring” (l.50), through the keyhole, Moses suggests that Plath used Ariel’s Into my darkened, trajectory to envisage a future at Court hushed, safe casket Green and a marital reconciliation. In From which (I did not Sylvia, a similar ending is imagined, know) with Paltrow telling Craig that “in the I had already lost the summer we should go back to Devon. treasure. . . The summer, and the fall, and this (l.58-61) goddamn winter, it’ll all fade and by the time the leaves are out it’ll just There is the sense, then, that in seem like some terrible nightmare that following Plath’s instructions and we finally woke out of” (Brownlow harvesting their crops, Hughes has 105). Just as, in the biopic, the reader unwittingly “robbed himself,” has knows that Sylvia’s dreams will disturbed the talismanic reminders of founder even before it transpires that the couple’s intended future. In is pregnant, Moses must Wintering, Moses offers a prose find a way of balancing Sylvia’s faith in summary of the poem, in which Ted the narrative of Ariel with the reader’s retrieves not only the apples, foreknowledge of her “ultimate fate” potatoes, and curtain material (“Baking”). She again uses her text’s requested, but also “all of this honey; internal structure to hold these there was no telling when she might

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get back.” Like his counterpart in has already been taken. Moses’s “Robbing Myself,” he “withdraws from intertextual engagement thus the house and turns his key, leaving complements her text’s internal the cellar empty” (324). structure, allowing the reader to see through Sylvia’s hopes that “her The significance of this moment honey is waiting for . . . all of them at becomes apparent two chapters Court Green.” It is a powerful hence, in which Sylvia stakes her moment, a synecdoche for our hopes for the future in the “six jars of readerly awareness that her projected honey” described in “Wintering” (l.4): future can only be imagined.

[O]ne she’d already Moses similarly uses poems from used; Ted, if he’s Birthday Letters to foreshadow and remembered it, should undermine the final paragraph of have one in his custody Wintering. In her penultimate chapter, this minute at Montagu she engages with Hughes’s poem Square. The last four are “The Inscription,” which describes in the wine cellar: the Plath’s visit to Hughes’s flat to receive tangible promise of her “the missing supplies” (l.8). “Like the return to springtime. running animal that receives / The Four more jars - four fatal bullet without a faltering check / months left until she In its stride” (l.44-6), Plath is plans to go home. A jar superficially unaffected by the for each of them: herself, discovery of an Oxford Shakespeare Ted, Frieda, Nicholas. inscribed by Wevill. However, it is Her honey is waiting for painfully apparent that her redoubled her, for all of them, at pleas for assurance that “we shall sit Court Green. Her hive together this summer / Under the would make it through laburnum” will come to naught in the winter’s dumb chill, face of Hughes’s continuing affair enough honey to last (l.21-2). In a democratic gesture that until spring, hoarded, does not demand foreknowledge of secreted away. A hope Birthday Letters, Moses paraphrases she can cling to, the poem, suggesting that Sylvia will shimmering in the dark be undone by “the letters swimming of the cellar. up from this replacement and its (332-3) inscription. The anagram will read you are ash” (330). Unaware that Ted has removed not one, but all five jars of honey, Sylvia is This moment, narrated proleptically, placed in the position of Hughes in serves to transform the novel’s final “Robbing Myself,” peering into a paragraph from optimism into pathos. “casket” from which the “treasure” Walking to meet Ted, to retrieve what

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she still believes to be a single jar of with the poem is rendered explicit in honey, and to attempt reconciliation, an earlier description of the Sylvia photograph’s composition, in her direct quotation of the phrase “perfect can imagine her family light” (229), and in her reference to on the sand near “an ancient moated mound” (50). Her Appledore, at the use of prolepsis and engagement with northern mouth of the “The Inscription” loads her final Taw, the Atlantic sun paragraph with a weight of foresight edging her daughter, her equal to that described in “Perfect son, and Ted in gold - Light”: their shoulders, the crowns of their heads - And the knowledge and the loud pounding Inside the hill on which and sighing of the you are sitting, waves. If she could stand A moated fort hill, where the sun stands, bigger than your house, would they be fronted Failed to reach the entirely in gold, their picture. While your next souls exposed? […] And moment, when they turn to her, Coming towards you like carrying shells and an infantryman pebbles to her, running Returning slowly out of ahead of the foaming no-man’s land, waves, they are still Bowed under something, golden in the late light. never reached you – Simply melted into the Snowflakes catch in her perfect light. eyelashes at each step. (l.14-21) There is no more waiting. It’s here. Here, We know that the wine cellar is now, her moment of stripped bare of honey, and that truth. And it falls like Sylvia’s hopes for reconciliation will grace, only for her. turn to “ash” in the face of Ted’s (334) ongoing infidelity. Such details are tokens of the wealth of contextual The imagistic emphasis on the play of knowledge surrounding Wintering, as the sun echoes Hughes’s poem evident as Hughes’s approaching “Perfect Light,” which recreates a infantryman. In short, there is an poignant photograph of Plath, Frieda, irresolvable tension, acknowledged by and Nicholas at Court Green, “your Moses, between “the story I was only April on earth / Among your creating for my fictional Sylvia,” and daffodils” (l.6-7). Moses’s dialogue “the true story of Plath’s life, the end

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of which is all too well known” may have “reinstat[ed] [Plath’s] (“Baking”). Wintering’s narrative original selection and arrangement” structure and intertextual engagement (cover), the collection read very foreground this context, emphasising differently as a “restored” text in 2004 that Sylvia’s “moment of truth” is than it would have as an “original” necessarily “only for her” (334). Yet edition in 1965. In its hinterland is the novel ends on a moment of infinite Hughes’s Ariel and its associations deferral, akin to the climax of Kate with Plath’s death, which the Restored Clanchy’s poem “Slattern”: Edition’s optimism can never fully unwrite. By ending on a note of . . . again plurality, which unites the hopefulness and again I am walking of the Bee sequence with the up your road, retrospective knowledge that that first time, bidden informed Hughes’s later additions, and wanted, Wintering summons not only Plath’s the blossom on the original arrangement, but also the trees, light, doubled gaze necessary to light and buoyant. Pull comprehend it. yourself together, they say, quite *** rightly, but she is stubborn, that In drawing this article to a conclusion, girl, it is useful to revisit Frieda’s Hughes’s that hopeful one, still opposition between contemporary walking. writers’ attempts to “breathe life” into (l.9-16) Plath, and Plath’s own words, which, Hughes claimed, “describe her best” The reader thus holds two moments in (xvii). Hughes’s statement situates balance; Sylvia is doomed, but still Brownlow and Moses’s attempts at hopeful, still walking. resuscitation as a harmful distraction from the ‘real business’ of attending Moses here creates a readerly effect critically to Plath’s textual corpus. This not unlike that experienced when corpus will, in “describ[ing] her best,” turning from Hughes’s arrangement of lead to a truer representation of Plath Ariel to the Restored Edition. As than biofiction or the biopic can hope described by Matthews, Frieda to offer. Hughes’s statement was, Hughes’s publication “restores not just ironically, echoed by Moses, one of Plath’s original arrangement of her her most prominent detractors. Shortly book, but also the presence of after the publication of Wintering, Hughes in the act of his earlier Moses acknowledged that “all editorial rearrangement of it – the very secondary Plathian roads, whether act that necessitates a restoration” biographical or critical or fictional or (91). For while The Restored Edition celluloid, will lead surely and

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inevitably back to the genuine article” original sequencing allows us to (“Whose Plath”). Hughes’s and “(re)imagin[e] a Plath who might have Moses’s statements reflect the been, in some part of herself, more ideology that, as Badia has reliant on the fabled Power of Positive demonstrated, governs “the vast Thinking that her reputation as a majority of Plath scholarship that is suicidal depressive would suggest (3). published today.” Situated in direct While glib, Gilbert’s statement opposition to biographical reading encapsulates how these creative practices, “this ideology insists that interventions add to our the only responsible way to discuss understanding of Plath, balancing Ted Plath is through a close reading and Hughes’s image of a poet whose art explication of her literary texts” (Badia foreshadowed her death against the 16). image of a poet who used her art to imagine a way through the difficulties This is problematic for the simple of her life. reason that the only Ariel available in 2003 was not the “genuine article,” In situating Ariel as the template for, but was Ted Hughes’s own highly rather than the record of a life, Moses personal orchestration of Plath’s body inverts the conventional dynamics of poems. Sylvia and Wintering do governing biographical readings. This not, then, force Plath’s life into an intervention is paralleled on a broader unproductive engagement with her level by both texts’ subversion of the untarnished text. Rather, they engage relationship of the original to the the life with the text differently, and in copy. In adding their voices to the call such a way as to resist the dominant for a restoration of Plath’s manuscript, narrative established by Ted Hughes. both Sylvia and Wintering helped, on Both refuse the connection, implicit in some level, to call their original into Hughes’s arrangement of Ariel and being, demonstrating that confirmed in Birthday Letters, biographical readings may have a between Plath’s writing and her death. positive, in this case a creative, impact Jeffs and Brownlow achieve this by on the text. For Hagström, Frieda prioritising the Bee sequence as Hughes’s Restored Edition, “with an Plath’s final word, and Moses by preface . . . loyally defending her attributing Plath’s late poems to a father’s choices,” was a separate cycle, and advocating a straightforward corrective to Moses’s physiological, rather than a literary focus on “[Ted] Hughes’s much- explanation for the death she refuses criticised editing of Plath’s texts” (51). to describe. In place of Hughes’s Such a teleology was resisted by version, both prioritise Plath’s own Hughes herself, who claimed that it arrangement of her poems, revealing was an editor at Harper Collins who what Moses calls the “woman’s story, “first suggested that my mother’s not the man’s” (Wintering 193). original arrangement of poems might Gilbert writes that the revelation of her make a good book” (qtd. in Badia,

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162). Yet as Badia observes, Hughes Secondly, in anticipating the thus unwrites the contributions of publication of the Restored Edition, Perloff, Bundtzen, and all of the Jeffs and Moses inflect its reading in intervening scholars who subtly pervasive ways. To cite just one “demonstrated so powerfully not example, Moses’s suggestion that simply an interest in but a need for a Plath viewed Ariel as a prophesy has restored edition” (Badia 162). At the the potential, as Brain writes in time of publication, Sylvia, Wintering another context, to “solidif[y] into an and their accompanying absolute truth through which that text commentaries were the latest can be understood (Brain, “Dangerous manifestation of this ongoing need. Confessions” 22). Yet the same is true Renewing popular attention to of any reading: of Frieda Hughes’s debates first articulated in the 1980s, suggestion that Ariel unearthed they should rightly be understood as a “everything that must be shed in catalyst, if not a cause for the Restored order to move on” (xii), and of Ted Edition. Hughes’s assertion, in Birthday Letters, that the manuscript “sucked the Yet the restoration of Plath’s “original oxygen out of both of us” (“Suttee” selection and arrangement” still does l.83). In the end, then, it comes down not constitute the “genuine article,” to this: how do we want Ariel to be which must remain, for two important remembered? “Perfected,” like its reasons, an irresolvable loss. Firstly, as creator, a synecdoche for “her dead Matthews has implied, the need for a body” (“Edge” l.1-2) – or soaring Restored Edition was generated by “over the engine that killed her” the same editorial interventions – Ted (“Stings” l.59)? Each version, as Frieda Hughes’s – that it set out to unwrite, Hughes writes, “has its own making Hughes “more present than significance, though the two histories ever” in the reconstructed text (91). are one” (xvii).

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