Sylvia Plath and the Mythology of Women Readers

Chapter 4. “A Fiercely Fought Defense”: Ted Hughes and the Plath Reader

124 cha p te r 4 “A Fiercely Fought Defense” Ted Hughes and the Plath Reader To convey his dissatisfaction with Plath’s elevation to the status of feminism’s “patron saint,” A. Alvarez uses the occasion of his 1976 review of Letters Home to consider the question of “what [Plath] would think” had she lived to experience her eventual success. While Alvarez admits that Plath’s success reflected the fulfillment of “all her wildest ambitions,” he ultimately concludes that the reality of that fulfillment would have “[broken] her heart all over again.” As I discussed in chapter 1, Alvarez’s conclusion is predicated on his perception of the undesirable nature of Plath’s path to posthumous success, a path built on her unintended appeal to what he calls “young would-be writer[s] with the blues” and “dissatisfied, family-hating shrews.”1 While I think Alvarez is unfair here in his harsh judgment of Plath’s readership, I do share his curiosity: What would Plath have made of her enormous popularity and success, especially with women readers? We know that Plath prized literary success above nearly all else, and we know that she approached writing with an unflinching eye to its marketability and money-earning potential. That Plath’s attitude toward authorship reflected “her American entrepreneurial spirit,” as Lynda K. Bundtzen notes, is undeniable.2 We also know that Plath did not shy away from tapping into women readers as an audience. “I hope to break into the women’s slicks this summer,” she writes to her mother in 1957.3 On “A Fiercely Fought Defense” 125 another occasion she vows to “slave and slave until” she does.4 Given all this, it’s hard to imagine that Plath would have lamented the success she eventually achieved. But in the end we can only speculate about her response , for Plath of course never experienced fandom in her lifetime, and so there are simply no grounds on which we might construct an answer to how she would have regarded her success or her audience. What we do have, however, is a record of how those who inherited her literary estate and acted on her behalf since her death have perceived Plath’s readers. I’m speaking here, of course, about Ted Hughes, as well as Plath and Hughes’s daughter, Frieda Hughes. Together, Ted and Frieda Hughes have contributed an important dimension to the discourse about Plath’s readers. In this chapter and in the conclusion I examine this contribution, which includes statements the Hugheses have made about Plath’s readers in opinion pieces, personal letters, and interviews, as well as selections from their poetry that speak, often quite directly, to the question of how each has regarded Plath’s audience and her posthumous success. This question is an especially important one to raise in the Hugheses’ case, given the impact their perceptions of readership have had on their handling of Plath’s work. At the same time, it’s important to recognize that their comments about Plath’s readers do not exist in some kind of Hughesian vacuum, as if divorced from the larger cultural discourse surrounding Plath and her readers. In many cases their comments engage an existing dialogue, often as personal correspondence or as direct editorial response to other people’s statements and actions. Thus their comments do not simply contribute to the cultural discourse about Plath’s readers; they are themselves shaped by the discourse. For this reason I aim here and in the next chapter not simply to track the tropes the Hugheses have used to depict readers and their reading practices but also to place these tropes alongside those circulating elsewhere, such as in the book reviews, popular media, and literary writings examined in the three previous chapters. But first, a little background about the role played by Ted and Frieda Hughes in the handling of Plath’s literary estate is in order. At this writing , Plath’s literary estate belongs to Frieda Hughes, Plath’s only living child, who together with her late brother, Nicholas, assumed control of the estate from their father in the early 1990s.5 While separated from Hughes at the time of her death in February 1963, Plath died intestate, 126 ch a p t er 4 and so her material possessions and all rights to her writings, published and unpublished, fell to him, a fact that...