Sylvia Plath and the Mythology of Women Readers

Conclusion: “I Don’t Mean Any Harm”: Frieda Hughes, Plath Readers, and the Question of Resistance

155 conclus i on “I Don’t Mean Any Harm” Frieda Hughes, Plath Readers, and the Question of Resistance If her public statements are any indication, Frieda Hughes inherited from her father, Ted Hughes, not only the rights to Plath’s literary estate but also his rather enigmatic attitude toward readers and their relationship to Plath’s writing. Although her time as literary executor has been relatively short so far, her statements seem even more pertinent than her father’s in light of what appears to be her eagerness (in contrast to her father) to participate in the public discourse about her mother’s readers, a reality brought to many people’s attention by the controversy that swirled around the 2003 film Sylvia. Frieda,1 as news stories in a range of periodicals reported around the time of the film’s production, denied the filmmakers’ request to use Plath’s poetry at any length in the film. Supplying fuel to the controversy, Frieda published a poem called “My Mother” in the March 2003 issue of the British magazine Tatler, in which she rails against the filmmakers for digging up her mother for “repeat performances” of her suicide, all for the entertainment of the “peanut eaters.” Despite the poem’s title, Frieda challenges the filmmakers’ right to make the film less from the position of daughter than from that of literary executor, one now possessed of authority and control over her mother’s writing. As she puts it, it is she who could “give them [her] mother’s words” but refuses.2 156 concl u si on But even before most people were aware that she had acquired this control, Frieda spoke with particular authority not simply about Plath but about Plath’s readers. One of the public’s earliest glimpses of Frieda as a poet, in fact, comes in the form of a poem about Plath’s audience titled “Readers,” which she published in the Guardian on November 8, 1997, and republished in 1998 in her first volume of poetry, Wooroloo, with the deletion of the two original final lines of the poem. In “Readers,” Frieda evokes images from her father’s poem “The Dogs Are Eating Your Mother” and borrows many of the same tropes that define her father’s attitude toward Plath’s audience. Of the many similarities, perhaps the most striking is her allusion to Plath’s gravesite and the grave ornaments once lovingly left by the children but now dug up along with Plath’s body itself. Continuing the parallels to her father’s poem, Frieda figures Plath’s readers through tropes of consumption. At various points in the poem, readers are cast as scavengers or cannibals who consume Plath in order to possess her, though not always with metaphoric consistency. For example, even as Frieda describes how readers treat Plath “like meat” on a spit, the subsequent line suggests that the end goal of this process is not consumption at all but rather investigation. Readers do it to find Plath’s “secrets.”3 Despite the slippage in metaphors, the end result is more or less the same. The destruction of Plath’s body is undertaken so that readers can inhabit her eyes and voice.In other words, Frieda’s imagined reader wants to be Plath, to possess her, not simply to consume her, for it is through the act of possession that they can take on her knowledge and then speak for her. Implicating scholars in particular, rather than general readers, the lines that follow suggest that scholars’ desire to speak for Plath results from a kind of competitiveness: though they consume her flesh and organs, they do not feed on the same things, and the result is that each one claims privileged knowledge, to have discovered the “right recipe.” Regardless of their differing approaches to Plath, the result appears to be the same: all have “gutted, peeled // And garnished her.” All felt she was “theirs.”4 In the original version of the poem published in the Guardian, the theme of possession evident in the final line of the Wooroloo version (“They called her theirs”) is carried further with two additional lines, which significantly pivot on a claim of ownership, as Frieda reveals that she had thought her mother “belonged” to her “most.”5 While I can imagine a number of reasons for the deletion of the two lines, one reason “I Don...