Vol. 16 No. 9 · 12 May 1994
pages 3-5 | 3307 words
Going underground
Elaine Showalter
- The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes by Janet Malcolm
Knopf, 208 pp, $23.00, April 1994, ISBN 0 679 43158 6
Ours is not an age in which literary events get much attention, but the publication in the New Yorker last August of Janet Malcolm’s study of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes was an exception. Brilliantly packaged with reprints of the Plath poems which the New Yorker had originally published, the issue was a sell-out on both sides of the Atlantic, and for weeks no dinner party from Hampstead to the Hamptons was complete without a discussion of it. Now published as a book, The Silent Woman is ostensibly a scathing denunciation of the ethics of literary biography in general and a defence of Hughes and his formidable sister Olwyn in particular.[*] Malcolm takes arms against the hordes of biographers, journalists, feminists and sensation-seekers who have mercilessly raked over the ashes of Plath’s life, often blaming Hughes for his infidelity during Plath’s life and his iron control of her copyrights since her death. ‘The pleasure of hearing ill of the dead is not a negligible one,’ she writes witheringly of their motives, ‘but it pales before the pleasure of hearing ill of the living.’ Since Malcolm herself, however, has been involved in a notorious case about libel and invasion of privacy brought by the modest and reclusive Jeffrey Masson, the topical ironies of the book have attracted a great deal of attention in the United States. In the New York Times Book Review, Caryn James observed that ‘while the English fuss about poets’ graves, Americans gossip about litigation and celebrity journalists.’
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[*] The Silent Woman will be published in this country by Picador on 25 October (224 pp., £14.99, 0 330 33578 2).
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Letters
Vol. 16 No. 11 · 9 June 1994
From P. Nelson-Saginor
In her review of Janet Malcolm’s The Silent Woman (LRB, 12 May), Elaine Showalter appears to err in writing that Malcolm ‘has told us how Plath had the habit of going to a park in Cambridge to cut a rose or two for her apartment’. While Plath may well have cut English roses, I believe Malcolm is referring to the incident recorded in Plath’s journal entry of 11 June 1958 when she was living in Northampton, Massachusetts. Showalter’s small mistake would hardly be worth mentioning were it not for its cultivable interest as an almost Derridean or Freudian slip.
P. Nelson-Saginor
Boston College, Massachusetts
Vol. 16 No. 13 · 7 July 1994
From Elizabeth Greene
I believe that both Elaine Showalter and P. Nelson-Saginor (Letters, 9 June) have misplaced the park where Sylvia Plath picked her roses in June 1958. The journal passage begins: ‘An incident today to start a train of remembering our wearying and also rejuvenating week in New York which cleared out Smith cobwebs:’ (11 June 1958).
Plath usually uses colons as connectives: it is probable that her snipped roses and the armfuls of stolen rhododendrons grew originally in New York. I don’t know where she stayed, but the poem ‘Child’s Park Stones’ (which she had just written, according to the journal entry) suggests Central Park, as does the sudden blossoming of azaleas, rhododendrons, roses in the journal and in the ‘Fable of the Rhododendron Stealers’ (the poetic version of the journal incident – poem 85 in the Collected Poems). By the following (printed) journal entry, 20 June, the flowers are gone; Plath has returned to the tunnel of everyday life. It is true that Plath’s journal entries vary as quickly as her lightning-fast mind; but she was highly responsive to landscape. Perhaps because of her skill as a visual artist, she could catch a scene quickly in her words without having to spend weeks or months growing into it.
Wherever the flowers grew, they are now immortal, in the tradition of poetic flowers. Both in the journal entry and in the ‘Fable of the Rhododendron Stealers’ Plath raises a question central to our much later age: is going beyond the bounds wrong in itself, or is it the degree of going beyond the bounds that creates outrage and chaos? In this, as in so much of her writing, she predicted the period that followed.
Elizabeth Greene
Queen’s University, Ontario
