Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes: A Literary Couple

Abstract

This body of work attempts to interpret Sylvia Plath’s and Ted Hughes’ literary career from a point of view that extricates itself from the standard discourses surrounding their private lives, discourses that often distort insights into their poetry. Starting from the authors’ biographies, in the first chapter I will argue, among other things, that truth and fiction are often mixed in the portrayal of Hughes’ and Plath’s lives, especially as far as their marriage and the interpretation of their works are concerned. Hughes’ Birthday Letters (1998) has often been defined as the poetic version of his marriage to Plath. Nevertheless, Boyle (1999) also defines it as ‘an ultimate act of editorialising in which Hughes actually attempts to re-write Plath and in so doing seems to misunderstand that the power of her work lies not in its relation to the contestable realities but outside these in the realm of fantasy and imagination’. In order to investigate this position, in the third and final chapter I will close-read Hughes’ exploration of his relationship with Plath, relating this analysis to her own writings accordingly. In the second and third chapter, especially, this dissertation joins a biographical and comparative approach to the contextual and philosophical influences behind Plath’s and Hughes’ works. Furthermore, it studies the textual conversation between two writers who ‘lived and worked together, partly because they shared the same vision from the start’ (Libby, 1974). I will argue that Plath’s poetry and Hughes’s poetry align, mirror and collide, concentrating on the incredible echoing of Hughes and Plath’s voices in each other’s works, an influence which ‘probably began – through publications – before they met, and [which] continue[d] after they parted (ibid). In addition, in the second chapter this dissertation sets out to delineate the link between Plath’s and Hughes’ political and philosophical concerns and the more general themes of the very uses of poetry and the conflicts about history and myth they explore in their works. Their poems are unified contextually in a perennial legacy of trauma and within a strong sense of difficulty in communicating. In them, there is an ongoing indication of the impossibility of escaping the past and, at the same time, facing the present. The indistinguishability between the personal and the shared and the desire for self-victimization, which are often expressed in a context of reciprocal conversation about not only the nature of poetry but also their relationship, is something this dissertation will study in depth. The interconnected allusions to infinitesimal objects symbolising historical, social or personal trauma in their works will be analysed from the beginning to the end.