실비아 플라스의 유산: 사생활과 폭로의 정치

Abstract

This essay aims to explore how Birthday Letters exploits and abuses Sylvia Plath’s stunning poems in order to undermine her literary authority. This essay argues that Ted Hughes’s poetry consistently attempts to stand guard over the privacy of Plath’s death, exposing his hatred of Plath’s critics and readers. Focused on Hughes’s private memories of his life with Plath, Birthday Letters could be read as a public response to arguments over the politics of publication, representation, and poetic authority. Ghosts of many other Plath’s poems frequently haunt Birthday Letters; this poem also indicates a response to the problems of publicity. Furthermore, this essay examines the familiar but misrepresented aspects of the controversies surrounding Plath and Hughes. Since her untimely death, Plath’s public status has remained heavily contested. Many critics who write about Plath do so not in order to assert her literary authority, but to retract what they suggest is a public standing artificially inflated by the details of her personal life. Male critics and the Plath Estate seek to commodify Plath’s mental health as a way of removing her authority to tell her own story. On the contrary, feminist literary critics make claims for Plath’s poetry and life as an icon of feminism. Feminists accuse Hughes of silencing Plath with concomitant charges of censorship. Ultimately, Hughes’s continuing contest with Plath over the ownership of his life is not a contest with Plath, but with her readers’ interpretations of her words.