Instead, she situates her book “at the crossroads of theory, imaginative literature, and biography,” a gambit that allows her the freedom to tug whichever cultural threads most engage her. She summarizes Plath’s life, reflects on her afterlife and selectively analyzes her poetry — all through the lens of a tough-minded contemporary feminism. “Let us tolerate no bystanding,” she writes. “Let us shriek.” That shriek may be a salutary provocation. But it can also become shrill and reductive.
Van Duyne’s subtitle promises a “reclamation.” But at its core, her book is more properly an indictment — of both a culture that misreads Plath and of Plath’s late husband, Ted Hughes, Britain’s longtime poet laureate and, to Van Duyne, a perpetrator of domestic violence.
After more than six years of marriage, Hughes left Plath for a woman, Assia Wevill, who was married at the time to her third husband. The affair triggered a messy, torturous period for all concerned. Van Duyne ascribes agency in the breakup to Plath, saying that she “had survived, and tried to leave, a violent, controlling marriage.” “Loving Sylvia Plath” also turns its feminist gaze on the other woman. “We have been taught to believe in Assia Wevill as a femme fatale,” Van Duyne writes, but doing so “lays blame for Sylvia Plath’s death on two sexist pathologies, Plath’s supposed predetermined date with death and Assia Wevill’s wild, deadly beauty.”
According to Van Duyne — and this much seems fair — Wevill was haunted by Plath. Both women suffered from depression; both had attempted suicide earlier in their lives. Six years after Plath’s death, Wevill committed a copycat suicide, by gas, killing not just herself but her daughter, Shura, whom Hughes had fathered.
For all his rampant infidelities and worldly successes, Hughes, too, must be accounted a tragic figure. But to Plath’s many acolytes, including Van Duyne, he remains an infuriating one. One count in the indictment is his handling of the work she left behind, including his admitted destruction of her final journal and apparent loss of other writings. “Forgetting became central to Hughes’s philosophy of his life — and his wife’s work,” Van Duyne writes.
Since they had never divorced, and Plath died without a will, Hughes controlled her copyright. In concert with his sister, Olwyn, who for decades functioned as the estate’s literary agent, he often impeded Plath’s biographers (though their efforts didn’t stanch the flow of books).
At the same time, Hughes promoted Plath’s poetic legacy. In “The Silent Woman,” Janet Malcolm wrote that Hughes attempted to “disentangle his life from the Plath legend while tending its flame,” a paradoxical enterprise. He edited not just “Ariel,” the posthumously published collection that (as Plath had predicted) made her name, but “The Collected Poems,” which won a Pulitzer Prize. According to Clark’s mostly sympathetic account and his own poetry collection “Birthday Letters” (1998), Hughes suffered mightily from grief and guilt along the way.
Van Duyne’s judgment is much less forgiving. To her, “Birthday Letters” signals Hughes’s controlling nature, not his regret. She considers Plath a victim not just of emotional cruelty — a far easier case to make — but of “intimate partner violence.” Van Duyne, herself a survivor of a relationship with a man she calls “a violent drug addict,” admits both to identifying with Plath and to lacking critical distance.
Van Duyne surely considers her focus on Hughes’s propensity for violence a necessary cultural corrective. But it serves to flatten the complicated and creative Plath-Hughes union into something horrifying and possibly criminal.
In her journal, Plath recounted her early, rough sexual encounters with Hughes with glee. (Wevill, too, experienced Hughes as a violent lover.) But in a letter to her American psychiatrist, Ruth Beuscher, Plath reported that, during a fight over a suspected infidelity, Hughes “beat” her, causing her to miscarry. Van Duyne argues that the Beuscher letters, revealed with much fanfare in 2017, merely confirmed facts already in evidence.
Where Clark describes the sexual aggression between the two lovers as erotic, and the miscarriage incident as abhorrent but aberrant, Van Duyne sees a pattern of abuse. She notes another instance, not reported by Clark but mentioned in Paul Alexander’s “Rough Magic,” in which Hughes allegedly choked Plath nearly to death during their honeymoon in Spain.
Whatever occurred in Spain, Plath repeatedly portrayed Hughes as gentle and kind. She was eager to reconcile during their separation and devastated at the thought of a life without him. In Clark’s telling, even at their nadir, the pair remained connected by their two children and, above all, a mutual artistic regard.
In his introduction to “Ariel,” the poet Robert Lowell described Plath’s poetry as “playing Russian roulette with six cartridges in the cylinder.” Al Alvarez, a British critic who championed Plath’s writing but rejected her romantically, called her late work “a murderous art.” Van Duyne disdains this mythologizing, instead reading many of the poems as interrogations of “the problem of marriage” and “the embodiment of Clytemnestra’s rage.” She insists that “the power dynamics of [intimate partner violence] are at the heart of much of Plath’s ‘Ariel’ poetry.”
Van Duyne’s digression into feminist analytic philosophy, reliant on jargon such as “hermeneutic injustice” and “epistemic oppression,” is the least engaging aspect of “Loving Sylvia Plath.” Far more interesting is her discussion of three failed biographical projects — by Elizabeth Hinchcliffe, Lois Ames and, most significantly, Harriet Rosenstein — in the aftermath of Plath’s death. Their incompletion, Van Duyne writes, suggests that “Plath’s story is simultaneously over and endless.”
Endless indeed. We’ve been inundated by what one commentator quoted by Van Duyne has called a “plethora of Plath.” If your shelves (like mine) already groan with works by and about Plath, Hughes and their intimates, Van Duyne’s love letter to the poet may seem necessary. For those less obsessed, it is a volume you can safely skip.
Julia M. Klein is a cultural reporter and critic in Philadelphia.
Loving Sylvia Plath
W.W. Norton. 303 pp. $27.99
