Day-um. My respect for her keeps growing. Suddenly, she’s speaking out, she’s everywhere. She sounds like an extraordinary woman. A part of me knows that people will always be curious about her mother (Sylvia Plath), her father (Ted Hughes), etc. I mean, I’m curious about them. I love them both as poets, and have read biographies of both of them. Look at how I run my obsessions. Cary Grant? Fine – let’s read biographies. Etc. Her parents were 2 famous poets, her mother committed suicide, etc. People will be interested.
But the level of prurient interest, the insane passing-off of stupid Freudian theories, her mother’s name being chiseled off her grave by some lunatic fan, the biographies being written by authors who have grievances, bones to pick, something to prove, yadda yadda … I completely sympathize with Frieda’s wish to have her mother and her father left alone. I’m with ya, woman.
Sheila
There’s a vindictive little comment in the middle of the Independent piece –
“It has been pointed out that the comments from Ms Hughes coincide with the publication of a new edition of Ariel, her mother’s final work, and are therefore likely to perpetuate the interest about which she complains.”
Hmmm.. ‘pointed out’ by whom exactly? I mean, it’s not as if the publication itself would create that ‘interest’.
What are the chances the writer of the article has some history here?
I noticed that one sentence, too – it had a whiff of “well, serves ya right, bitch” vibe to it, didn’t it?
Also, good call on the “It has been pointed out …”
That’s a load of shit. The author might as well have just said:
“I noticed that the comments from Ms Hughes coincide…”
Blech.
Blech indeed.
“Describing her father as a caring man who had gone to great lengths to explain and protect her mother’s memory, shebroke down and said: ‘He tried so hard.'”
That’s just so sweet, so touching. I’ve always been annoyed by the hyper-feminists who would trash Hughes at every chance. After reading that, I’m now eternallly pissed off at them.
That line really touched me as well. She knew her father better than those stupid bitches who would chisel Sylvia’s name off her grave….
grrrrr
Hmmm…and exactly how do you know that all those “stupid” grave-chiseling “fans”(probably a few people at most, perhaps one or two is all it would take, isn’t it?)were “bitches”? I’ve a feeling a few men hated Ted Hughes as well for his living off his abandoned “wife”‘s earnings via her poetry, which he unconscionably re-edited so that it would paint his almost-hated soon-to-be-ex-wife as a lunatic, hopeless, hapless, doomed woman.
Also, you are assuming that “fans” chipped the gravestone for a memento. No, they did it as a PROTEST on behalf(wrongly I think, btw)of a dead woman who wanted to be known as Sylvia PLATH, not “Plath-Hughes” when she died. They felt that it was a final insult to her to have done so. That once-small Frieda, who never knew her mother and was raised by a blood enemy of Sylvia’s, her aunt Olwyn, thinks her poor, poor daddy was a sweet victim is really far off the mark: TH was a pretty sleazy guy, a man who cheated on all his wives and women with miultiple partners, completely selfish, uninterested enough in his kids when they were little to hand them off to relatives while he lived it up with his latest mistress in London in the swingin’ 60s. News to you, huh?
What I think is pathetic is today’s yound gits-er, women who have ALL the immense benefits of the risks REAL “feminists” took, and now can sit back, relax, bask in the rewards of others’ struggles and call their betters names. “Grrr” indeed, yes.