Reading Sylvia Plath, especially The Bell Jar, is a standard high school or college rite of passage. And most readers are aware of the sadness of Plath's suicide,leaving two children behind and cutting short what most likely would have been a glowing literary career. Plath's husband, poet Ted Hughes, had been unfaithful, and the stress of this caused Plath's fragile mental state to leave her unable to go on with her life.
Now comes a story in the Guardian that Plath was not the only woman in Hughes' life to commit suicide. Assia Wevill, the other woman in Hughes' and Plath's marriage, killed herself and Shura, her daugher by Hughes, in the late sixties. This second tragedy, somehow kept out of the news at the time, adds layers and complications to the Plath/Hughes tragedy.
Shura had become the core of Wevill's existence, and she was quite certain that if left motherless, the four-year-old, pampered child would be a second-class citizen in the Hughes household. She was afraid that Shura was too old to be adopted, and did not wish her to grow up alone as a foster child, an orphan. Her murderous act was thus the outcome of a distorted over-responsibility: "Execute yourself and your little self efficiently," Wevill had written in her diary three days before.
Soon after her death, Hughes wrote a poem in which he tormented himself about having been destructive towards his nearest and dearest "who were my life". He never published it. Was it because it contrasted with the account that he wished to leave for posterity? In 1990, he published a volume of 20 poems, Capriccio, which revolved around Wevill. In it, he blamed her for consciously burning herself on Plath's funeral pyre.
Read more...
Comments