Reclaiming Assia Wevill: Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes, and the Literary Imagination

by Julie Goodspeed-Chadwick

Reclaiming Assia Wevill: Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes, and the Literary Imagination reconsiders cultural representations of Assia Wevill (1927-1969), according her a more significant position than a femme fatale or scapegoat for marital discord and suicide in the lives and works of two major twentieth-century poets.

Julie Goodspeed-Chadwick's innovative study combines feminist recovery work with discussions of the power and gendered dynamics that shape literary history. She focuses on how Wevill figures into poems by Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, showing that they often portrayed her in harsh, conflicted, even demeaning terms. Their representations of Wevill established condemnatory narratives that were perpetuated by subsequent critics and biographers and in works of popular culture. In Plath's literary treatments, Goodspeed-Chadwick locates depictions of both desirable and undesirable femininity, conveyed in images of female bodies as beautiful but barren or as vehicles for dangerous, destructive acts. By contrast, Hughes's portrayals illustrate the role Wevill occupied in his life as muse and abject object. His late work Capriccio constitutes a sustained meditation on trauma, in which Hughes confronts Wevill's suicide and her killing of their daughter, Shura.

Goodspeed-Chadwick also analyzes Wevill's self-representations by examining artifacts that she authored or on which she collaborated. Finally, she discusses portrayals of Wevill in recent works of literature, film, and television. In the end, Goodspeed-Chadwick shows that Wevill remains an object of both fascination and anger, as she was for Plath, and a figure of attraction and repulsion, as she was for Hughes.

Reclaiming Assia Wevill reconsiders its subject's tragic life and lasting impact in regard to perceived gender roles and notions of femininity, power dynamics in heterosexual relationships, and the ways in which psychological traumas impact life, art, and literary imagination.

Genres: Nonfiction

232 pages, Hardcover

Published October 9, 2019

About the author

Julie Goodspeed-Chadwick, Ph.D., Indiana University Columbus, Chancellor’s Professor of English, Professor of English, Affiliate Faculty in Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, and Director of the Office of Student Research

Reviews

[Carl Rollyson · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an overdue rehabilitation of a figure that has been treated reductively in many biographies of Sylvia Plath. The book is full of ironies, especially Ted Hughes’s maligning of Wevill—often in terms quite similar to Sylvia Plath’s. The book is occasionally repetitive, with some statements of the obvious that are typical of academic writing, which relies too often, as well, on the passive voice. But this is an accessible and forcefully argued corrective to the all too conventional treatments of Assia Wevill. The author rightfully relies on Lover of Unreason, a biography of Wevill I have used in my own work on Plath and Hughes.

[Jessy♡ · Rating 4 out of 5]

I’m so glad I read this before reading her poetry it helped me see her as an individual, since she’s so tied to Sylvia Plath.

[Anna rzk · Rating 5 out of 5]

A well written scholarly piece .Finally Assia got her well deserved rehabilitation.