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The Other Ariel
Sylvia Plath, who committed suicide in 1963 at age 30, is now widely regarded as one of America's greatest poets. Her second collection, "Ariel", which was issued posthumously in 1965, received superb reviews and became one of the best-selling books of poetry published in the 20th century. What is less well known about this celebrated volume is that the poems it contains are not the ones Plath herself selected when she assembled her manuscript. With great care and critical insight, Lynda K. Bundtzen examines Plath's original typescript for "Ariel" and compares it to the version that was published by her estranged husband, Ted Hughes. In his role as Plath's literary executor and "Ariel"'s editor, Hughes deleted 12 poems that he considered too "personally aggressive" in their attacks on him, while adding several others composed in the final weeks of Plath's life and coloured by her suicidal depression. Bundtzen argues that Plath's original plan represented a conscious response to her disintegrating marriage - the swearing off of an old life with Hughes and the creation of a new self as a woman and poet. She pays particular attention to a sequence of five poems about beekeeping which Plath originally intended as the book's conclusion and shows these poems to be simultaneously veiling and revealing the future that Plath both longed for and dreaded in a new life apart from Hughes. In a concluding chapter, Bundtzen demonstrates they ways in which Hughes's last collection of poetry, "Birthday Letters", extends the dialogue Plath initiated with him in her manuscripts for the "Ariel" poems. Bundtzen interprets Hughes's self-depiction as a grieving Orpheus who repeatedly looks back to address Plath both as the fading shadow of Eurydice and as a fellow poet of mourning.
- GenresLiterary Criticism
273 pages, Paperback
First published November 1, 2001
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
May 4, 2018
This is a very good review of the making of Sylvia Plath's Ariel. Lynda Bundtzen takes her theme from the fact that Ted Hughes edited Plath's final masterpiece by surpressing eleven poems, particularly those that he believed were an invasion of their family's privacy, and substituting in their place thirteen others, including those which Plath wrote just before her suicide. This act, when it came to light, drew the wrath of the formidable Marjorie Perloff, because, in Perloff's opinion, Hughes had deliberately misled readers and made it appear as if Plath's death was the culmination of well-known history of mental illness, rather than the direct result of Hughes's adultery and the consequent abandonment of Plath and their infant children. Bundtzen's brief is to examine the biographical and thematic background behind the making of the "other" Ariel, i.e., Plath's version, and thereby unearth the enigmas underlying Plath's most original work.
Bundtzen's analysis is professional and perceptive, offering substantial support from the archived manuscripts at Smith Collge and combining it with a thorough understanding of Plath's biography and work. Going this route, however, she deliberately eschews the ground-breaking work of Judith Kroll in Chapters in a Mythology and the brilliant metacritical commentary of Jacqueline Rose in The Haunting of Sylvia Plath, as well as the substantial readings by Perloff, Steven Gould Axelrod, Susan Gubar, and Tracy Brain, among others, whose examinations often supercede the biography and give the poetry broader literary and cultural perspective. Bundtzen's previous book on Plath, Plath's Incarnations: Woman and the Creative Process, did provide that kind of broad analysis of Plath's work through psychological, philosophical and feminist lenses, so we must assume that her narrative scope in The Other Airel was purposefully limited in service of the detective work that substantially enlarges upon Perloff's essay, "The Two Ariels: The (Re)Making of the Sylva Plath Cannon." When Bundtzen does delve into the lit-crit mode, however, as she does in her discussion of the "Bee poems" of Ariel, she is both enlightening and impressive with the depth of her scholarship and the manifold reflections she gives to these unusual poems.
For better or worse, Bundtzen devotes significant parts of her book to reading Plath against the lens of Ted Hughes's Birthday Letters, which were written over the years since Plath's suicide and then released on the thirty-fifth anniversary of her death. Most critics agree that Birthday Letters is far below Hughes's best work, besides being perceived by Plath aficionados as a craven attempt to nullify Plath's most popular poems, particularly those which Hughes suppressed in the first edition of Ariel. It comes as no surprise that Hughes, by his own admission, would have even suppressed "Daddy" had it not already been published to great acclaim. Bundtzen gives Hughes his day in court, despite his churlish refusal to allow her the usual perfunctorily-granted permission to quote from Plath's work (forcing Bundtzen to rely upon the "fair use" exception to copyrights), and he predictably convicts himself, not only because he "doth protest too much," but also because he does such a poor job of responding to Plath's work. As Linda Wagner-Martin recounts in Sylvia Plath: A Literary Life, it was a shock to the literary community that the man charged with safeguarding the work of this great poet, his wife no less, should find it necessary to respond with this counter-narrative. And this after all the years of railing against the invasions of his privacy by biographers and, particularly, feminist writers. Money was doubtlessly at the root of the publication of Birthday Letters, as Hughes could bet--as he was dying of cancer with his best poetry well behind him--that the public would certainly drink from another dousing at the Plath aquifer and that his estate (viz., his children) would reap the financial rewards. It wasn't the first time Hughes had sold his "privacy"; for the "myth of Sylvia Plath" (as Ted's sister, Olwyn Hughes, derivisely referred to it) was nurtured and grown principally from the release of Plath's personal journals, her letters to her mother and the publication of The Bell Jar in the U.S. --the latter two [as Janet Malcolm reports in The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes] directly proceeding from Hughes' desire to purchase more real estate in the U.K.
The Other Ariel is well written and researched and is a must-read for the Plath scholar.
Bundtzen's analysis is professional and perceptive, offering substantial support from the archived manuscripts at Smith Collge and combining it with a thorough understanding of Plath's biography and work. Going this route, however, she deliberately eschews the ground-breaking work of Judith Kroll in Chapters in a Mythology and the brilliant metacritical commentary of Jacqueline Rose in The Haunting of Sylvia Plath, as well as the substantial readings by Perloff, Steven Gould Axelrod, Susan Gubar, and Tracy Brain, among others, whose examinations often supercede the biography and give the poetry broader literary and cultural perspective. Bundtzen's previous book on Plath, Plath's Incarnations: Woman and the Creative Process, did provide that kind of broad analysis of Plath's work through psychological, philosophical and feminist lenses, so we must assume that her narrative scope in The Other Airel was purposefully limited in service of the detective work that substantially enlarges upon Perloff's essay, "The Two Ariels: The (Re)Making of the Sylva Plath Cannon." When Bundtzen does delve into the lit-crit mode, however, as she does in her discussion of the "Bee poems" of Ariel, she is both enlightening and impressive with the depth of her scholarship and the manifold reflections she gives to these unusual poems.
For better or worse, Bundtzen devotes significant parts of her book to reading Plath against the lens of Ted Hughes's Birthday Letters, which were written over the years since Plath's suicide and then released on the thirty-fifth anniversary of her death. Most critics agree that Birthday Letters is far below Hughes's best work, besides being perceived by Plath aficionados as a craven attempt to nullify Plath's most popular poems, particularly those which Hughes suppressed in the first edition of Ariel. It comes as no surprise that Hughes, by his own admission, would have even suppressed "Daddy" had it not already been published to great acclaim. Bundtzen gives Hughes his day in court, despite his churlish refusal to allow her the usual perfunctorily-granted permission to quote from Plath's work (forcing Bundtzen to rely upon the "fair use" exception to copyrights), and he predictably convicts himself, not only because he "doth protest too much," but also because he does such a poor job of responding to Plath's work. As Linda Wagner-Martin recounts in Sylvia Plath: A Literary Life, it was a shock to the literary community that the man charged with safeguarding the work of this great poet, his wife no less, should find it necessary to respond with this counter-narrative. And this after all the years of railing against the invasions of his privacy by biographers and, particularly, feminist writers. Money was doubtlessly at the root of the publication of Birthday Letters, as Hughes could bet--as he was dying of cancer with his best poetry well behind him--that the public would certainly drink from another dousing at the Plath aquifer and that his estate (viz., his children) would reap the financial rewards. It wasn't the first time Hughes had sold his "privacy"; for the "myth of Sylvia Plath" (as Ted's sister, Olwyn Hughes, derivisely referred to it) was nurtured and grown principally from the release of Plath's personal journals, her letters to her mother and the publication of The Bell Jar in the U.S. --the latter two [as Janet Malcolm reports in The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes] directly proceeding from Hughes' desire to purchase more real estate in the U.K.
The Other Ariel is well written and researched and is a must-read for the Plath scholar.
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July 2, 2012Unusually accessible for a work of literary criticism. No jargon. No endless, Miltonian sentences, so it's an easy and enjoyable read. Unfortunately, the author was working under 2 serious disadvantages: the facsimile copy of Plath's original manuscript had not yet been released and the estate entirely refused permission to quote from Plath's poems. Although Bundtzen defied them by quoting sparingly under the fair-use provision of US copyright law, as a reader I felt frustrated by the absence of complete texts. Also, I couldn't judge the validity of Bundtzen's thesis that some of Plath's poems "talk back" to Hughes' texts on the other side of the page. Sometimes scrap paper is just scrap paper, especially to a woman desperately worried about feeding her children on an inadequate income. I'd like to take up this book again when my public library finally gets around to sending me Ariel: The Restored Edition.
July 21, 2009
Good critical stuff here. She writes this book before the Other Ariel was released in 2004 - so she does a lot of work with the archives. I'm a fan of chapter 3, which looks closely at the bee sequence poems. And she spend chapter 4 discussing Hughes's Birthday Letters as an Orpheus/Eurydice grief that is put to rest.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews