Dead Poet's Society

For some reason, there's a lot about Slyvia Plath on the web lately. First, the Salon article entitled Sylvia and Ruth, an interesting interview with her therapist. Then, this article in the UK Telegraph from November 14th, in which her daughter defends her father's role in the marriage (he left Plath just prior to the suicide).



In following links, I discovered this Salon article on her daughter's feelings regarding the attention still paid to her mother's legacy and mental health. Key quote:

"Readers," a poem by Frieda Hughes published alongside the November 1997 interview in the Guardian, was an indictment of those literary groupies of her mother's who had been "fingering her mental underwear" since Sylvia Plath's suicide in 1963, when Frieda was 2 years old.



Following a gruesomely detailed description of how "they" dug up and roasted and ate her mother's corpse (an image fueled, unfortunately, by the real Plath fanatics who regularly defaced Plath's grave over the years, even stealing the pebbles left as decorations by Frieda and her younger brother, Nicholas), Frieda Hughes' poem ends:

They called her theirs.

All this time I had thought

She belonged to me most.

The article goes on to argue that while fans might be intrusive into Plath's relationships and mental health, it's only because Plath invited them into her head to begin with. While I grant that point, I really have to identify with the daughter on this one. It's impossible to stop the obsession with Plath, but it must hurt to have the world always poking at the broken places in your heart, making them bleed anew.