![]() Hughes’ murderous crime, to those who view it as such, is clear-cut: Six years after the couple’s epochal first encounter at a Cambridge University party in 1956 - he’d kissed her “bang smash” on the mouth, she’d bitten his cheek and drawn blood - Plath’s “big, dark, hunky boy,” the demigod of her teenage fantasies, destroyed their marriage by taking up with another woman, the austerely beautiful Assia Wevill. ![]() The other side, equally intransigent, blames her innately tortured psyche, which had led to at least one prior suicide attempt. On one side stand those who place culpability for Plath’s suicide squarely on the head of her husband, the late English poet Ted Hughes. Thus began the American poet’s deification as a feminist martyr and an ongoing conflict of Biblical fervor. ![]() It was on February 11, 1963, that 30-year-old Sylvia Plath, having first sealed up her young children’s bedroom with tape and towels, went into the kitchen of her London flat and gassed herself. ![]() The gossipiest, most divisive and arguably most compelling literary legend of them all - “the plot of the suicidal poetess and her abandonment by the man with the witty mouth,” to quote Janet Malcolm - is turning 50. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |