I’m not sure what author Janet Malcolm was after when she wrote The Silent Woman. The back-ad copy says that this is a “feat of literary detection” and that Malcolm examines the biographies of Sylvia Plath to create a book about Plath’s afterlife.
Malcolm succeeds in giving us a very, very thorough retelling of the various Plath biographies, with a special focus on Anne Stevenson, whom she portrays as a rather weak writer and victimized by Plath executor Olwyn Hughes (Ted Hughes, Plath’s husband’s sister). Olwyn, as anyone who knows about Plath knows, never was one to mince words and is fierce in her protection of the image of Plath that she will allow the public to see. As long as Olwyn is alive, there will be biographies that are authorized that read like Anne Stevenson’s Bitter Fame – which is to say, expected, the usual high points and low points, the same tired stories we have heard time and time again.
three Sylvias | srp
Malcolm focuses a lot on the "Myth of Plath", which is the myth that Plath herself created in her lifetime, that of the brilliant but tortured victim of Ted Hughes. Of course, there was also a great love between Plath and Hughes (what else could make such high animosity possible between the two?), but when Hughes left for the infamous Assia Weevil, who admittedly had "set out to bag him" as she told a girlfriend, the Plath–Hughes marriage fell to pieces and Sylvia fell with it.
That Sylvia was a victim, if one can still use the word and not be pounced on for being politically incorrect, then certainly she was a victim of infidelity and betrayal of the first order. Hughes had lied about other women in the past and Sylvia had stood by him, sending out his work and playing a sort of Zelda to his F. Scott, putting her husband’s career and fame ahead of her own very palpable talent. That Sylvia did this willingly one does not question. But it would seem that the deal was not without its conditions, as would be expected or anticipated.
Nothing is free and, even in the best of marriages, when we give, we expect some modicum of respect in return. Perhaps not an actual deed or tit-for-tat, but certainly to be treated rightly and respectfully. So after years of putting her husband first, Sylvia soon finds that he too has put himself first, tossing her by the wayside in favour of Assia, who was dark to Sylvia’s light (in terms of looks) and, at the time, seemed in terms of character, light to Sylvia’s dark.
Surely Assia seemed a lighter, more secure person and perhaps Ted was tired of being not trusted, though in fairness, one clearly sees that Plath had many good reasons not to trust Hughes. Still, one cannot deny that Sylvia did go about creating her own myth. Why she did this is unclear. The facts and the real story were clearly on her side for the most part. Yes, we know she could be difficult to a large degree and moody as hell, but how does that make her different from anybody else?
Everyone has their moment of stadium self pity and difficulty and stickiness. We all have those hot button issues. Malcolm’s view of Sylvia doesn’t allow for such human qualities. The book reads as if we are to have expected Sylvia to take her fate willingly, to simply carry on after Ted’s betrayal and not talk to friends. I have to ask myself, isn’t it completely understandable that Assia and the topic of betrayal would be prominent in Sylvia’s life at the time? What else would she be talking to her friends about in the weeks or even months before she died? Like anyone, she was talking of her life as it was, and feeling and, worse, living all of the desperation and heartache. This does not make Sylvia mythical; it makes her human.
Article comments
1 - Hope
Hello. I am not sure I follow the point about Zelda Fitzgerald. Is is well known tha she tried to succeed as a dancer at one point and wrote a novel of her own. She was no deferential wife, but famously high spirited and later mentally unbalanced.
Hope
http://humorhangout.blogspot.com/
2 - sadi
hi Hope: thanks for reading, first. About Zelda, and i may be wrong in this, the way i always read it and heard it too, was that many of Fitzgerald who for the count, is one of my favorties, so this is hard), used a lot of Zelda's ideas and had her typing up his work for him a great deal; that was the part that i meant. I know the Crack Up was written about her nervous breakdown and subsequent hospitalization, right? I had read that the breakdown was due in part to the role she was playing in the marriage and putting her own life rather secondary to him. That maybe wrong, but that is what i have always read. Do you have a reliable source on this, because i would actually like to know with certainty -- it would help. I also understood that Zelda died in a fire in that same mental institution.
Anything you can tell mne or any good sources would be much appreciated. I've long loved Fitzgerald and this has always bothered me. I'd be thrilled to be wrong about this.
Cheers,
s.
3 - Ken Cameron
Janet Malcolm is a writer who deals in subtle, complex, nuanced perceptions and judgments and who seems fated to attract critics who are incapable of such perceptions or judgments. Your review leaves me thinking that you don't get Malcolm. You seem to agree, as you write that "I'm not sure what Janet Malcolm was after when she wrote the silent woman". I see that as your problem, not Janet Malcolm's. You seem unhappy that the book isn't something it doesn't pretend to be - a biography of Sylvia Plath. You might find it worthwhile to read it again with a different assumption - that is is about the difficulty of writing biography. This is what shapes its treatment of all its "characters", including Malcolm herself as well as Olwyn Hughes Ted Hughes, Anne Stevenson and Jacqueline Rose and Plath herself. The book leaves my human sympathy for all of them intact, along with and my sense of their human weakness and ultimately their complexity, the fact that they are not captured by the various self-serving or otherwise partial narratives that biographers cobble together. You seem unhappy that the book doesn't provide a straightforward verdict, a simple narrative, but unaware that not doing so, deconstructing all the narratives, the biographers', Hughes', and Malcolm's own, is its whole point.
4 - sadi ranson-polizzotti
as a biographer myself, as a writer myself, and further, as a poet - i can honestly say that it is up to the writer (songwriter, poet, author, etc etc) to convey. Yes, the reader has to work and be interested, and certainly if was and am, but if Malcolm did not convey to me, then I wonder who she did convey to, because I was and remain a captive audience... So this to me, just as I have fallen flat on my face, is a minor (I said minor) failure on her part. You need not be so pithy about it. This is a simple review, nothing more, nothing less - it's absolutely not personal. Why do you make it so?
Thanks for reading - I can give Malcolm another read since I read this a while ago, but I doubt my opinion will have much changed, but you never know. Again, I am also a biographer and have fallen flat, but then , who does not? I find you are saying "there is no fault with this faultless, flawless gem of a book" etc etc and the "fault" must lie with the reader - which is, frankly, utter b.s. - If the message is NOT conveyed, that is often a failing on the writer's part if the reader is educated, etc etc in the subject matter and eager to read and educated in general: there is something not quite right here. To put it all off on me and make th author "St. Malcolm" is rather absurd.
5 - Ken Cameron
I certainly don't mean to say the book is flawless. I just think it is very interesting, in itself and as part of Malcolm's oeuvre, which deconstructs a series of intellectual enterprises - psychoanalysis, journalism, biography, autobiography, literary criticism, law - in the end writing itself as an activity and a career - in a way which I find enlightening and helpful.
To say, as I did, that I felt you didn't get the book does sound excessively personal and I apologise for that. But it is, in the end, something like what I think. For me Malcolm's book "conveys" (to use your useful word) with clarity and subtlety. Other books, that other people admire, don't. With some of those books, I think it likely that the impediment is with me rather than the book. The same applies to painting and other arts. EG, I don't get Samuel Beckett, or Raoul Dufy, or Schoenberg, but in saying so I am hesitant to imply any failing on the part of those artists. I don't think Janet Malcolm is in their class, but I think she deserves more than faint praise.
I also think that Malcolm does attract a certain kind of misunderstanding. People accuse her of taking sides when I find she is recording vivid impressions, together with her own reservations about those impressions, in a way which reminds me that the person she is writing about exists outside her (Malcolm's) story. I think this kind of respect for the people she is writing about is exemplary. I have this kind of problem with the account you give of Anne Stevenson and Plath herself as they appear in Malcolm's book - I simply don't think she is criticising them in the way you imply.
Thanks for your response, and I apologise again for the clumsiness of my earlier post - although I still don't think "Forget about The Silent Woman" is good advice to your readers. As you may have guessed, I admire Janet Malcolm, and am inclined to rise up in her defense.
6 - Ken Cameron
Amending para 2 above, I should have written "Some other books, that other people admire....".