Her Husband: A Review of Diane Middlebrook on the Plath-Hughes Deal

Her Husband

by Diane Middlebrook.

Well, thank God someone has finally written a Plath book that isn’t all Plath. Kudos to Diane Middlebrook for writing about the infamous Ted Hughes as he related to his wife Sylvia, the poetess extraordinaire, the yin to his yang, or as some believe, the yin to her yang and giving us at last the balanced portrait that we’ve been searching for all these years.

No matter how you look at it, Plath and Hughes were meant for each other in some weird cosmic way, destructive as the union may have been, Plath and Hughes were a perfect couple, and Middlebrook does a remarkable job of presenting each of the partners in this ill-fated marriage (who doesn’t know that Plath committed suicide, and that later, Hughes next paramour for whom he left Sylvia, Assia Weevill, also took her own life and that of her daughter by Hughes, Shura, in the same way as Plath.) As Plath and Hughes both said in their work, “Fixed stars govern a life.” Indeed, both believed that the stars had contrived to join the two, and both were heavily into all sorts of magic and astrology that they believed had predestined their lives from the moment of conception.

Given this theory, there is little room for a life that one can choose, since under this type of thinking, a life is essentially predetermined. Small wonder, then that if you believe this, it is far easier to give up hope as Plath did and take your own life; she would have believed it was her destiny to do so. How can one live a life in which the self, according to the logic, has no control over events or circumstance; if everything is so pre-determined a sense of helplessness would inevitably set in during bad times. The good times, by contrast, would all be attributed to the stars and not to any sense of self congratulations. Where is there room for a sense of self or sense of accomplishment in this belief system?

Was it that Hughes was such a dark creature as many would have us believe and so Plath was “driven to her death” by such an ogre (this has been the Myth for many decades now, since Plath’s death in 63), or was it more that he was attracted to a certain type of woman that was already predisposed in some way and that it was exactly this type of mad intensity that drew Hughes to such woman as Plath in the first place. No one ever says that perhaps in his way, Hughes was misguidedly trying to save such individuals – an impossible feat, but certainly a theory that few seem to give any credence.

Article Author: Sadi Ranson-Polizzotti

Sadi Ranson-Polizzotti is a published writer in both the United States and Europe. She is widely known for her music commentary, particularly her writings about Bob Dylan about whom she runs a highly-trafficked site. …

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