5/12/2023 0 Comments Red comet sylvia plath reviewIt affects readings of Virginia Woolf, Anne Sexton, even Emily Dickinson to a certain extent - but Plath might be, as the saying goes, the blueprint for this kind of reception. This kind of narrative circumvention happens a lot to writers like Plath: white women whose artistic contributions were cut short and often outshadowed by the shock, drama, and tragedy of their suffering and death, who are no longer around to quippily defend themselves, or joke about their affinity for shuffling their mortal coils. A few other people left similar messages, trying to capture why that caption felt vaguely aggravating - something about the assumption that everyone would know how and why this particular mother was absent (i.e., the “drama”), the centering of that absence itself over the grief over the loss of a whole person (outside of her capacity as a mother), and the weirdly passive role of fatherhood it seemed to slot Hughes into. Ted Hughes with Sylvia Plath’s children.” When I commented “maybe not the best way of putting it,” sort of as a joke, my comment was deleted within minutes. About a year ago, a New Yorker writer whose work I have always admired posted a photograph of Ted Hughes with his and Sylvia Plath’s children on Instagram, captioning it, “the never resolvable internal drama of the absent mother.
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