Module_C_-_Hughes_and_Plath

Question: To what extent has textual form shaped your understanding of conflicting perspectives' Truth is neither finite nor fixed as each responder has individual values allowing the textual form to be easily manipulated by the composer to create a conflict of perspectives. Ted Hughes’ representation of multiple dichotomies in his works Your Paris and Sam addressed to his Sylvia Plath in the form of confessional poetry conflicts with Plath’s representation of herself in the poem Whiteness I Remember. Michael Frank’s article; Plath and Hughes: Good Times, Bad Times and All the Rest of It published in the New York Times in 2005 represents the conflicting responses of ‘biographers, moviemakers, the conjectures and the cliché-spinners’ to the publicised relationship between Plath and Hughes. These texts show that truth is multi-dimensional and can be exploited by the composer to create a multitude of conflicting perspectives. An individual’s interpretation and representation of truth is not impartial to personal bias from their values and background. Ted Hughes’ poem Your Paris is a part of his anthology ‘Birthday Letters’ that was written shortly after Plath’s death written in the form of epistolary poems addressed to Plath. It represents both Hughes’ and Plath’s account of their visit to Paris. An aspect of conflict seen in Hughes’ poem is represented as arising from the differing cultural upbringings as where Plath sees ‘Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Henry Miller, Gertrude Stein’, Hughes sees ‘SS mannequins’ and ‘walls patched and scabbed with posters’. His Paris is personified as it ‘was only not German’ and ‘was a post-war utility survivor’ with ‘bullet scars’. He makes reference to the harshness of the war through the use of simile in ‘so recently was the coffee still bitter / as acorns’. This comparison allows Hughes to present to his audience the conflict between the views of his younger self and his representation of Plath’s views. He represents Plath’s Paris through her reactions as she responds to it with ‘a shatter of exclamations’ where the use of sharp sound devices devalues her reaction. Hughes begins the poem with a mockingly patronising tone as he represents Plath’s ‘American’ Paris through the use of art imagery depicting it ‘frame after frame, street after street’. The artificiality of Plath’s response to Paris is personified through sound devices as ‘the thesaurus of your cries’ and ‘your practiced lips’ which creates connotations of insincerity as if Plath were putting on a performance which ‘sealed / the underground, your hideout’. This is accompanied by as Hughes’ tone become more solemn and the voice of the older Hughes with hindsight comes through. This change is emphasised by the raw imagery used to describe Plath’s internal suffering in ‘those walls, / raggy with posters, were your own flayed skin’. This description give with hindsight contrasts with the shallow representation of Plath at the start of the poem. Hughes uses dog imagery and through his ‘dog-nosed pondering analysis’ he was ‘like a guide dog, loyal to correct your stumblings’. The city of Paris is depicted as both a heaven and hell for Plath and a reminder of the World War II for Hughes, creating a dichotomy of truths influenced by the cultural background of the individuals. Conflicts in the interpretations of truth arise from the varying interpretation of events by individuals. Frank’s article published in the New York time represents his and the varying opinions of the public on the Hughes / Plath relationship. Frank states using a patronizing tone that ‘unknowability has certainly not stopped the interpreters’ and the relationship is described metaphorically as ‘a deep-freeze of silence’ where ‘Plath was the victim, and Hughes the victimizer; Plath was abandoned, Hughes the abandoner’. The use of similar sentence structure and repetition confuses the audience and alludes to the varying views on the relationship. He addresses the opposing views of ‘biographers, moviemakers, the conjectures and the cliché-spinners’ as he describes the labels used by the public to address the relationship by means of listing; ‘labels that supply context, bridge gaps and help parse the mysterious and fragmented.’ Through quotations from Plath’s personal and unabridged journal, he contrasts the personalities of Hughes and Plath as Hughes ‘end papers and notebooks are tossed at angles, kitty corners and impromptu’ and Plath’s are in ‘tediously neat stacks’. This contrast then conflicts with his personal opinion where listing is employed to create a union between Hughes and Plath as they are ‘two writers, creatively, physically, emotionally, domestically conjoined’, thus showing that the interpretation of an event by individuals affects their interpretations of the truth. The events of an incident are dependent on the individual’s perspective thus allowing there to be multiple truths. Hughes’ Sam depicts the incident where Plath is almost thrown off her ‘calm white stallion’. This description of Sam conflicts with Plath’s description of Sam as a ‘one-tracked, stubborn, white horse’. The poem begins with a mocking tone to address Plath. The effect of this makes the incident seem almost trivial as ‘it was all a piece to you’ giving the audience the impression that Plath was often out of control. He uses juxtaposition to describe Plath’s experience as ‘your incredulity, your certainty’ and this coupled with the repetition highlights the sudden loss of control to Sam as ‘you lost your stirrups…you lost your reins, you lost your seat.’ This conflicts with Plath’s representation of the incident in her poem Whiteness I Remember where she describes the experience in an understatement as ‘the great run he gave me’. Although Hughes wasn’t present at the time of the event, but he imaginatively evokes it as a metaphor for the turbulent relationship between him and Plath where Hughes metaphorically depicts himself as a horse that in ‘one giddy moment’ he ‘jumped the fence’ and Plath ‘strangled me’. Hughes uses the break created by the stanzas to change his tone from a mocking one to an incredulous one. He refers to Plath’s terror mocking through comparing her to a ‘baby monkey’ ‘with nothing / between you and the cataract of macadam’ but through the use of consecutive rhetorical questions, he questions ‘what saved you'’ and ‘how did you cling on'’ In her poem, Plath describes the incident as clarifying as ‘resoluteness / simplified me: a riding, riding’. There is a shift in tone as Hughes’ representation of this incident exploits the incident as a metaphor and labels it as ‘that gallop was practice, but not enough and quite useless’ alluding to Plath’s eventual suicide where Plath ‘flung yourself off and under my feet to trip me’. Hughes’ version of the incident conflicts with Plath’s representation, thus showing that the truths of an incident are not impartial to the perspective it is viewed from. An individual’s personal bias allows the manipulation of the textual form by the composer to create a conflict of perspectives within the texts. The opposing perspectives of Hughes and Plath can be seen in Hughes’ poem Your Paris and Sam as they are both in the form of confessional poetry addressed to Plath. Whiteness I Remember by Plath provides a contrasting recount to Hughes’ of the traumatic event experienced by Plath while riding her horse, Sam. Michael Frank’s article Plath and Hughes: Good Times, Bad Times and All the Rest of It presents several representation of the perspectives of the public and himself that conflict regarding the Hughes and Plath relationship. These text show that there is no ‘whole truth’, allowing the composers to easily influence the textual form to create a conflict of perspectives.