Ted_Hughes-_Conflicting_Perspective.

Conflicting Perspective When we look at any text, we must remember the fact that those wriiting it, had like everyone else, baggage. The experiences, thoughts, and beliefs, that affected the way they saw things, that gave them a different perspective to everyone else. And at times these veiws conflict with the ones that other people hold. Within Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath's lives there were many warring veiws and it is evident in their poetry. In this speech I will talk to you about Syvlia's poem 'Daddy', 'Syvlia' the movie, directed by Christine Jeffs, and Ted Hughes' 'The Minotaur' and 'Fullbright Scholars.' The poem Daddy is directed at her father, the use of the world Daddy rather than 'father' or 'dad' shows that Sylvia was in a state or arrested devlopment. She has not been able to resolve her resent or bitterness when her father "Died before [she] had time." We can see that there are two differrent feeling she has towards her father, that of anger and that of adoration. She tried to kill herself at twenty to get 'back back back' to him. The repitition of back gives it a childlike feel once more. Accompained with the reptition of the 'oo' sound it serves to make it sound like a dark nursery ryhme. In this poem she twice mentions that she is 'through'. It is an angry outburst at her father where at the end she professes to be finished with him. "Daddy, daddy you bastard I'm through." But it is not just to her father she is directing this poem, it is also to the 'man with the meinkempf' look, Ted Hughes, who she also believed was an opressor, comparing him in a metaphor to a vampire who sucked the life out of her. Although this is her perspective it conflicts with Ted Hughes' who beliieved that he was nurturing of her creativity, and encouraging her poetry. In the Minotaur he quotes himself after one of Syvlia's rages, "Get that shoulder under your stanzas/ And we'll be away." Hughes does not seem to believe that his callousness and infedility was the cause of her suicide, he shows no remorse for his adultery in this poem. He blames her father's hold over her, the 'goblin' deep in the cave of her ear, the 'minotaur' stalking the tunnels of the labyrinth. The metaphor likening Otto to a mythical beast makes him seem inhuman. Hughes does however blame himself for unleashing the emotions she had before kept locked up about her father. He believes that in doing so, PLath could not cope and so killed herself. Even though she herself believed that she was over with her father. Many feminists however, prefer to place Plath in the position of a martyr and Hughes as her murderer. Ted alludes to her mental health in the Minotaur. 'Demented' is a term used not to describe anger but insanity. He specifically mentions the reason for her episode, his being twenty minutes late for baby minding, and how she was over reacting to a normally insignificant thing. And to Hughes it was insignificant. But to Plath, it meant so much more. She had a self professed hatred of people being late. In her journals she wrote, “All my life I have been ‘stood up’ emotionally by the people I loved most…So I endow the smallest incident of lateness…in other people I love, with an emotional content of coldness, indication I am not important to them.” Hughes did not sympathize, her hysteria angered him rather than anything else. In the poem he is even sarcastic and mocking , he quotes his response in the third stanza saying “Marvelous!...Go on. Smash it into kindling. That’s the stuff you keep out of your poems.” In the movie 'Sylvia' there wasn't much of a focus on the relationship Plath had with her father, even though the impact he had was so great. The focus was more on her Husband, their love and his infedelity. Although it shows us he is an adulterer it also shows us the strain it takes on a person’s patience when living with someone with a damaged psyche. John Toon's cinematography has the thick, saturated look of old technicolour, and the light that normally surrounds PLath darkens as she begins to spiral into despair. Gabriel Yared uses a minor tonality to give the music a distressing quality, an aura of wrongness that cannot be shed and is a contrast to the otherwise normality of the scene. It show’s how Sylvia’s emotions and Sylvia’s façade are two different things. Hughes mentions in the foreword to her Journals that “Sylvia was a person of many masks.' A theme he continues in 'Fullbright Scholars.' In 'Fullbright Scholars', the conflicting persepctive is that with his younger self. The opening of this poem starts with the rhetorical question “where was it, in the strand'” setting up the tension between the conflicting perspectives of his memory and hindsight, between what he remembers and what he has since learned. The poem is saturated with the tone of uncertainty and questioning. He mentions noting her 'Veronica Lake bang. Not what it hid." This is further compounded by the use of the word “appear” in the line “It would appear blond”. This raises the notion of appearance versus reality. He furthermore suggests that this “bang” was hiding aspects of her personality. He is implying that she has a secret, something his younger self would not know. It is only now, after his experiences, that he does see these characteristics in her. The line “Then I forgot. Yet I remember/The picture…: Juxtopises the idea of forgetting and remembering. It is not clear what he has forgotten, however the enjambment of the following lines makes it clear that he remembers the picture but not necessarily all the details of the occasion. At times he draws on memories from after that particular moment to describe it. He does not necessarily remember PLath herself, as he questions "Where you among them." But he then describes how she looked like at the time. There is no story more polarizing than that of Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath's marriage. All we have to go by are second hand accounts, the poems and Syvlia's Journals, who Hughes admittidly destroyed some of, not wanting his children to read it. This makes it harder to developed an unbiased understanding of the situation.