Reviews for Robbing the mother

The average rating for Robbing the mother based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2015-04-08 00:00:00 Shawn Rust There is a good argument that Ted Hughes would have been nothing as great as the poet he became without Sylvia Plath. Hughes (pre-Plath) was a poor student at Cambridge University, where he switched his field of study to archaeology and anthropology because the English program was "too constrictive." Upon graduation he began a series of low-paying jobs, including one as a zookeeper. Only a few of his poems had been published when he met Plath at the launch party of a poetry magazine he and some friends had formed. On the other hand, Plath entered Smith College on a full scholarship and consistently demonstrated extraordinary brilliance in her studies -- while (extracurricularly) winning numerous writing contests, including a guest editorship at Mademoiselle magazine -- before graduating summa cum laude. By the time she embarked on her Fulbright Scholarship at Cambridge, she had already earned a reputation as an accomplished young writer with numerous short stories and poems published in major periodicals in the U.S. But Hughes was extremely handsome and had a magnetic power over women that became legendary, and Plath's own eroticism was uncheckable in the circumstances. They fell for each other in a big way and married soon afterwards. As writers, they complemented each other, in Plath's words, each being the other's best critic. Importantly, Plath saw Hughes' genius and promoted it with an industry hitherto unknown to Hughes. Plath typed his manuscript for The Hawk in the Rain and submitted it to Harper's poetry contest, which Hughes won. Plath then sent the prize-winning manuscript to Faber & Faber in the U.K. (where T.S. Eliot was the editorial eminence), referring to him by his American nickname, "Ted," the name he became known to the world forever after. "Ted Hughes "was more the creation of Plath than the other way around, so we naturally feel the pathetic injustice of Hughes' abandonment of Plath in mid-1962, when she had few financial resources and two young children to take care of. Then, as it had been for hundreds of years before, women's poetry was a small subset of a predominantly male literary scene. [At Cambridge the ratio of men to women was 10:1.] She had willingly exalted his career over her own while fighting the specter of the parenthetical "wife who also writes". So Hughes' betrayal was devastating to her on many levels. Despite these setbacks, Plath doggedly persisted in her writing, and, surprisingly, the separation from Hughes sparked the beginning of an extremely productive period in her brief life. Her personal ambition was to take women's poetry to a much higher level, daring to assault even the male bastions. To her credit, in 1962 her star was on the rise, propelled by the publication of a steady stream of poems, her first book of poetry, The Collosus and Other Poems (published in 1960), and a "first reading" contract with The New Yorker, which assured her a receptive forum for her work. On October 30, 1962, she was invited by the BBC to make a recording of fifteen poems (all of which from Ariel) as part of a program featuring forty-five contemporary poets, of which she was the only American. By the end of 1962, she had secured a publisher for her first novel, The Bell Jar, and completed the manuscript for Ariel (save for some textual revision), a book that would change the face of poetry forever. The loss represented by her suicide on February 11, 1963 is inestimable. When it was published in 1993, Susan Van Dyne's Revising Life: Sylvia Plath's Ariel Poems established a new gold standard for Plath scholarship. Van Dyne uses the extant manuscripts, journals, letters and fictional work, most of which comprise the Plath collection at Smith College, and reads these against a broad background of feminist theory to provide penetrating critiques of what Plath herself called "the best poetry of my life". Divided into three sections, "Rage," "The Body" and "Motherhood", Van Dyne's thesis is that Plath quite deliberately used her art to evolve beyond the given feminine models of daughter, wife and mother, re-imagining herself by forging new iconic masks to subvert the classic constraints of the male gaze. While Plath confronted an entrenched existential model, one that overtly and subliminally cast feminine duty and sexuality into conflicted roles, she was also embattled in her personal relationships with Hughes and her mother. Her life with Hughes was complicated by the roles she took on, at once his biggest fan, his lover, the mother of his children, his secretary and literary agent, as well as his student and fiercest competitor. Her ambivalent relationship with her mother, to whom she was emotionally and financially dependent, took on Freudian dimensions of adoration, guilt and loathing. Although Plath used the incidents of her life as foundations for each poem, Van Dyne shows, by exhaustively working through drafts of the poems, that Plath's progressive revisions disclose more capacious intentions and a structural integrity that belie the dirty little secrets that so many critics have been unjustly satisfied to expose and leave unexamined. It is, perhaps, passing irony that, in drafting most of the Ariel poems, Plath used as scrap the reverse side of Hughes' typed manuscripts of The Hawk in the Rain, his first book, and The Calm, his radio play, as well as a copy of the manuscript of The Bell Jar, a definitive sign of her intent to make herself, among other things, an avenging angel of "Vesuvian rage". Van Dyne's study is elegantly argued and sensitively presented throughout. At times, late in the proceedings, encumbered by successive catalogues of feminist statements, theories and speculations, Van Dyne's exegesis lumbers forward despite the insightful intelligence that inhabits the book. I disagree with her inclusion of Plath's final poems (like "Balloons", "Kindness" and "Edge", all of which were written in 1963), at least in the context of her thesis, because they obscure the narrative arc of the original Ariel manuscript that Plath had so meticulously organized. As Marjorie Perloff pointed out in her essay, "The Two Ariels: The (Re)making Of The Sylvia Plath Canon" (1984), Plath's final poems were cravenly substituted by Hughes (in the first publication of Ariel) for "Ariel" poems that plainly spoke to his faithlessness, misleading readers to conclude that Plath had accepted the inevitability of her suicide. Plath intended just the opposite. The final "post-Ariel" poems should been covered in a separate chapter or an appendix where Plath's poetic departure from the original Ariel would have been better apprehended. Van Dyke's analysis of the poems, in one important aspect, falls short by not giving due regard to the figurative assignments that Plath threaded through Ariel. For example, The Divine Comedy as the central literary exemplar of Christian myth is the spinal cord of "Fever 103⁰," which debates the concept of "purity," on one hand, opposing the "Devilish leopard" (a symbol of lust) and the "lecher's kiss" (both of which invoke Hughes' adultery), and on the other hand aligning herself with an artistic purity that releases her from the bonds of the male-centric vision of the world ("My selves dissolving/old whore petticoats"). The authorial persona's progress "To Paradise" (as Dante's own) is a form of transcendence also realized by the book's eponymous poem. Of course, Ariel repeatedly relies on religious, cultural and literary myth and strategically uses language to make the case against the hegemony of received forms of "purity". In an earlier poem,"The Magi", the Platonic forms of the "papery gods" are "abstracts [that] hover like dull angels," the trope is then echoed in "Fever 103⁰": "The tongues of hell/are dull, dull as the triple//Tongues of dull, fat Cerberus". Hence, Plath employed "dull" in Ariel as leitmotiv, like the sound of a broken bell, not only meaning insipid, but archaic and outmoded. The world of Ariel is premised on exploiting our idealizations in order to explode their underlying myths. This is why, for instance, in "Morning Song," the child is a "New statue/In a drafty museum" - because, in the real world, men and women are presumptively expected to emulate the idealized models prescribed by religious myths and cultural convention. Plath is telling the story Van Dyne has discerned, but as a poet would, not as a theorist. Because Van Dyne omits reference to Ariel's underlying literary structure in her zeal to evince the work's place in the psychological and philosophical jet streams of feminist theory, I believe she missed an vitally important aspect of the work. Notwithstanding these reserrvation, her work is superlative and a must read.

Review # 2 was written on 2016-11-21 00:00:00 Sean Ross A fine book of criticism, if not a great one. My assumption that this is largely due to estate/copyright issues. Van Dyne's writing a book based upon Plath's drafting process and what significance that may have with regard to our reading of the Ariel poems: an obviously fascinating premise. Unfortunately, she's hardly able to cite said drafts, and so often her readings feel disjointed or superficial. Then again, at other times she conducts close readings of the published poems without referencing the drafts and so feels unmotivated. Perhaps I'm just misreading the purpose of the book. Perhaps I'm more rigid in my expectations because I'm teaching a freshman seminar on confessional poetry, and wouldn't allow some of Van Dyne's readings to slide by without more evidence in my students' papers. Perhaps I'm just a bit tipsy and so less forgiving. Also my supposition that she had estate issues may be pure speculation. The structure of the book seemed slightly off to me, as well, inasmuch as the theory didn't always jive with the poetry, and some of the "trend" considerations dated the book. So in short: quite good. Imperfect. Certainly worth it for any Plath scholar.