Sylvia movie review & film summary (2003)
But if there was ever a woman who seemed headed for suicide with or without this husband or any other, that woman must have been Plath, and there is a scene in "Sylvia" where her mother warns Hughes of that, not quite in so many words. "The woman is perfected," Plath wrote in a poem named "Edge." "Her dead body wears the smile of accomplishment..." Of course it is foolhardy to snatch words from a poem and apply them to a life as if they make a neat fit, but "Edge" was her last poem, written on Feb. 5, 1963, and six days later she left out bread and milk for her children, sealed their room to protect them and put her head in the gas oven.
Christine Jeffs' "Sylvia" is the story of the short life of Plath (1932-1963), an American who came as a student to Cambridge, met the young poet Ted Hughes at a party, was kissed by him before the evening had ended, and famously bit his cheek, drawing blood. It was not merely love at first sight, but passion, and the passion continued as they moved back to Massachusetts, where she was from, and where he taught. Then back to England, and to a lonely cottage in the country, and to the birth of their children, and to her (correct) suspicion that he was having an affair, and to their separation, and to Feb. 11, 1963. He was famous before she was, but the posthumous publication of Ariel, her final book of poems, brought greater fame to her. In the simplistic accounting which governs such matters, her death was blamed on his adultery, and in the 35 years left to him, he lived with that blame.
Hughes became Britain's poet laureate. He married the woman he was having the affair with (she died a suicide, too). He burned one of Plath's journals -- he didn't want the children to see it, he said -- and was blamed for covering up an indictment of himself. He edited her poetry. He saw her novel The Bell Jar to press, and kept his silence.
Birthday Letters is all he had to write about her. When you read the book you can feel his love, frustration, guilt, anger, sense of futility. When you read her poetry, you experience the clear, immediate voice of a great poet more fascinated by death than life. "Somebody's done for," she wrote in the last line of "Death & Co." (Nov. 14, 1962), and although that line follows bitter lines that are presumably about Hughes, there is no sense that he's done for. It's her.
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