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kellykferguson 's review for:
The Silent Woman
by Janet Malcolm
The New York Times had an article yesterday where Kathleen Hanna (founder of the the Riot Grrrl music movement)is archiving her materials at New York University. She's my age, 44. Like many writers, I've had these silly ideas that my letters, journals, process, etc., might matter, and I've come to the realization that what's really going to happen is that some relative or hired cleaner will toss a ton of paper into the recycling bin until my life gets to about the mid-90s. The paper trail halts. Someone will then look at a chip, feel guilty for a second, and then dispose of it.
Part of the romance of The Silent Woman, is reliving these writers who had some idea that who they married or had coffee with was future Norton Anthology material. Plath died before Ariel made her an icon (and her death might have been the publicity happening that secured this canonization) But Ted Hughes made regular trips to archive himself. Can't you just imagine the letters all bound by twine?
But I digress. Malcolm wrote this book in the early nineties, right before digital communication took over. Hughes was still alive, as was his aggressively protective sister Olwyn, whose life became managing the Plath estate and legacy of her brother's image.
Was Plath a narcissistic, manipulative woman with Borderline personality disorder? Was Hughes an egomaniacal bully who bailed on his wife and two kids for a younger woman?
Malcolm's point is that while certain facts are in place, the meaning of the facts is a red hot mess. She blasts out the traditional beginning, middle, end biography structure. She never really tells the "story" of Plath's life at all. Instead she questions the ability to write biography by showing the absurdity of the omniscient, third person POV. The story instead becomes that of Malcolm trying to write biography and the problems with the form. She details her encounters with Olwyn Hughes, with other biographers, the fallouts authors and subjects suffered from publications. She even includes correspondence that happened during her process.
As someone who has had to deal with the Laura Ingalls Wilder "estate" it was interesting following another writer trying to unwind the irrevocably knotted and fiercely protected. Also, I enjoyed how Malcolm, a woman of the same era of Plath, examined what it was to be a woman of the repressed fifties pretending she could simply will the chains away, only to find self-doubt haunting at every corner.
Part of the romance of The Silent Woman, is reliving these writers who had some idea that who they married or had coffee with was future Norton Anthology material. Plath died before Ariel made her an icon (and her death might have been the publicity happening that secured this canonization) But Ted Hughes made regular trips to archive himself. Can't you just imagine the letters all bound by twine?
But I digress. Malcolm wrote this book in the early nineties, right before digital communication took over. Hughes was still alive, as was his aggressively protective sister Olwyn, whose life became managing the Plath estate and legacy of her brother's image.
Was Plath a narcissistic, manipulative woman with Borderline personality disorder? Was Hughes an egomaniacal bully who bailed on his wife and two kids for a younger woman?
Malcolm's point is that while certain facts are in place, the meaning of the facts is a red hot mess. She blasts out the traditional beginning, middle, end biography structure. She never really tells the "story" of Plath's life at all. Instead she questions the ability to write biography by showing the absurdity of the omniscient, third person POV. The story instead becomes that of Malcolm trying to write biography and the problems with the form. She details her encounters with Olwyn Hughes, with other biographers, the fallouts authors and subjects suffered from publications. She even includes correspondence that happened during her process.
As someone who has had to deal with the Laura Ingalls Wilder "estate" it was interesting following another writer trying to unwind the irrevocably knotted and fiercely protected. Also, I enjoyed how Malcolm, a woman of the same era of Plath, examined what it was to be a woman of the repressed fifties pretending she could simply will the chains away, only to find self-doubt haunting at every corner.