The Two Ariels
The Other Ariel
By Lynda K. Bundtzen
Sutton Publishing, 273 pages
Ariel: The Restored Edition
by Sylvia Plath (Foreword by Frieda Hughes)
Harper Collins, 273 pages
Reviewed by Catherine MacLennan
Forty years after it first appeared, Sylvia Plath’s Ariel and Other Poems has finally been published in its original form, with the poems and order that Plath intended. The public first became acquainted with Ariel in 1965 (UK 1965, US 1966) through a version edited by Ted Hughes. Much later, with the 1981 Collected Poems (also edited by Ted Hughes), it was revealed that Ariel was not published as Plath had planned – and the differences were significant. In The Other Ariel, Lynda K. Bundtzen examines both of the “Ariels” in attempt to answer the questions that naturally arise: Why were the changes made? Why were some poems added, and some omitted? Why was the order changed? What impact did this have on the perception of Plath’s work, and the literary criticism that followed?
Both Bundtzen’s The Other Ariel and Ariel:The Restored Edition begin with expressions of anger and frustration. In Frieda Hughes’s forward to Ariel: The Restored Edition, she protests that since her death, Plath has been “dissected, analyzed, reinterpreted, reinvented, fictionalized, and in some cases completely fabricated.” As the daughter of Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath, these are real people - her parents - that she is reading about, and from that perspective she objects to the many things written about them, especially when the subject matter is that of Plath’s suicide and the unhappy end of her marriage. However, Plath is now a part of the literary canon – and like any author, will be written about and analyzed; it is through literary analysis and scholarship that authors’ works are appreciated and understood. Bundtzen’s frustration is related to this issue – in her preface she states that she has become “part of a tradition in Plath scholarship, a member of a group of scholars, biographers, and critics who have been discouraged by the executors of the estate of Sylvia Plath (and now the estate of Ted Hughes) from pursuing their research, scholarship and interpretations.” Repeatedly, scholars have been denied permission to quote from the works, which complicates research and forces them to paraphrase when direct quotation would have been more effective. It appears permission is refused when it has been decided that there was disagreement with a point of view of the author; an author writing fiction was given permission because “Ted Hughes approved the project” (Buntzen adds: “as well he might, since Wagner agrees with his characterization of Plath, their marriage, and what went wrong”).
Buntzen, too, decries the dissection of Plath – the “rather freakish way in which Plath’s textual body has been dissected for publication and served to readers” – the poems taken out of intended order, missing then reappearing, “collected” and published in inexplicable and haphazard fashion. Hughes also admitted to “misplacing/burning” her last journals. Another Plath novel disappeared/was burned. Since the literary executors sometimes had other aims than the protection and promotion of Plath’s work, the restoration involved other sources. Poems that may have been omitted or ignored altogether could not because they were published elsewhere, (such as in The Observer). Plath’s own careful notation of dates aided in restoring order and context. According to Bundtzen, Plath’s alma mater appears to be looking after its pupil’s work with great care: “Plath would have been absolutely pleased at the condition of her body at Smith, which includes everything high and low…catalogued and neatly pocketed and filed, right down to miscellaneous scraps of paper.”
Handling Plath’s papers at Smith, Bundtzen notes that Plath wrote the Ariel poems on the back of old manuscripts – her own and some of her husband’s. Bundtzen believes Plath’s poems may have “talked back” to what had previously been written. The “’no-one and ‘no body’” of her poem “The Detective” appears on a page of The Bell Jar manuscript where Esther talks about not being seen by the dorm girls; “The Courage of Shutting-Up” appears on the reverse of a Bell Jar page that has Buddy telling Esther about a drug that he administered to a woman in labor “that would make her forget she’d had any pain;” her “Burning the Letters,” where the “dogs are tearing a fox” is written on the back of Hughes’s “Thought-Fox.” Eight of Ariel’s poems (including “Daddy”) were written on the back of an unpublished Hughes play, The Calm; three of these poems were omitted from the first edition of Ariel that was edited by Hughes.
Hughes did leave out poems, and did change the order. Did this make a difference? Bunzten convincingly believes it did. While she doesn’t agree with Marjorie Perloff’s assessment regarding Plath’s placement of the bee poems at the ending (Perloff saw it as a statement of positive rebirth), she does commend Perloff as a lone voice interested in the arrangement of the collection as Plath intended, and someone who noticed that this changed dramatically affected Ariel’s narrative. Written after the angry break-up between Plath and Hughes a number of poems alluded to these events. Hughes did remove poems that put him in an unfavorable light. He changed the order of the poems, which not only weakened and clouded the narrative, but also, by putting death-related poems at the end, made Plath and Ariel appear fixated on a morbid final end.
While the editing sleight-of-hand could possibly be forgiven due to the messy events and the pressure of the times, it is stranger to see variations on it continued decades later. Written over a period of twenty-five years and published in 1998, Hughes’s Birthday Letters, a book of poems addressed to Plath (and her poems), continues to portray Plath in a light where she is death-obsessed and obsessed with her father Otto (while Hughes is removed from the picture). Bunzten points out that in “Fairy Tale,” Hughes even paints her as the unfaithful one – in his interpretation, so strong was she attached to her (dead) father, Hughes, the outsider, could never be a part of their mythic world. From the double-sided manuscripts at Smith to Hughes’s efforts at a last word, Bunzten seeks to discover the real Ariel, and uncover what was hidden.
Ariel: The Restored Edition presents the poems, in book form, at last with their original arrangement. In addition to the poems, the book includes facsimiles of some of the original typed pages, with Plath’s hand written annotations, as well as comments on some of the poems that Plath made for the BBC. And so the new (old) Ariel arrives, long after the Hughes edited one. Frieda Hughes concludes her foreward stating: “Each version has its own significance though the two histories are one.”