Reclaiming Assia Wevill

Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes, and the Literary Imagination

Julie Goodspeed-Chadwick

• Publisher: LSU Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780807170564
• eBook ISBN: 9780807172285
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism in Poetry
• Index: Literature

Reclaiming Assia Wevill: Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes, and the Literary Imagination reconsiders cultural representations of Assia Wevill (1927–1969), according her a more significant position than a femme fatale or scapegoat for marital discord and suicide in the lives and works of two major twentieth-century poets. Julie Goodspeed-Chadwick's innovative study combines feminist recovery work with discussions of the power and gendered dynamics that shape literary history. She focuses on how Wevill figures into poems by Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, showing that they often portrayed her in harsh, conflicted, even demeaning terms. Their representations of Wevill established condemnatory narratives that were perpetuated by subsequent critics and biographers and in works of popular culture. In Plath's literary treatments, Goodspeed-Chadwick locates depictions of both desirable and undesirable femininity, conveyed in images of female bodies as beautiful but barren or as vehicles for dangerous, destructive acts. By contrast, Hughes's portrayals illustrate the role Wevill occupied in his life as muse and abject object. His late work Capriccio constitutes a sustained meditation on trauma, in which Hughes confronts Wevill's suicide and her killing of their daughter, Shura. Goodspeed-Chadwick also analyzes Wevill's self-representations by examining artifacts that she authored or on which she collaborated. Finally, she discusses portrayals of Wevill in recent works of literature, film, and television. In the end, Goodspeed-Chadwick shows that Wevill remains an object of both fascination and anger, as she was for Plath, and a figure of attraction and repulsion, as she was for Hughes. Reclaiming Assia Wevill reconsiders its subject's tragic life and lasting impact in regard to perceived gender roles and notions of femininity, power dynamics in heterosexual relationships, and the ways in which psychological traumas impact life, art, and literary imagination.

CHAPTER 1

RECOVERING ASSIA WEVILL

An Introduction

. . . But the man laughed—
The song was worth it.
The woman felt cheated.
—from “Two Eskimo Songs,” by Ted Hughes

This book began when it became clear to me that scholarly interest in Assia Wevill’s role as actor and muse in the biographies and poetry of Sylvia Plath (1932–63) and Ted Hughes (1930–98) would never wane. From the outset, Assia Esther Gutmann Steele Lipsey Wevill (1927–69) was positioned as an integral part of the Plath-Hughes myth, a myth that prevented her from receiving acknowledgment of her own victimhood and recognition for her own artistic contributions.¹ Ironically, the Plath-Hughes myth, perhaps the most sensational biographical and literary interpersonal and family drama in twentieth-century poetry, could not survive if Assia were not a major player in it. Fortunately, Assia’s life story has been recovered, retooled, reconstructed, and related beautifully by Yehuda Koren and Eilat Negev in their book Lover of Unreason: Assia Wevill, Sylvia Plath’s Rival and Ted Hughes’s Doomed Love (2006) and in their newspaper articles in The Guardian. What remains to be examined is the substance and significance of Assia’s life and contributions to poetry and art, particularly in American and British literature. Of equal importance but in a different vein is the need for a feminist recuperation of her reputation, artistic work, and influence. What we have done to Assia in scholarship, research agendas, and teaching—our literary imagination, in short—is a disservice to our field. As teachers and scholars, we have perpetuated victim blaming and have scapegoated Assia in sexist fashion, and we have either eclipsed or minimized her importance in literary studies, women’s studies, and work on Plath and Hughes.

My aim is to offer new scholarship on the writer and artist Assia Wevill in order to establish her significance in letters and to accord her a more proper place than femme fatale or scapegoat for marital discord and suicides. The arc of this enterprise is indebted to feminist recovery work as well as to scholarship in trauma studies. Additionally, this study sheds light on Assia’s and Hughes’s relationship with each other and with Plath. Because Plath as well as Hughes occupy privileged places in the American and British literary imaginations, research about Assia, an important figure in Plath’s and Hughes’s work and lives, has far-reaching implications for literary and biographical insights and scholarship on two famous poets: the Pulitzer Prize–winning Plath and the British poet laureate Hughes have always been of interest to scholars and teachers, and so they, unlike Assia, are well established in the literary canon and acknowledged as important figures. Assia puts them into relief; that is her current role to play.

If we adhere to the tenets of feminism and current trends in trauma studies, we need to reconsider and/or reclaim Assia (her life and work): she was a woman who was artistic and talentedly so, and her life serves as a panorama of gendered politics from which we can learn. While she created, designed, wrote, and translated visual art, advertisements, and poetry, her roles as muse and collaborator with Hughes—and Plath—eclipse her contributions and her own status as an important literary and historical woman. Her life, contributions, and legacy have been demonized and victimized, much as she was a victim in her actual life too. I address the following complex question as I work through and untangle the Assia Wevill–Ted Hughes–Sylvia Plath triangle: How might Assia’s life and work shed meaning on our own times concerning gender roles and power in heterosexual relationships; femininity and its challenges, dangers, and pleasures; and our knowledge about and understanding of trauma and its manifestations and representations in life and art?

A bit of context: I come to this project as a feminist scholar working on Plath, which, from my point of view, is quite a startling revelation with respect to the focus of this book. One is not supposed to take up Assia and recuperate her in positive terms if one is dedicated to fleshing out Plath’s victimization and traumatic responses, as I have done in the past.² But when one spends time in the archives at Indiana University or Emory University, it becomes increasingly apparent how Assia has been elided from the professional and public record in many ways. Her own voice has been silenced: in life, in the archive, and in the public domain.³ Texts authored by her, specifically her journals and letters, remain unpublished and are difficult to access. Others speak for her and about her, most notably Hughes and Plath, and they tax Assia with their own grievances. Part of what I hope to accomplish with this study is the acknowledgment that what we have done to Assia in professional scholarship, in texts that circulate on the internet, and in our classrooms is antifeminist and a profound and unkind injury to another woman who deserves better than what she encountered in her life—and we deserve better than what we encounter in ours.

What I endeavor to do here is to rethink Assia from a feminist, literary studies perspective and bring that to bear on important texts so that a dialogue about gender, women’s bodies, identity, and power in interpersonal relationships and their subsequent representation in literature emerges. This is a book about identity politics and women, primarily: women as subjects and victims many times over. Concerning recovery work, I have attempted to show how Plath wrote about Assia in her poetry and to what extent Assia proves to be a critical influence on Hughes and his work. Moreover, analyses of artifacts that contain Assia’s personal stamp or that are authored by her are highlighted in chapter 4 and are incorporated into this study whenever possible. These avenues forge new pathways into research on Assia as well as bolster existing work and indicate new directions in Plath studies and Hughes studies.

What follows is a mapping of how Assia has mattered and how she might be reapproached. For instance, in chapter 2, I focus on Assia’s place in Plath’s The Collected Poems (1981) and showcase how Assia emerges as the embodiment of Plath’s desires, fears, and trauma; in this case, Assia is Plath’s Other Woman, an adulteress and a fantasy upon which Plath projected what she wanted, hated, and could not make sense of within a gendered world. The third chapter treats Assia’s signature role in Hughes’s impressive oeuvre, namely Capriccio (1990), Birthday Letters (1998), and his highly regarded collected letters. Chapter 4 gives us Assia in her own voice, in textual materials created by her, and in self-styled images of her and her daughter with Hughes, Alexandra “Shura” Tatiana Elise Wevill (1965–69). In other words, we will view Assia as an author and as a subject. Specifically, we will encounter her as she chose to represent herself in her letters; in artifacts produced by her or directly related to her in the archive; in her translation of Yehuda Amichai’s poetry (1968, 1969); in her artistic products (i.e., visual art); and in her unpublished journal entries. The last chapter assesses Assia’s legacy in the twenty-first century, presenting materials and developments that draw attention to her. Examples include the distribution of the big-production film Sylvia (2003); the publication of Lover of Unreason (2006); the publication and staging of the drama Doonreagan (2013); the airing of the BBC documentary Ted Hughes: Stronger than Death (2015); and the appearance of what I will call fanfiction dedicated to Assia.

HOW ASSIA HAS BEEN STAGED: A REVIEW OF THE LITERATURE

The first public address, in English, to Assia after her death occurred in the poem “The Death of A.G.” (titled “The Death of Assia G.” in Hebrew) in Amichai’s Songs of Jerusalem and Myself (1973). Koren and Negev reference this poem as the work that ignited their investigation and study of Assia: her name and details about her were purposely obscured.⁴ As they point out, Amichai’s friendship with Hughes would have led to such discretion, and twenty years would pass before her full name would appear in the title of the poem (Koren and Negev 224). Fortunately, Assia is now readily identifi-able, which fulfills a rhetorical function of the poem: the speaker of the poem wants others to know someone important died, and he invites us to share in his grief over the loss and to puzzle over the incomprehensibility of her suicide. As a poetic lament on the occasion of Assia’s death by someone who knew her, the poem opens with the speaker explaining that he has just left off crying, and the silence is strange to him. He declares, “I want to make propaganda / for your death” (5–6). The desire for her to be remembered—to not be eradicated from the world of poetry (she was, after all, the English translator of his poems and his friend)—resonates. The poem commemorates Assia’s life in a sense: hers was a life worth remembering and mourning; she is worthy of this poetic tribute. All traces of her, then, are not erased: the speaker in the poem will not let her go without protesting her death and the impact it has on him because she was important to him. In lamenting her loss, Amichai mixes his warm regard for Assia with this public, poetic eulogy. He treasures her letters, he suggests, distinguishing them from others. Those letters from others are “set apart for life”—for the living, for the duration of his life, perhaps—but he qualifies life without Assia as “not so long, / and maybe not better” (9–10). The last stanza closes with the speaker’s stark bewilderment: he cannot fathom what she has done or why she has done it.

With respect to what has proven instrumental in solidifying Assia’s position as the villain in the Ted Hughes–Sylvia Plath drama, we will turn to a brief survey of early work that set the stage for Assia’s critical victimization. Factors that enable what I call the traditional approach to Assia include her elision as a significant biographical subject; the eclipse of her personhood; and the disregard or lack or acknowledgment for her own artistry and/or her significance as muse to Plath and Hughes.

Letters Home, edited by Plath’s mother, Aurelia Plath, appeared in 1975, and it was pruned: intensely and scrupulously edited, few mentions of Assia appear in print. An exception appears in the 7 November 1962 letter. At its close, Plath writes to her mother: “Living apart from Ted is wonderful—I am no longer in his shadow, and it is heaven to be liked for myself alone, knowing what I want. I may even borrow a table for my flat from Ted’s girl—I could be gracious to her now and kindly. She has only her high-paid ad agency job, her vanity . . . and everybody wants to be a writer . . . I may be poor in bank funds, but I am so much richer in every other way, I envy them nothing. My babies and my writing are my life and let them have affairs and parties, poof!” (479). In this excerpt we see what we might not expect: that, at this particular moment, Plath professes to pity Assia and to look down upon her.⁵ Plath refrains from categorizing Assia as a talented writer, despite the fact that Assia held a high-powered copywriting job. Plath apparently recognized Assia’s desire to be known by her pen (“and everybody wants to be a writer”) and prevents giving her that identity, thereby becoming the first on record to diminish her professional achievements. Insisting that she is “richer” in every way except money, Plath declares that she envies Assia and Hughes nothing at all because, she implies, they may have ephemeral “affairs and parties,” but she has her children and her writing to provide meaning and depth to her life. From Plath’s poems and from memoirs and recollections of friends and associates, we know that Plath struggled to conquer her demons and that she was not always “gracious” and “kindly” to either Assia or Hughes, as Assia attested in her journal (Koren and Negev 117). Plath’s take in the letter to her mother contributes three aspects to the Assia story, as told by Plath and Hughes: first, Assia is superficial and vain (perhaps part of her femme fatale image); second, Assia was never a true writer, so she could only envy the talented Plath and Hughes their writing abilities; and third, Assia’s relationship with Hughes was not a partnership but, instead, that which Assia abhorred: a “slinky affair” (Assia qtd. in Koren and Negev 101). Assia wanted to marry Hughes more than anything else in her life and served him, for roughly the same number of years as Plath did, as a partner and the mother of his children. Although Hughes unkindly dubs her “this Lilith of abortions” in “Dreamers” (Collected Poems, line 27), Assia assumed caretaking duties for Frieda and Nicholas, Hughes’s children with Plath, addressing them lovingly in her will (“Will of Assia Estre [sic] Wevill”), and bore Hughes a daughter, whom Assia cherished.

Edward Butscher produced two books that included Assia early on in Plath studies; his books formed part of the first fleet to center on Plath. In his first, Sylvia Plath: Method and Madness (1976, revised and reprinted 2003), he changed Assia’s name to Olga, in an attempt, as stated in the 2003 editor’s note, to protect “people from legal repercussions” (x). However, Assia continues to be identified as Olga in the same prefatory note. Despite its blatant unkindness to Assia—one description dismisses her fabled body as “dumpy” and another dismisses her attraction to Hughes as transference (because Assia “had always wanted to be a ‘real’ writer” [315])—what sets this book apart is its reliance on contents from a letter about Assia by Edward Lucie-Smith, one of her colleagues. Lucie-Smith provides biographical details and emphasizes her beauty and her perfectionism: “In terms of personality, he recalls her as a perfectionist about everything, from her immediate surroundings to her relationships with others, which made her somewhat self-conscious about her minor physical defects” (315). While Butscher places blame squarely on Assia for destroying Plath (i.e., destroying her “last illusions” about marriage and her husband [313]), this book offers other details and ways to think about Assia, although Butscher refrains from endorsing an alternative view—or a fair one. For instance, he asserts: “[Assia] is a rather tragic figure, one who can no longer testify in her own behalf, having also committed suicide [. . . .] Still, it is difficult not to be slightly prejudiced against her in view of the disastrous effect she had on Sylvia’s life” (314). In his second book, a collection of essays, Sylvia Plath: The Woman and the Work (1977), Assia is infrequently mentioned. The only sustained account of her comes from Elizabeth Compton Sigmund, who identifies her as a seductive “villainess from beginning to end” (24).

Bitter Fame (1989) by Anne Stevenson offered a markedly different picture of Assia; the book as a whole sympathized with Hughes more than Plath. Sanctioned by the Plath estate—which was managed by the Hughes family, with Olwyn Hughes, Ted Hughes’s sister, as literary executor—this biography was almost cowritten: Stevenson insisted that the book was a work of dual authorship between Olwyn Hughes and her in the author’s note. Brief, sympathetic accounts are related by people who knew Assia best, including her last husband, David Wevill: he describes her as “brave, resourceful, warm, with many shadows” (243). We are told, too, that “Assia’s quality meant that [for Plath] this ‘rival’ was more likely than other, imagined rivals to turn into a real one” (244). In no other early account that historically grounds the Plath-Hughes marriage mythos is Assia presented in a positive or sympathetic light. Instead, she is repeatedly dismissed as crude by David and Elizabeth Compton, who admittedly did not know Assia very well or spend prolonged time with her. In Method and Madness, the couple finds that Assia was “a very high powered presence in any room, quite unbearably another Sylvia, in a much nastier way, much cruder in dominance” (David Compton qtd. in Butscher 314). Assia’s beauty changes into crudity in contrast to Plath’s refinement. Countering the negative portrayals of Assia that put Plath in a much better light due to their contrast (though they appear more similar than one might expect), Stevenson informs us of what Suzette Macedo, a friend to both Plath and Assia, told her: “[Plath] scorned Ted for having left the perfection of what they shared for ‘a whiff of Chanel.’ Suzette was surprised, for she remembered Sylvia’s exclaiming enthusiastically about Assia the previous year, ‘An amazing woman—she has her passport on her face.’ Suzette was quite aware that David and Assia Wevill were both in a terrible state about the affair. Suzette tried to tell Sylvia that things were not as black and white as she imagined, but Sylvia would not listen” (273). The recollection here dates back to October 1962; Plath was living alone at Devon with her children at the time and would not have been inclined then to consider her husband’s mistress an “amazing woman.” Indeed, Jillian Becker remembers that Plath refrained from using Assia’s name in talking about her (“Sylvia would never speak Assia’s name”), further rendering her a muted presence but a powerful one, nonetheless. All the same, Assia “was hateful” in Plath’s eyes (Stevenson 293). In a somewhat similar vein, Richard Murphy records in his brief memoir, which Stevenson appended to her biography, that Hughes also refrained from mentioning Assia’s name in discussing the breakup of his marriage to Murphy, “but [Assia’s] role was implied” (Stevenson 350; Murphy 225). In his full-length memoir, Murphy remembers that the “Babylonian beauty of Assia’s raven hair, dark eyes and voluptuous bosom astounded me” (229). In his memoir, also part of the appendices to Stevenson’s book, Lucas Myers, who sidesteps naming Assia, writes: “Sylvia’s rival has been misrepresented. She was a touch too elegant for her own well-being, fundamentally very vulnerable, needed a lot of affection, and could remember SS boots outside the railway carriage compartment as her family, half Jewish, approached the Swiss border” (319–20). This assessment captures a version of Assia that emerges when one seeks out Assia’s own voice and imprint in various media or in the archive.

Ronald Hayman’s The Death and Life of Sylvia Plath (1991, new edition published in 2003) harbors gems of information pertaining to Assia in the way of interviews, especially with Fay Weldon. Hayman sketches a valuable overview of Hughes’s poetry collection about Assia, Capriccio, too. These aspects differentiate this biography from the others about Plath that include Assia. Historically, Plath biographers were the first to break the ground in introducing Assia to Plath-Hughes scholarship: Hughes biographers followed suit and extended the examinations of Assia at a later date. Similar to the traditional accounts of Assia in Plath biographies, Hayman delivers the narrative of Assia as an exceptionally beautiful but difficult woman—one who is, by turns, mischievous, unconventional, untamed, flamboyant, confident, talented, lively, amusing, egotistic, impulsive, unscrupulous, and ladylike, whenever the notion struck her to be so. Assia’s reputation as a homewrecker is also furthered in this narrative: Hayman relates that three of Assia’s friends, Suzette Macedo, Julia Matcham, and Angela Landels, told him that Assia announced her intention of seducing Hughes to them in May 1962, in anticipation of the storied weekend in Devon (169, 241). What makes this assertion interesting is that Hayman follows it with the statement that, to people who knew her, Assia “didn’t give the impression of being promiscuous” (169). This observation counters the one provided by Al Alvarez, who maintains that Assia threw herself at every man she encountered (240). Alvarez’s point has been disputed by Koren and Negev, who cite Nathaniel Tarn, a close friend in whom Assia confided and who documented their conversations in his journal. Tarn maintains that Alvarez was spurned by Assia, who rejected his marriage proposal on 27 July 1962 (Nathaniel Tarn Papers).

Regardless of what actually happened, traditional accounts, such as this one, of Assia in the aftermath of Plath’s suicide popularize the idea that Assia “was trying in several ways to take Sylvia’s place.” Among the examples given are Assia’s attempts to befriend Plath’s friends; become a patient of Plath’s physician, Dr. John Horder; live in Plath’s homes; and rely on “things Sylvia had used, including a hand-painted pot on the bedside table” (Hayman 199). The insinuations are that Assia was jealous of and obsessed with Plath, so much so that she wanted to copy her deceased rival.⁶ However, these precise conjectures seem to be overblown in Assia’s day-to-day life and, indeed, when true, caused her much distress. In fact, Hughes, in stipulating the conditions he saw as necessary to promote a harmonious household, dictated that Assia refrain from battling over changing the furnishings of a home she would share with Hughes (“Draft Constitution”). Jonathan Bate, Hughes’s biographer, interprets this stipulation as “don’t remove every last trace of Sylvia’s taste” (266). In other words, Assia could not completely redecorate Hughes’s domicile, should she move in with him. Unfortunately for Assia, two of the homes she established with Hughes in London and Devon were residences where Plath had also lived. While Assia preferred not to live at the Fitzroy Road “ghost house,” as she called it,⁷ or at Court Green in Devon, she had to make do with what was there if she wanted to live with Hughes.

As one can see, when Assia appeared at all historically, it was in the form of biographies about Plath. Paul Alexander’s Rough Magic: A Biography of Sylvia Plath presents Assia, in her very first appearance in the book, in a misogynistic, body shaming way: “[David Wevill’s] wife, Assia Gutmann, was a woman whose beautiful elegant...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Recovering Assia Wevill: An Introduction
• 2. Sylvia Plath’s Representations of Assia Wevill
• 3. Ted Hughes’s Treatments of Assia Wevill
• 4. Assia Wevill as Author, Artist, and Translator
• 5. Assia Wevill in the Twenty-First Century
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index