16.30-18.00: Panel Title: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes – Critical Responses
Gazing at Ophelia, Veronica and Sylvia: The Manuscript Drafts of Ted Hughes’s Cave Birds
Traditional definitions of ekphrasis codify the relationship between word and image in gendered terms. The image is the feminine: mute, the object of the masculine creative gaze. The word is deemed the masculine: active, giving a voice to the mute or a narrative to a static image. Hughes’s collaborative composition in Cave Birds involved negotiating the power play between his words and Leonard Baskin’s overwhelming images. The drafts of Cave Birds (1975) show Hughes grappling with the relationship between the visual and the verbal calling on key moments of gazing at images of women whilst thinking about the nature of the image itself: Shakespeare’s Ophelia, the veil of Veronica and, finally, Sylvia Plath.
Using the critical framework of spectrality to read the paradox of the ‘present absence’ of the manuscript trace, I explore the deleted references to Ophelia and the veil of Veronica in the drafts of Hughes’s Cave Birds poems. I will think about why the references were removed, their broader cultural resonances as symbols in literature and art and their place in the interplay of Hughes and Plath’s work, particularly in the context of Plath’s ‘Virgin in a Tree’. The second half of the paper will discuss Hughes’s interaction with Plath’s poetic imagery in the Cave Bird’s drafts to consider Plath as a ‘third collaborator’ with himself and Leonard Baskin.
Dr Carrie Smith is a lecturer at Cardiff University. Her research concentrates on literary manuscripts of various 20th century writers. Her published work on Ted Hughes focuses on questions of authenticity and voice in his poetry readings and recordings using original interviews and research undertaken in the BBC Written archive. She has also published on Hughes’s creative partnership with American artist Leonard Baskin. Her most recent publication explores Roald Dahl’s inscription and erasure of his childhood in Wales through his manuscript drafts. She is currently preparing a monograph on Ted Hughes’s poetic process that makes extensive use of the writer’s literary archives. She has also co-edited a collection titled The Boundaries of the Literary Archive: Reclamation and Representation (Ashgate, 2013), which draws together archivists and literary scholars to think through the multifaceted nature of archival study.
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