The inconsistent points of view presented that form Hughes’ roles as both a composer and persona in Birthday Letters, are revealed in the interaction with memory and hindsight. In “Fulbright Scholars” this interaction is displayed in the tension that is produced in the opening of the poem from the repetition of the juxtaposition of rhetorical questions which he writes answers to. In particular, when he asks; “Were you among them? I studied it…”, the inquisitive yet unfounded tone in the composer’s voice creates an impression that Hughe’s point of view is genuine, despite the fact that his recollection of the past is impacted by his own understanding of the future. Hughes’ perspective of Plath can be regarded as anti-feminist which is support by his characterisation of her being shallow and melodramatic, emphasised by the simile; “Your lingo, Always like an emergency burn-off”. His frequent use of the “you” creates an accusatory tone directed at Plath, which enables him to sustain the use of high modality language throughout the poem in order to highlight the problems created by her in their relationship. In this body of work, Hughes positions himself as a victim to her volatility but endorsing a fatalist interpretation of her suicide of which he recalls as being his own perspective, despite conflicting the picture Plath paints of him in her poetry.
Strong emotions and individual viewpoints in a relationship can create tension, as demonstrated in Sylvia Plath’s “Daddy” and “Lady Lazarus”. In these poems, she expresses her hatred towards Otto and Hughes as she sees them as the same person as a result of her ‘daddy issues’ as someone who suffers form the electra-complex. Lady Lazarus uses biblical allusions and mythological references used to symbolically compare her strained relationship to a phoenix rising out of the ashes taking revenge against the male ego.
The aggravated tone in Plath’s poem “Daddy” create a figurative image of Otto, her father, using different metaphors to describe her bitter relationship with him. In multiple times throughout the poem, Plath draws on parallels to distinguish the similarities she sees with Otto and Hughes. Her accusatory tone created by the vowel sound of ‘you’, paints Hughes as a perpetrator of her suffering and herself as a victim, which she often dramatically compares her anguish to the cross-cultural reference of the Jews who endured the genocide during the Holocaust.
Additionally she emphasises her suffering of domestic subjugation in ‘Lady Lazarus’, glorifying her ability to endure her own despair and isolation; “And I am a smiling woman.” The extended motif of the reference to the biblical character, Lazarus, where he is raised from death in his grave represents Plath being saved from suicide and further warrants empathy from readers with her feminist braggadocio. The use of colloquial language at the start; “I have done it again. One year in every ten I manage it-” is used to downplay her own suffering and suicide and reveals her need to be heard as she positions herself as a victim.
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Our ability to recall the past can be from enlightenment and from the value created by hindsight, which Ted Hughes reflects on in “The Shot”, describing how; “Vague as mist, I did not even know / I had been hit”. The composer’s choice of using past tense highlights the underlying reasons for his written response to her, of attempting to acknowledge Sylvia despite her death while at the same time diverting from the disapproval of feminists. He also discerns how Sylvia’s behaviours such as “sob-sodden Kleenex / And your Saturday night panics” were indicators that she was suffering from a mental illness which he was unable to recognise until further on. Furthermore, the symbolic imagery creation from the “gold-jacketed, solid silver / Nickel-tipped” bullet functioning as a metaphor for the cataclysmic traits of Plath references the biblical allusion to “the first fresh peach I had ever tasted peach”. Hence, throughout Hughes’ collection of poetry, his first opinions of Plath do not recognise that Plath’s traits are part of her character which he later comes to discover in hindsight through rationalisation.
Hughes’ ‘Fever’ responds to Plath’s ‘Fever 103°’, regretfully pitying how her mental illness took a toll on her by comparing her mental instability to a physical sickness such as a fever. The fragmented, non-linear structure of ‘Fever 103°’ is reflective of the disorientating experience of a fever, with Plath expressing her urge to rid herself of the metaphorical fever of bother her relationship and her bipolar mental illness which is demonstrated through the repeated biblical imagery of hell and heaven representing impurity and purity; “The tongues of hell / Are dull, dull as the triple”. She expresses her own vulnerability through drawing parallels from cultural allusions, accusing the oppression of patriarchal forces imposed on the vulnerable people from the war, “choking the aged and the meek, /The weak”.
In response to this poem in particular, Hughes’ excuses Plath’s mental illness as an ailment for their strained relationship sustained in the fever motif; “You had a fever… You had eaten a baddie.” He pardons his own reaction to Plath’s mental episodes, through the intertextuality from Aesop’s fable: “Stop crying wolf”, rather than fuelling her mental downfall by not taking her seriously enough. Hughes’ remorseful response to her death further distances himself from being a perpetrator to her suicide, rather as feeling guilty for not assisting her.
Conflicting perspectives emerge as a result of personal human experiences, which can create individual interpretations of circumstances and personalities. In Hughes’ ‘Birthday Letters’, he writes in textual response to reflect on his relationship with Plath’s oeuvre of poetry, ‘Ariel’, in which she expresses her own perspectives in an accusatory tone from feminist’s point of view which contradict his personal opinions. Throughout his poems, Hughes presents his opinions elegiacally in free verse while Plath expresses herself in stanzaic however both draw on similar themes in a confessional style of expression and language features while having disparate discourses due to significantly different personal and cultural upbringings.
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