Plath's Daughter Upset with Gwyneth's Film

The daughter of poets Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes has penned an angry poem to protest the making of a new film about her family. Frieda Hughes' prickly poem My Mother, which will feature in the upcoming issue of British society magazine Tatler, claims BBC bosses are wrong to make a movie cashing in on her mother's tragic gas oven suicide. The poem criticizes the makers of the film Ted & Sylvia and its potential audience. Hughes, who was two when her mother killed herself, writes, "Now they want to make a film/For anyone lacking the ability/To imagine the body, head in oven/Orphaning children." The poet, 42, claims she has been "pestered" to help movie makers complete the project, which stars Gwyneth Paltrow, but she's determined to not even see it when it's released. She says, "I wrote a letter to them saying, 'I don't want to collaborate, ' and they kept coming back. Why would I want to be involved in moments of my childhood which I never want to return to? I want nothing to do with this film. I will never, never in a million years go to see it." Hughes, who is literary executor of her mother's estate, has banned the BBC from using any of Plath's poetry in the film. (from The Internet Movie Database's "Celebrity News: 4th February 2003.")

I'm so glad I'm not the only one with a bone to pick with this film being made! Freida Hughes has legitmate reasons for not wanting it made, though. I'm just irrationally protectective (irrational because I have no real reason to be so) of Sylvia and her work.

It's interesting that this bit of criticism has just been aired. My friend Jessica and I were discussing this very film this weekend after I picked up a copy of Plath's Ariel during our shopping trip. It bothers me that people want to try to make money off Plath's pain. By the same token, I suppose I should be more irritated with Viginia Woolf's presence in The Hours. But I'm not. First of all, I think that's because The Hours is based on a novel and neither novel nor film purport to be biographical. Here it is Virginia Woolf as constructed by the imagination of Michael Cunningham. Second, I don't know why, but I just don't feel as protective of Woolf. Though her critical works "spoke" to me, they never touched me as much as the work of Plath.

As odd as this may sound, I've always seen Plath as a sort of kindred spirit for me.