In March, the surviving child of Ted
Hughes and Sylvia Plath, painter
and poet Frieda Hughes, sold at
auction a number of her mother’s personal effects, to the tune of $551,862. The
items included such mundane offerings as a yellow sundress, a costume jewelry
necklace whose source is unknown, and of course, one of her mother’s signature
plaid skirts from her days at Smith College. Hughes’ reasoning, as if she
needed to provide one, was that being the last in her family (her brother Nicholas, an infant at the time of their
mother’s suicide in 1963, committed suicide himself in 2009), she was fearful
that the provenance of some unique items would be lost after her passing.
Of course, many do not live to provide the history of significant artifacts
after their own death, and yet the information is passed on. And Frieda Hughes
of all people has a right to seek some profit, after all her mother’s life and
death have cost her. Little known is the fact that profits from the publication
of Plath’s Collected Poems went to
her and her brother, and not the so-called villain Ted Hughes. Yet, it doesn’t
all sit right with me. A chair? A few bits of cloth? Sylvia Plath, like Marilyn Monroe, has transcended what
fame she’d achieved in life to rise to a supernatural status straddling the
literary and pop star worlds. The significance of these things because they belonged
to Sylvia has multiplied exponentially, and their monetary value at auction
clearly prove this.
I am not walking in Frieda Hughes’ sad, heavy shoes. I can’t imagine
what she remembers of her mother, if anything. To carry that legacy into the
art world, let alone life, must be an unimaginable burden. She paints, she
writes, but always with the specter of the giants that bore her hovering
overhead. But I can’t imagine either that many of us would part with such
personal tokens. An exorcism of a kind? Frieda Hughes is herself a survivor,
and that is something to be proud of in this realm. How she does it is her
business.
