Did poet Ted Hughes’s deserve the hate?

[6ate9]

Ted Hughes faced immense backlash from the feminist movement following Sylvia Plath's suicide in 1963 and Assia Wevill's suicide in 1969.

Do you think he deserved it? I’m asking because someone was taking to me about this and she thought he did, while I didn’t think he deserved all the vitriol which at times included death threats, physical attacks on his property, and being branded a murderer.

I felt very sorry for his children Frieda and Nicholas, as they both suffered and Nicholas later died by suicide, and Shura, who was murdered by her mother Assia Wevill at age 4.

I don't think writers of either sex are necessarily nice people. I think if we are outraged by male domestic violence, the most helpful thing we can do is support the work of organisations such as Beira's Place
Both Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath produced some brilliant work. Both were flawed human beings. There's something about the Plath industry which is uncomfortable - as if we are getting some kind of weird pleasure from an old sad story.

I don’t read that poem quite as straightforwardly as you. I think it acknowledges what they did to each other emotionally.

See also Neil Gaiman.

Women have a choice if they want to date a “male genius!!” Sylvia Plath actively sought out Ted Hughes after reading his work.

I don't believe in hating people but his first wife and his next woman friend committed suicide. With poor Sylvia Plath, we know she had always had mental health problems but when two women involved with him commit suicide, Assia Wevill also killed her child, Shura; his son, Nicholas committed suicide at 47, you cannot help but wonder about the effect he had.

There is no point in hating him, he had to live with it.

Holy victim blaming, Batman!

Sylvia Plath and Assia Weville were both very intelligent, very creative and very complex women.

I think its complex.

I am pretty sure he was a right bastard in many ways.

And that he was entirely the wrong man for Plath to be with. But she had her own issues completely separate from Hughes' effect. And maybe Hughes was attracted to women with such vulnerabilities.

More support for her mental health, a different climate for women and their rights could maybe have helped Plath.

The whole thing seemed a dangerous and toxic mix of highly intelligent, highly creative but variously amoral, dysfunctional and vulnerable people.

What, and poor, innocent, plain-spoken, bluff Ted was just grist to the mill of this rapacious American who came over, with her Samsonite luggage and her wiles and her uncanny ability with a villanelle, and bagged him? Or am I thinking of Meghan Markle? Or Wallis Simpson?

It is.

But many female artistic geniuses have also behaved without regard for normal constraints (and maybe had to disregard usual norms in earlier times in order to escape the very barriers that prevented them practicing / being published etc) - but they had and have less power and influence and in some ways men are less vulnerable to their carry on than the other way around. (because of the usual inequalities)

Sylvia Plath did choose to date and marry him. She was deeply in love and actively pursued their marriage. They met in February 1956 and married 4 months later.

And that excuses him of being a domestically abusive cheater how?
(Hint: It doesn't.)

What's made you suddenly so invested in defending a dead abuser, OP?

You're missing my point. Ted was an equal agent in this marriage. She didn't hit him on the head with a club and drag him to St George the Martyr on Bloomsday.

I don’t think he was hated. Feminist criticism wasn’t overly emotional and laden with feeling.

He was evaluated according to feminist tenets. It wasn’t a personal feeling.

I never said she did!!!

I agree with this.

I never suggested you did. I was responding to @6ate9.

I am @6ate9!!!

Wow OP you’re really hell bent on defending this misogynist woman abuser. He was indirectly, or otherwise, responsible for the death of two women and a child. Mental health issues aside he left Plath isolated and alone with two babies, where was his responsibility and care for those children that winter? It boils my blood that some people view Hughes as a tortured genius who was put upon by two unstable women. He destroyed her work not to protect the children but to protect himself.

I am not defending him!!! We don’t know why he destroyed her work. Both his children have publicly acknowledged that he was a loving father. So maybe he did destroy some of her work to protect them. We will never know.

@angieloumc Sylvia Plath was separated from Ted Hughes and visited his children regularly. They were discussing a trial reconciliation before her death.

I am very uneasy about your determination to defend this man.

Any man who hits a woman is automatically the one in the wrong. No matter how annoying she is, how mad, or how much more successful.

The second he puts his hands on her, he will never, ever, be anything other than a violent abuser.

There is no excuse. You can argue without fists. You can be frustrated, walk the moors and scream into the wind with rage and helplessness. But you cannot, ever, legitimately, hit another person and be excused.

I don't think there's the slightest excuse for destroying work, whether you're TH burning SP's last journal or Charlotte Bronte possibly destroying Emily Bronte's follow-up to Wuthering Heights in case it damaged her sister's posthumous reputation by being equally 'coarse'.

There are many precedents now for donating something (often sensitive correspondence or journals) to an archive and putting an embargo on it for many years, so that it doesn't cause distress or reputational harm to anyone living. You can specify all kinds in an embargo -- not to be opened to researchers till five years after the death of my later child to die, not to be opened till 2050, not till be opened till ten years after my death, and or that even then any researchers who want to read the specified items need to contact my estate and explain their reasons for wanting to read the material, and the use they will be making of it etc.

It's not an either/or choice between 'burn the work' or 'hurt my children.'

Starting to wonder if you’re just writing an article or something @6ate9? You’ve started off with “mm what do you think?” and now you’re defending him to the hilt/ telling us when they got married like that matters at all.

People aren’t going to agree on this and I totally disagree with the idea that Ted Hughes in some way murdered his partners but he was cruel and abusive and that together with existing MH conditions contributed to their misery and deaths, in my view. He wouldn’t be triable for it, but morally like many people he was a slug.

Does a marriage ending with abuse, cruelty, faithlessness and suicide mean that the “innocent” partner should have somehow been wise to this years earlier and turned back from the altar? Obviously not that is crazy thinking, but that seems to be what you’re implying with your “she chose to marry him”. So what? Women choose to marry people who later do go on to murder them or their children it doesn’t mean they’ve agreed to it and that attitude belongs in the bin.

Of course it was up to TH to decide what to do with her works. He was still married to her at the time of her death. Why is it so hard to believe that he was protecting his children?