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Only they have nothing to say to anybody. I have seen to that.
Sylvia Plath, "Burning the Letters"
What was in those manuscripts, the one destroyed like a Jew in Nazi Germany, the other lost like a desaparecido?
Steven Gould Axelrod, "The Second Destruction of Sylvia Plath" Sticks and stones may break your bones, But words can never harm you.
In his foreword to The Journals of Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes confessed to destroying one of Sylvia Plath's "maroon-backed ledgers" and losing another. They "continued the record from late '59 to within three days of her death. The last of these contained entries for several months, and I destroyed it because I did not want her children to have to read it (in those days I regarded forgetfulness as an essential part of survival). The other disappeared" (xiii). As Steven Gould Axelrod's comparison of Plath's missing journals to a Jewish victim of the Holocaust shows, many critics regard Hughes as committing an act of desecration worse than Hitler's burning of the books. Indeed, Hughes's handling of Plath's work has aroused endless critical fury, and he has responded in myriad waysat times with scorn, defensively, at others with cool detachment, as if he were only her editor.l In a piece titled "Sylvia Plath and Her Journals," Hughes refers to himself as "her husband" when he describes the destruction and disappearance of the final two journals and even says, "Looking over this curtailed journal, one cannot help wondering whether the lost entries for her last three years were not the more important section of it. Those years, after all, produced the work that made her name. And we certainly have lost a valuable appendix to all that later writing" (177-78). Hughes the editor criticizes Hughes the husband for an unnecessary appendectomy on Plath's corpus.
Acts of textual violence or abuse, if so they might be called, were, as it turns out, habitual in the Plath-Hughes marriage, although Plath was customarily the perpetrator. Plath's biographers describe more than one incident in which Plath destroyed her husband's work, and Plath's "Burning the Letters" is about one of those times, when she pillaged and burned the contents of Hughes's study. A more covert form of sabotage and vandalism is...