Rozkishna az do ostatнього rechennia pіslymovy knizhka. On the cover, it is indicated about Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, but Janet Malcolm does not write biographies. There is a lot of such good, at least five versions by 1993, when "The Silent Woman" comes out, and all of it is rather problematic. This book, which delves into the history of the intense attempts to tell the story of Sylvia Plath's life after her suicide, is rather a metabiography, a study of what we have the right to as readers and interpreters, and a careful gaze into one specific case of the realization of such a right.
Biography is the medium through which the remaining secrets of the famous dead are taken from them and dumped out in full view of the world. The biographer at work, indeed, is like the professional burglar, breaking into a house, rifling through certain drawers that he has good reason to think contain the jewelry and money, and triumphantly bearing his loot away. However, a small problem with the secrets of the dead lies in the fact that they also concern the living (when Malcolm writes about "Plath survivors", the image is filled with the images of the victims of the catastrophe), and therefore:
Relatives are the biographer’s natural enemies; they are like the hostile tribes an explorer encounters and must ruthlessly subdue to claim his territory. The biographers of Plath with her relatives were clearly not lucky. On the one hand, the story of her death forced to think first of all about Ted Hughes (later it became worse, because if your wife commits suicide, it says more about her, but if two of your wives commit suicide together, then it inclines to the search for a system); and on the other hand, to turn to any of Sylvia's manuscripts, it was also necessary to him - and his sister Olwyn, completely devoted to her brother. The attempts of the Hugheses to control the narrative only increased the distrust of them: for example, when Jacqueline Rose in The Haunting of Sylvia Plath read androgynous motives in one of Plath's poems, Ted demanded that this analysis be removed from the book, justifying it by the need to think about the children, for whom it will be painful to hear such things about their mother; the age of the children at that time was 31 and 29.
Instead, attempts to tell the story from another point of view, showing Plath not as a dear swallow, but Hughes not as a solid monster, as, for example, Bitter Fame: A Life of Sylvia Plath by Anne Stevenson, caused opposition in the public, which had already decided everything for itself. Therefore, Janet Malcolm takes a big risk when she says from the very beginning that she is on the side of the (then) living; this is such a general ethical choice, which, however, does not prevent her from refusing when Ted Hughes asks to get acquainted with the full manuscript of "The Silent Woman", and extracting only the paragraphs around the places quoted with the permission of the Plath estate for the preview. As a person from a position, Malcolm is rather distant - and because of this, she is really interesting; she provokes not to sympathize, but to think.
