Ariel

The 1965 edition of Sylvia Plath’s Ariel—while certainly not a scholarly edition in function or appearance—poses quite a few interesting challenges to the MLA Guidelines on Scholarly Editions that evoke complicated questions regarding authorial and editorial intent, and which I think are well worth discussing. In a book review provocatively titled “The Way She Wanted It,” Lev Grossman states that on the morning that Plath killed herself, “she left behind two children, an estranged, adulterous husband, a note for the baby sitter and a neat black binder containing 40 poems” (107). Those poems would later form Ariel, though controversially neither in the order nor the number that they originally appeared in the black binder on that morning of February 11, 1963. 

Plath’s husband Ted Hughes reordered and “dropped about a third” of the poems, raising questions of the editor’s true intention, as Ariel “contains a great deal of pain and sorrow and rage directed at Hughes” (Grossman 107). In this week’s readings, Tanselle argues for the creative rights of the editor to transform the manuscript—which he insinuates is more of a historical document than an author’s “final” intention—into an edited piece of “literature” (152). What happens when such a historical document falls into the hands of a related and potentially biased editor, and which so often does in the editorship of posthumous works? In the case of Hughes editing Ariel, the line between objectivity and subjectivity becomes increasingly ambiguous, since many of the poems do concern him.  

Perhaps I would have more trust in Hughes as an editor if he were transparent and explicit in his decisions to remove/reorder certain poems; the 1965 edition, however, bears no evidence of his hand at all. The introduction is by Robert Lowell, and there are no notes or footnotes of any kind. In fact, the only mention of Hughes’s name is in small text on the copyright page. Despite this edition not posing as scholarly in any way, it is arguably an outright defiance of the MLA Guidelines.

Grossman, Lev. “The Way She Wanted It.” Time 164.23 (2004): 107. Academic Search Complete. Web. 15 Sept. 2016.

Plath, Sylvia. Ariel. Harper Perennial, 1965.

Tanselle, Thomas G. “The Editorial Problem of Final Authorial Intention” [1976], Textual Criticism and Scholarly Editing, Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 1990, 139-155.