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Literary
Biomythography
SAGE Publications, Inc.200510.1191/0967550705ab024oa
MichaelBenton
University of Southampton, UK
Address
for correspondence: Michael Benton, 54 Orchards Way, Highfield, Southampton,
Hampshire SO17 1RE, UK.
Myth-making is endemic in
the life histories of novelists and poets. Literary biographies are complicit
in the process even when they seek to demythologize their subjects. This
article outlines a five-phase development in the Brontë myth as the paradigm
of `biomythography'. Life writings about Byron, Dickens and Sylvia Plath
are then shown to follow a similar pattern and to exemplify, respectively,
the characteristics of celebrity, idolatry and martyrdom that typify myth-making
and which literary biography both helps to create and attempts to expose.
What
are the Gospels but a series of varying attempts at the art of biography?
(A.S. Byatt, Possession, 1991: 384) Several of Addison's Spectator papers
were of the first importance in the growth of Bardolatry ... Dr Johnson's
1765 edition of the Works of Shakespeare and David Garrick's Shakespeare Jubilee
four years later were long-prepared milestones in the history of the Bard's
reputation. (J. Bate, The genius of Shakespeare, 1997: 169) Samuel Johnson
was the most fortunate event in English literary biography. In three major
roles, as the first important theorist and an able practitioner of the art
and then as the subject of the greatest biography, he is the giant who bestrides
our story. (R.D. Altick, Lives and letters. A history of literary biography,
1965: 46) BIOMYTHOGRAPHY Behind the latter-day literary myths, from the Brontë
sisters to Sylvia Plath, stand three superordinate biographical myths of Olympian
stature each casting a particular light through the historical mist. My epigraphs
identify the subjects. The life histories of Jesus Christ in the four Gospels
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emit
a sense of biographical sanctity down the centuries whose diffused light infiltrates
later hagiographies, shines brightly in the nineteenth cen- tury (especially
haloing the head of Charlotte Brontë), and can be detected even after Strachey.
Shakespeare, the invisible man, whose biographical absence makes his artistic
presence even more dramatic, occupies the throne of literary idolatry. Dr
Johnson, whose biographical presence in Boswell looms massively over succeeding
centuries, is biography's first national celebrity author. All subsequent
biographies are touched in one way or another by these enduring presences.
Since literary biographies have a special concern for the life of the imagination,
mythologizing plays a bigger role in this sub-genre than with other subjects.
In fact, saintliness, idolatry and celebrity appear so frequently in literary
biography that `bio- mythography' is a more apposite term since it recognizes
the role of these aspects of myth-making. It encompasses the necessary invention
of self and identity by the writer, and the virtual representation of the
subject by the biographer. In doing so, it alters our perceptions of the genre
by acknowl- edging that the biographer is dealing both with historical data
and with the self-projections of the author in his or her life and literature.
It expresses both the elevated status of canonical writers, the sense of their
remoteness from the ordinary, that whiff of otherness that implies access
to magic and the supernatural; yet it reminds us also of the fact that the
painstaking, his- torical documentation of life writing is, by its nature,
incomplete and can never hope to capture the elusive `life' without the aid
of narrative imagina- tion (Runyan, 1984: 77; Denzin, 1989: 25). It will be
apparent by now that I am not using the term `myth' in its Classical sense,
nor even in its most prominent sense in literary analysis where Frye (1957)
and others have seen the genres and plot patterns of many works of literature
as representations of basic mythic paradigms. I use `myth' in the colloquial
sense to mean notions that either lack a factual basis, or have evolved and
left it behind. The questions I want to ask are the following: • How
are `biomyths' formed within our literary culture in a genre where facts are
supposed to be preeminent? • What roles do saintliness, idolatry and
celebrity play in their creation? • In its efforts to deconstruct literary
myths is modern biography free from perpetuating them? Presently, I take Byron,
Dickens and Sylvia Plath as examples of celebrity, idolatry and saintliness
but, first, I need to consider what are the phases of biographical myth-making
with which modern biographers are faced. Recent biographies of the Brontës
(Barker, 1994; Gordon, 1994; Miller, 2001) illuminate this issue and suggest
the paradigm for the process of myth-making.
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MYTH-MAKING:
THE BRONTË PARADIGM Five overlapping phases can be distinguished in the biomythography
of the Brontës: 1 Facts: selection and `spin' Mrs Gaskell, like any biographer,
had her own agenda. Her concern was to select and edit her data to present
Charlotte as both a martyr to duty and a writer blessed with extraordinary
talents. She elides the two cleverly, seeing Charlotte as one who `must not
hide her gift in a napkin; it was meant for the use and service of others'
(Gaskell, 1975: 334). Literary genius, domestic duty and Christian principles
are all blended in this phrasing; it catches in miniature the `spin' that
Mrs Gaskell gives through- out the Life, one which enables her to offset any
criticism of her subject's supposed `coarseness' (that very unsaintly term
used by Victorian critics to describe anything they considered unfeminine
and improper) (e.g., Gaskell, 1975: 335, 495–96) with a compensating
image of the dutiful vicar's daughter. Exhibiting the skills of any present-day
`spin doctor', she has the cunning both to overstate and understate her case
as required. Hence, in protecting the respectability of Charlotte and her
sisters, she is prepared to all but deny them their imaginative capacities.
`Thoughtless critics ... who have objected to the representation of coarseness',
she argues, `should learn that, not from the imagination – not from
internal conception – but from the hard, cruel facts, pressed down,
by external life, upon their very senses, for long months and years together,
did they write out what they saw, obeying the stern dictates of their consciences'
(Gaskell, 1975: 335). This has the doubly curious effect of belittling the
Brontës' imaginative powers and stressing the confessional nature of their
fictions, as if the autobiographical explanation would deflate rather than
exacerbate criticism – an oddly overplayed defence for a fellow novelist
to mount. Conversely, she underplays the central and contentious issue in
the Brontë story of Charlotte's relationship with Constantin Heger. Charlotte's
strong affection for Monsieur Heger and her fictional portray- als of him
and his wife in Villette and The Professor were a source of embarrassment
to Mrs Gaskell, not least when she visited Brussels and Mdm. Heger refused
to see her. Her technique is to understate the cool- ness that developed between
Charlotte and Mdm. Heger and to explain the `silent estrangement' between
the two women in terms of religious differ- ences (Gaskell, 1975: 263–64).
Not only does the biographical process begin from inherently unreliable sources
(partial evidence, uncertain memories, letters slanted towards their recipients)
but the facts are soon spinning in the imagination of the biographer with
her own agenda. Well
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might
Mrs Gaskell say: `And I never did write a biography, and I don't know how
to set about it; you see you have to be accurate and keep to facts; a most
difficult thing for a writer of fiction' (Gaskell in Uglow, 1999: 397). 2
Fact into fiction The fictionalizing of the Brontës' lives took a variety
of forms, three in particular: factual sisters promoted themselves as fictional
brothers in the pseudonyms they adopted in an effort to protect themselves
from the male chauvinist prejudices of publishers and reviewers; the use of
their own lives as the imaginative source for their novels; and the images
that two novelists, Charlotte and Mrs Gaskell, ostensibly writing biographically,
created of the three sisters. The gender issue came to a head with the famous
incident, recounted by Mrs Gaskell and subsequent biographers, of Charlotte
and Anne setting out in a thunderstorm, travelling to London overnight, and
revealing their true identities to Charlotte's publisher, George Smith. Charlotte
gave her own account in a letter to Mary Taylor on 4 September 1848; George
Smith gave his over 50 years later in his Memoir of 1902. Biography soon set
to work, fictionalizing the incident in different ways. It had been interpolated
by Mrs Gaskell (Gaskell, 1975: 345–47) and, among many others, has
been depicted and evaluated (Barker, 1994: 557–60), and imaginatively
dramatised (Gordon, 1994: 167–68). The seven major novels also make
their contribution by showing heroines in adversity, none more so than Charlotte's
last and most autobi- ographical work, Villette, `the last ... of the writer's
fictional attempts to come to terms with her own loveless existence' (Gilbert
and Gubar, 1979: 399–400). Lucy Snowe is but one of the many representations
of the educated, single woman in the restricted, and emotionally deprived
role of governess/teacher that recur in the Brontës' works. And, of course,
both Charlotte and Mrs Gaskell had the motive and the talent to fictionalize
when writing biography: Charlotte in her `Biographical Notice of Ellis and
Acton Bell' and `Preface' to Emily's novel, creating images of unworldly,
isolated young women living intimately amidst both the rough vulgarities and
romantic beauties of Nature; and Mrs Gaskell portraying Charlotte the lonely
suffering woman rather than Currer Bell the successful novelist. 3 Fiction
into myth The transition from fiction into myth is characterized by two particular
features: the romanticizing of Haworth, the Parsonage, and the surround- ing
moors as an isolated, lonely setting against which these three mythic
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figures
could enact their solitary tragedy with the stoicism of Greek drama; and the
tendency to use the characters in the seven novels to bolster the stereotypical
images of the three sisters. Haworth and the Parsonage are presented as a
setting from a singularly gloomy fairy tale in Mrs Gaskell's Life. The latter
is `a dreary, dreary place literally paved with rain-blackened tombstones'
and occupied by an old man `brooding like a Ghoul over the graves' who `hardly
looked human'. Charlotte is placed in this setting: `Miss Brontë put me so
in mind of her own “Jane Eyre” ... there was something touching
in the sight of that little creature entombed in such a place, and moving
about herself like a spirit' (Gaskell, 1975: 429–31). Charlotte is
here depicted as moving from fact to fiction to being `like a spirit' from
myth all within one brief paragraph. Beyond the Vicarage and the village lies
the wider mythic landscape of Wuthering Heights, created by Emily and deliberately
mythologized by Charlotte in her `Preface', which concludes with a paragraph
of poetic prose that invests Emily's story with the qualities of Greek myth.
Wuthering Heights is seen as a stone book, coming into being through an irresistible
creative power that hews a gigantic statue from the granite rocks on the
moors around Haworth (Currer Bell, `Preface', 1965: 41). And what of the characters
of the `three weird sisters', in Ted Hughes's unkind phrase, who are situated
on the `blasted heath' above Haworth? It is ironic that, though the Brontë
sisters created complex characters in their stories, they themselves became
fixed into stereotypes in their own life story: Charlotte as the long-suffering
victim of duty; Emily as the wild child of genius; Anne as the quiet, conventional
one who conforms to the demands of society and religion (Barker, 1994: xvii).
So strong has the imagery of this landscape with figures become that the combination
of biographical documentation and literary power has produced myths that seem
endlessly adaptable. They can be shaped into our preferred likeness. Hence,
to the respectable, the Brontës are decent, well-behaved, properly brought-up,
conventional young women; to the religious, they are icons of piety; to romantics,
tragic heroines in a wild landscape; to realists, spinsters of modest means
and limited opportunities, reliant upon their own resources; to feminists,
symbols of Everywoman struggling for freedom against the restrictions of
a patriarchal society. The malleability of myths is the key to their real
nature: they evolve with the character of a living organism, and they adapt
to the sub-cultures which they inhabit. What might seem like a sequence of
discrete phases turn out to be loosely linked, unpredictable developments
that spread like a cultural virus. The next phase accelerates this process.
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4 Myth
into `faction' `Factions' in the world of journalism and television are stories
with a basis in fact but embellished with invented elements. The Brontë myth
has been repeatedly appropriated in this way in our culture. Charlotte has
become the iconic figurehead, Haworth the shrine (Miller, 2001: 106). Factions
in different media have proliferated: ballets, plays, romantic fictions, Hollywood
blockbusters, TV films ... Spielberg is due in on the act with a new film,
Brontë. All this serves to detach the Brontës from factual biography and to
give them new lives as fictional characters. The job of the modern biographer
is to demythologize this process, knowing, even as the attempt is made, that
it is in the nature of the organism to reconstitute itself. 5 Demythologizing
the Brontës Virginia Woolf famously described the aim of biography as the
effort to unite the `granite-like' solidity of verifiable evidence with the
`rainbow- like' intangibility of personality (Woolf, 1967: 229). Barker's
monumen- tal biography, The Brontës (1994), certainly provides solid evidence,
emphasizes context and historicity, and counters the myth with exhaustive
data on the family and the wider community. Gordon (1994) probes the interior
emotional life of her subject, representing Charlotte as driven by a passion
for words – for exploring in the language of her fictions the nature
and role of women. She leaves the granite to Barker and seeks the rainbow,
conscious no doubt that the search for such an end is illusory. Miller (2001)
situates the Brontës' works and family history in the larger context of cultural
myth-making. She is alert to her own potential vulner- ability, admitting
that her background as a literary critic may be perceived as giving a distorting
slant to her study. All three confront the myth that Mrs Gaskell released.
Barker is blunt: The portrayal of Charlotte as the martyred heroine of a tragic
life, driven by duty and stoically enduring her fate, served its purpose at
the time. Charlotte's wicked sense of humour, her sarcasm, her childhood joie
de vivre which enlivens the juvenalia, are completely ignored. So, too, are
her prejudices, her unpleasant habit of always seeing the worst in people,
her bossiness against which her sisters rebelled, her flirtations with William
Weightman and George Smith and her traumatic love for Monsieur Heger. What
remains may be a more perfect human being, but it was not Charlotte Brontë.
(Barker, 1994: 829) Gordon is succinct: `Mrs Gaskell tells a coherent story
... a lasting imaginative truth based on a selection of facts' (Gordon, 1994:
329), a
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description
that simultaneously both hints at Gaskell's particular mythol- ogizing and
offers a general definition of biography. Miller (2001: 169) is subtle. She
acknowledges the advances in modern scholarship but reminds us that every
biography remains a provisional statement, a child of its time. Each generation
reconceives the Brontës in its own terms, tells `their story from a new perspective'.
Neither heavy data nor imaginative insight will abolish myth-making; indeed,
their combined power ensures its continuance. Three distinctive approaches
reflecting three preoccupations of current literary biography: the fashion
for no-stone-unturned research and biogra- phies with massive documentation; the wish to identify the springs of the creative impulse and their workings
in art; and the impetus towards metabiography – the search for transferable
principles in the studies of particular authors. The paradox of this whole
process through its various phases is that the very effort of demythologizing
can also lead to further mutations of the myths it attempts to explode. The
five overlapping phases of the paradigm can thus be summarized as follows:
1) the first biographer is commissioned, selects and establishes a factual
history, giving the `facts' a particular `spin'; 2) the facts become fictionalized,
typically through the writings of the subject as well as those of the biographer; 3) the fiction, in turn, becomes mythologized as its characters and land-
scape become symbols; 4) the myth is transmuted into a variety of `factions'
in different media – stories accepted as based on fact but embellished
with invented elements; and 5) modern biographers attempt to demythologize
this process by returning to primary sources. VARIATIONS How plausible is
it to generalize from the Brontë paradigm and apply it to Byron or Dickens
or Sylvia Plath? Clearly, in the biomythographies of these subjects the emphases
will necessarily differ from author to author: celebrity reaches new heights
with Byron; it metamorphoses into idolatry with Dickens; and, given the late
twentieth-century post-Christian culture, saintliness is replaced by secular
martyrdom in the case of Sylvia Plath. Biography, of course, is not solely
responsible for such developments but, in describing and accounting for them,
it both shows a willing complicity in the processes and appears to conform
to the phased pattern of bio- mythography discussed above. The variations
which follow exemplify the
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three
dominant themes with which I began: in each instance, the initial thrust towards
celebrity, idolatry or martyrdom owes much to the energy and behaviour of
the biographee. I introduce each with a contemporary `snapshot'. Byron Here
is Byron, as described by Lady Blessington: Byron had so unquenchable a thirst
for celebrity, that no means were left untried that might attain it: this
frequently led to his expressing opinions totally at variance with his actions
and real sentiments ... there was no sort of celebrity he did not, at some
period or other, condescend to seek, and he was not over nice in the means,
provided he obtained the end. (MacCarthy, 2003: x) How did biography react
to such a personality? From first to last, biogra- phers have conspired, deliberately
or indirectly, in the making of the Byronic myth. The phases follow the Brontë
paradigm. Byron's friend and fellow poet, Thomas Moore, wrote the first authentic
Life in 1830 being both helped and hindered by Byron's surviving family, friends
and acquaintances (as Mrs Gaskell was in researching Charlotte Brontë). His
facts were also subject to selection and `spin': he does not – indeed,
dare not at the time – deal with Byron's homosexual experiences. The
fiction- alization of Byron's life was self-generated, initiated in the persona
of the moody, passionate, lonely wanderer who crossed Western Europe thinly
disguised as Childe Harold and carried forward in the more explicitly autobiographical
Don Juan. From these poems, Manfred, The Corsair and others arose the Romantic
figure of myth – the Byronic Hero, a figure described by Macaulay as
`a man proud, moody, cynical, with defiance on his brow, and misery in his
heart, a scorner of his kind, implacable in revenge, yet capable of deep and
strong affection' (quoted in Christiansen, 1989: 201). As Christiansen notes,
the Byronic myth mutated rapidly. It was soon compounded with over 30 biographies,
memoirs and critiques published within five years of Byron's death; and, according
to Holmes, the biographical tally alone now stands at over 200 (Holmes in
Batchelor, 1995: 18). The shift from myth to `faction' is described by another
recent biographer who comments on `the monster known as Byronism ... the mythologized
Byron that virtually rose from his corpse at Missolonghi': From Byron's lifetime
to the present day, competing voices have invoked the poet as an idol in their
own image: hero and martyr of revolutionary struggle, aristocratic aesthete
and dandy, transgressive rebel of polymorphous sexuality fuelled by forbidden
substances and with sulfurous whiffs of the
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Prince
of Darkness swirling about him. These last mutations were recharged by rock
culture's canonisation of self-destructive artists hallowed by early death:
Elvis and James Dean, while `His Satanic Majesty' Mick Jagger still pays tribute
to the sneering, demonic Byron of Victorian nightmare. (Eisler, 2000: 752)
Byron's `posthumous life', like that of the Brontës, has been littered with
relics, paintings, literary imitations, operas and musical composi- tions,
ballets, plays, films and, of course, the inevitable `legacy of kitsch' (Eisler,
2000: 758). There are few more formidable myths anywhere for the modern biographer
to demythologize, as the exhibition `Mad, bad and dangerous: the cult of Lord
Byron' (National Portrait Gallery, 2003) demonstrated. Eisler and MacCarthy
are free from the constraints imposed upon Leslie Marchand who produced the
first thoroughly researched modern biography in 1957. MacCarthy comments:
`Marchand, writing at a time when homosexuality was still a criminal offence
under British law, was compelled to temper his account not only of Byron's
incestuous relations with his half-sister Augusta but also, more crucially,
of his recurring loves for adolescent boys (MacCarthy, 2003: xii). Both these
recent biographers have enjoyed a more open climate and had access to the
John Murray archive so that a much fuller account of their subject emerges.
Yet the myth continues to mutate. MacCarthy faces it squarely in her title
and in her part headings: `The making of a legend', `Celebrity in exile' and
`The Byron cult'. The effort to demythol- ogize is explicit. Yet, at the end,
even she cannot resist a dramatic finale, recalling the Gothic scene in 1938,
which she paints with a novelist's relish, when the Byron family vault beneath
the parish church of Hucknall Torkard was re-opened. Officially, this was
for archaeological reasons; unofficially, it was because the vicar wanted
to see if Byron was still in his coffin! It was nearly midnight before the
embalmed corpse was finally revealed, still intact and recognizable as when
it was placed there 114 years earlier (MacCarthy, 2003: 571–74). On
such stories myths continue to thrive. Dickens The snapshot of Dickens is
from his first American visit in 1842, taken by Edgar Johnson, following Forster's
account: ... his lionization began to swell to embarrassing proportions; [Dickens
was mobbed], women clinging to him while they furtively snipped bits of fur
from his coat to treasure as souvenirs, and filling the passage with a soprano
clamour of adulation. (Johnson, 1986: 202–03)
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Like
Byron, Dickens was a celebrity at the age of 24 – Pickwick did for
the novelist what Childe Harold had done for the poet (Kaplan, 1988: 82).
Unlike Byron, whose fame turned into notoriety and ensured his exile in Europe,
Dickens was idolized at home and feted in America. Unlike Byron, too, whose
celebrity was primarily focused in the upper classes with knowledge of his
life and works, Dickens spoke to and for a mass audience. Chesterton was not
alone in elevating Dickens into a god: `He approached the people like a deity
and poured out his riches and his blood' (Chesterton, 1975: 77). Johnson makes
the specific link with Bardolatry and concludes that Dickens alone among English
novelists can stand with Shakespeare (Johnson, 1986: 570). The pattern of
Dickens's biomythography is the familiar one, but there are some significant
variations. Both Dickens and Forster knew from an early stage that the latter
would be his biographer. Forster as Dickens's closest friend had unparallelled
access to data and personal knowledge of his subject over a period of 33 years.
But the `spin' here, while different in substance from Mrs Gaskell's on Charlotte
Brontë, is typically Victorian. Forster gives a minimalist account of Dickens's
separation from his wife, omits Mrs Dickens and Nelly Ternan from the biography
alto- gether, and elects not to draw upon his own unrivalled store of personal
reminiscences but upon public documents which he then destroyed. There is
no conspiracy here but there are elements of collusion which censor the facts
and then `spin' them to create the image of a life that is suitable for public
veneration. The fictionalization of the facts of his life was Dickens's own.
Dickens called David Copperfield his `favourite child' (Preface to 1867 edition).
This is the novel where Dickens shows his skill in blending truth and fic-
tion (Kaplan, 1988: 245). This `interweaving', as he called it, occurs most
powerfully in his two first-person Bildungsromane (the other being Great Expectations)
and is also reflected in the rich variety of his characters many of whom are
based upon real people. The shift from fiction to myth is easily effected
from this basis that Dickens himself created; and biography is implicated.
Kaplan, more than any other modern biographer, interprets Dickens's life and
works in mythic terms, seeing David Copperfield as Dickens's transformation
of `his private memories and his emotional life into a public myth about him-
self' (Kaplan, 1988: 249). Dickens not only transforms himself and others; he also initiates a topographical myth that biographers right down to Peter
Ackroyd have helped to develop: Dickens's London vies with Hardy's Wessex
and Wordsworth's Lake District as one of the prime sites in the literary biomythography
of Britain. The starkest evidence of myth detaching itself from fiction is
the small, half-timbered house in Portsmouth Street, off Kingsway which still
claims to be The Old
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Curiosity
Shop, even though Dickens made it clear that his shop no longer existed. This
fake has been photographed countless times, appeared in TV doc- umentaries
and is a seemingly permanent symbol of the factions that have been derived
from Dickens's life and works. Plays and films are endlessly recycled and
reworked every decade, testimony not only to the power of the Dickensian myth
within our culture but to the singular affinity that both his life and works
have with theatre. There was much for the biographers of the late twentieth
century to demythologize. Two examples must serve to show how biographers
have, in fact, re-mythologized Dickens's story. The first is Dickens's relation-
ship with Nelly Ternan. The modern biographer's task is to establish its nature
with hard evidence; but, when the evidence is merely circumstan- tial, there
is ample scope for further myths to flourish. Was Nelly Ternan Dickens's mistress?
Edgar Johnson (1986: 500) judges it as `not unlikely'; Kaplan (1988: 410)
says it is `likely'; Ackroyd (1999: 967) disagrees and says that `it seems
inconceivable that theirs was in any sense a “consum- mated” affair',
and he suggests that their relationship was an acting out of one of Dickens's
most enduring fictional fantasies; that of `sexless mar- riage with a young
idealised virgin'. So much for Dickens's biographers; what of Nelly Ternan's?
Claire Tomalin suggests two narratives for the years 1861–65, one which
accounts for Nelly's time in France by the need for secrecy over her pregnancy
with Dickens's child; the other which sees this foreign travel as just part
of the education which Dickens had sup- ported for her and her family for
some years (Tomalin, 1991: 147–49). In her final chapter, `Myths and
morals', she comes off the fence and sug- gests, on balance, that it seems
most likely that Nelly was Dickens's lover and mistress (Tomalin, 1991: 261).
Yet, even then, there is a postscript. Tomalin adds a final few pages on `The
death of Dickens' with fascinat- ing fresh evidence that she received only
in 1990/91 that Dickens did not die at Gads Hill as Georgina and Forster testified
but at the house he rented for Nelly in Peckham some 25 miles away. With the
same sense of fictional freedom that MacCarthy shows in her description of
the opening of Byron's tomb, Tomalin constructs a dramatic 3-hour journey
for Nelly and her dying lover in a closed carriage drawn by two horses in
order to get him home for a decent, respectable death in his own dining room
(Tomalin, 1991: 277–79). New evidence or new myth? Biomythography feeds
on doubt. The second example is Ackroyd's Dickens (1990/1999). It is long
(1200 pages), exhaustively researched, and innovative. Written by a novelist
on a novelist, its one-word title signals its focus on the complexities of
char- acter, with all the contradictions that Dickens's restless energy entailed.
It also interprets the art of literary biography afresh. Some common
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biographical
conventions are not observed: there are no chapter titles, no part divisions,
no running heads with dates. The flow of life seems to be Ackroyd's aim. Nor
is his Dickens allowed the comfort of historical dis- tance. In the fifth
of the seven imaginative interludes scattered through the book, Ackroyd takes
part in a dramatized conversation with the novelist in the Geffrye Museum
(Ackroyd, 1999: 793–96), which turns on the issue of biography and
fiction as means of understanding the self. In the course of some polite fencing
between the biographer and his subject, the fic- tional Dickens bursts out
with, `Oh, biographers! Biographers are simply novelists without imagination!'
After a few more probes at his subject's identity, which Dickens counters
with the remark: `Are you saying that I live in a world of my own devising?',
Ackroyd throws in the towel and replies: `Actually, I don't know. I'm making
all this up.' This interlude fig- ures as a mise en abyme for the whole biography,
a biography which delib- erately blurs the boundaries between history and
fiction. In doing so, Ackroyd in effect re-mythologizes the figure of Dickens
as a man who, as he says in another interlude, `saw reality as a reflection
of his own fiction' (Ackroyd, 1999: 994). Sylvia Plath The snapshot of Sylvia
Plath is a self-portrait: I have done it again. One year in every ten I manage
it – A sort of walking miracle, my skin Bright as a Nazi lampshade
... She possesses – is possessed by – a unique skill: Dying
Is an art, like everything else. I do it exceptionally well. I do it so it
feels like hell. I do it so it feels real. I guess you could say I've a call.
(From: `Lady Lazarus', Ariel, 1965: 16–17) Sylvia Plath's suicide on
11 February 1963 has provoked a `posthumous life' of over 40 years, a decade
longer than her actual life, during which time she has achieved remarkable
fame. Search the net and Google takes just 1/10th of a second to record 83,800
references under her name. Why this extraordinary interest in someone who
published just one novel and
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one
slim volume of poems during her own lifetime? Clearly, the reasons are more
than literary. Here are four: 1) her suicide at the age of 30 by a woman whose
writing was uniquely personal – writing that anatomized her own identity
as daughter, wife and mother; 2) fascination at her marriage to an even more
famous poet, Ted Hughes; their often troubled relationship and separation
in 1962; and Ted Hughes's admission that one volume of Plath's Journals `disappeared'
and that he burnt her last Journal in his desire to protect their children
(Hughes, 1994: 177–90; Wagner, 2001: 12); 3) the rigorous control that
the Plath Estate, in which Ted's older sister Olwyn played a significant part,
exercised over the poetry, novel, let- ters and journals, making any publication
both legally difficult and highly protracted; and 4) her death at the time
when the `second wave' feminist movement was getting underway in the 1960s
for which she quickly became an iconic figure. In all, a potent mix for both
myth-making and martyrdom. Biographers continue to be fascinated (Malcolm,
1995: 66) and to have a hard time making sense of it. What is pertinent here
is the opportunity to observe the process of mythologizing while the pattern
is mutating. Currently, we are in phase three and edging into the next, the
phase of commercial and media exploitation. The facts have been subject to
distortion and `spin' from the start. The three main sources are: 1) the censorship
of information by the Plath Estate – not even Aurelia Plath can quote
from her own daughter's letters home without official approval; 2) the `spin'
that the first biographers put on her life where Anne Stevenson (1989) was
seen as unduly influenced by Olwyn's view of Sylvia as sick, violent and self-destructive; where Paul Alexander (1991) seemed to express the fawning admiration of a
Plath devotee; and where Linda Wagner-Martin (1987) could be regarded as an
opportunist intent on creating a feminist icon; and 3) the perception of Sylvia's
life that emerges from her novel, poetry, journals and letters, as well as
from Hughes's writings (1994: 177–90), of her two `warring selves':
her external image, notably in her Letters home, of `Sivvy', the happy-go-lucky
success; and her pri- vate, tortured self beneath this surface which emerges
in her Journals and in Ariel (Stevenson, 1989: 22–23, 163–65,
262). Given that
219
her
autobiographical motivation is a pervasive, deliberate search for self-knowledge
and its literary representation, biographers cannot ignore its data. The facts
of her life and her descent into suicide have been fictionalized both by the
two poets and by the writers of memoirs and biographies, all spinning their
stories in a sophisticated game of Chinese whispers. The posthumous life was
aptly described by Alvarez as `the myth of the poet as a sacrificial victim'
(Alvarez, 1974: 55); and his memoir became `the foundation text of the Plath
legend' (Malcolm, 1995: 20). The focal period is, inevitably, the end game – the six or seven months from July 1962 to her death the following February
when much of Ariel was written and The Bell Jar was published. Both interrogate
her own identity – fictionalizing it, symbolizing it, attacking it,
celebrating it and finally destroying it. Has there ever been such a self-lacerating
analysis by a writer? Identity is the subject for both the writer and the
biographer. Plath's self-representation is expressed differently in the novel
and the poems. Esther Greenwood's story falls into two distinct halves before
and after a suicide attempt similar to the one Sylvia Plath made in 1953.
It is a novel that falls somewhere between autobiographical fiction and self-administered
psychotherapy (see the American publishers' comments quoted in Stevenson,
1989: 285). Biographers have responded uneasily to the challenge this poses,
showing varying degrees of willingness to read the life through the fiction
(Stevenson, 1989: 152; Wagner-Martin, 2003: 34; Hayman, 2003: 152). With Sylvia
Plath, self-representation is more than just fictionalizing her own experiences; she mythologizes both her life and her death. Having mythologized her mother
in The Bell Jar, she did likewise with her father and husband in her most
famous poem, `Daddy', written like an incantation, an angry nursery rhyme
chant to dispel Otto's ghost with which, in the last four stanzas, Ted Hughes
becomes associated. The poem interpolates her earlier dicing with death as
trying to get back to her father: But they pulled me out of the sack, And
they stuck me together with glue. And then I knew what to do. I made a model
of you, A man in black with a Meinkampf look And a love of the rack and the
screw. And I said I do, I do. So daddy, I'm finally through. (From: `Daddy',
Ariel, 1965: 56)
220
Plath's
own bleak comments explain the self-mythologizing. The poem is spoken by a
girl with an Electra complex. Her father died while she thought he was God.
Her case is complicated by the fact that her father was also a Nazi and her
mother very possibly part Jewish. In the daughter the two strains marry and
paralyse each other – she has to act out the awful little allegory
once over before she is free of it. (Quoted by A. Alvarez in Newman, 1971:
65) The vampire and Nazi imagery that pervade the poem are ways of height-
ening the victim–oppressor relationships she projects with her father
and husband. This mythic Sylvia, engendered by the equally mythic male and
female figures symbolized by Otto/Ted and Aurelia, is at the core of all her
writing and most powerfully in these Ariel poems. But, if the foundations
of the cult and the legend were self-laid in 1963 (Hayman, 2003: 198), it
took the biographers to develop the actual myth. The battle lines were sharply
drawn from the start and the Plath Estate was a major combatant. Olwyn Hughes's
intervention in Anne Stevenson's biography resulted in a highly unusual `Author's
Note' which (despite the singular position of the apostrophe) described the
book as `almost a work of dual authorship'; and Olwyn complained that Wagner-
Martin (1987) (who according to her `Preface' had clearly found nego- tiations
frustrating), `hadn't been writing a biography, but a feminist thesis on “Plath-as-the-libbers-wish-to-iconise-her”'
(Hayman, 2003: 207). However, Olwyn's judgement is lent some credence in the
light of Wagner-Martin's diatribe 16 years later against Ted Hughes's Birthday
letters – 88 poems, all but two of which are addressed to Sylvia Plath,
written over a 25-year period. They give us, according to Andrew Motion, `his
[Hughes's] account of her psychic history inside a portrait of their domestic
history' (The Times, 17 January 1998). Hughes's last act in these quasi-biographical
poems, coming as they did only months before his own death from cancer, polarized
opinion. Elaine Feinstein, Hughes's biogra- pher, argues that `These poems
should be read not as self-exculpation but as a form of self-discovery. ...
This whole book resonates with loss and love' (Feinstein, 2002: 265). In contrast,
Wagner-Martin's account shows feminist biomythography at its most virulent
and ill-considered. Before I justify that judgement, it is worth recording
that, for 30 years, Ted Hughes was abused and heckled at poetry readings; reviled on arrival in Australia with placards accusing him of being a wife-
murderer; tormented by the repeated desecration of Plath's grave in Yorkshire – the letters HUGHES hacked off her name on the head- stone; and vilified by
feminists in print, one of whom (Robin Morgan, later the editor of Ms magazine)
published a poem, `Arraignment', which accused Hughes of Plath's murder and
threatened his dismemberment
221
(Alexander,
2003: 357–58; Wagner, 2002: 10–11). (Some myth-makers, it seems,
cannot bear too much reality: it does not do to defrock a saint.) Wagner-Martin's
vocabulary is less violent than Morgan's yet as unworthy as it is misguided:
Birthday letters, she says, is `a secret mis- sile'; it is `conceived to infuriate
Plath readers'; it is `an affront' which `argued with' and set about `the
task of correcting her story'. It is `a betrayal'; Hughes's poems `usurp the
authority of Plath's narrative; they nearly erased her voice'. The poems are
mostly `skewed'; the book is Hughes's final `insult'; feminists (the inclusive “we” of her last para- graph) are `angered'. Propelled by all this fury, Wagner-Martin's
critical judgement spins out of control. She states: `There are several dozen
poems in which Hughes begins with a poem that readers of Plath would recognise,
and then rewrites her text so that nothing sensible remains of her original
work' (Wagner-Martin, 2003: 150). Apart from the distortion that Ted Hughes
often begins with a Plath poem rather than with experi- ences they shared,
the idea of him rewriting her text and obliterating hers in the process is
bizarre. Both remain available – the more valuable through their complementary
nature. Alvarez (1974: 30) understood this and prefigured it. Germaine Greer
has given a more measured assessment: `Ted Hughes existed to be punished.
We'd lost a heroine, and we needed to blame someone' (quoted in Wagner, 2002:
11). So, this is where we are in the myth-making. Hughes and Plath have associated
their own myth with that of the Brontës, weaving the supposed setting for
Wuthering Heights into their poetry, becoming the Cathy and Heathcliff of
their generation (Miller, 2001: 250). The `factions' have begun: there was
a film of The Bell Jar in 1979 and another, Sylvia, went on general release
on 30 January 2004. Emma Tennant has published Burnt diaries (1999) and The
ballad of Sylvia and Ted (2001). Paul Alexander, capitalizing on his work
as a biographer, has written a one-woman stage show, Edge (2004), set on the
last day of Sylvia Plath's life, which `unashamedly mythologises Plath as
victim and confessional genius' (Times Literary Supplement, 22 February 2004).
The publication of Ariel (2004) with the poems in Plath's origi- nal MS order
instead of that of Ted Hughes's edited version (1965) will, no doubt, provoke
renewed controversy. In this third unfinished case, what biomyths have yet
to come? The key to their future is, literally, secure: they will feed not
on a corpse in the crypt, not on a covert death at a mistress's cottage, but
on a locked chest. It was deposited four years ago along with two and a half
tons of papers collected in the Plath Archive at Emory University, Atlanta.
It is not to be opened for 100 years and (who knows?) may contain the last
journals of Plath, not burnt or lost by Hughes after all (Williams, Times
Literary Supplement, 12 March 2004).
222
CONCLUSIONS
My conclusions take the form of 10 brief reflections on the notion of biomythography.
1) Biomythography is a term that subverts any concept of life writing based
on a simplistic account of supposed `facts'. It acknowledges the importance
of context and historicity; but, more than that, it reflects the ways in which
what we take as facts are subject to nar- rative representation and cultural
mutability (Denzin, 1989: 81). Lucasta Miller's The Brontë myth (2001: x),
is the most explicit example but instances of the metabiographical interest
she demon- strates are evident too in several recent biographical studies.
For example: the opening and closing chapters, entitled `Biography' and `Biographer',
that frame Hermione Lee's Virginia Woolf (1997); Jonathan Bates's description
of his book, The genius of Shakespeare (1997: x) as `a kind of biography',
one which covers not only the life of the man but the living body of his `words
and stage images'; and Adam Sisman's account of Boswell the biographer, rather
than Boswell the man, and his `presumptuous task' in writing his Life of Dr
Johnson (Sisman, 2001). In such books, literary biography has begun to interrogate
itself. Reflexiveness is their common quality, one shared with Ackroyd's Dickens.
They recognize in different ways that literary biography deals not only with
life stories but with biomyths. 2) Biomythography dissolves the distinction
between the `actual life' and the `posthumous life', between the period of
the biographee's existence and the period of biographical interpretation that
succeeds it. Successive biographies ineluctably take account of their antecedents
and perceive the subject's life through a historical lens that, tantalizingly,
both clarifies and obscures. It offers a sharper focus on facts, yet becomes
more opaque as the myths mutate over time and become absorbed into the biographer's
vision. 3) Virginia Woolf was right – biography is an impossibility
(Woolf, 1967: 234). Fact, fiction and myth (not to mention forgery, lies and
innocent error) are so interwoven in our perceptions of human lives that `life
writ- ings' must not assume to tell the truth. Holmes's description of biogra-
phy as `inventing the truth' (Holmes in Batchelor, 1995: 18) reminds us that
the genre is a construct of historical narrative. Biomythography is a way
of expressing this and of indicating the sort of truths that myths tell:
not literal truths but symbolic ones. We must resist the pressure for a single,
legalistic `truth' (Rose, 1992: 104–05); at best, it is a mere convenience,
an attempt at fairness or balance. Biography must embrace the more difficult
concept of multiple `truths', versions of the self as
223
expressed
in different contexts, driven by different motives, for a variety of purposes
(Denzin, 1989: 81). Cultural myths, as indicated earlier, are malleable; so
are the `truths' they carry. 4) Biomythography signals that there is no such
thing as `the definitive biography' – a phrase that still occurs frequently
and indicates our psychological need for certainty more than anything else.
5) Biomythography acknowledges our `unconscious hunger for explanatory myths'.
The phrase is again Richard Holmes's, writing recently about the Shelley
myth (The Guardian Review, 24 January 2004). `We like our “lives” ', he goes on, `to conform to archetypes, or fables, or even fairy tales ...
myths are easily formed but difficult to change'. As I have argued, we need
our heroes and heroines, celebrities and idols, saints and martyrs – they are the leading characters in these explanatory myths. 6) Biomythography
is as susceptible to a gendered concept of charac- ters and roles as traditional
myths and fairy tales are. (The latter, par- ticularly, have been reconceived
in recent decades with books like the aptly titled, The practical princess
and other liberating fairy tales, Williams, 1980). It will not have escaped
the reader's notice that, of my four writers, the men are portrayed as heroes,
the women as martyrs. Feminists have seen both women as martyred on the patriarchal
cross. In Charlotte Brontë's case, she is the martyred saint to Christian
duty and Victorian respectability – both things controlled by being
the daughter of a vicar and, latterly, the wife of another one – and
subject to all the constraints of male-dominated, nineteenth-century provincial
England. Sylvia Plath has become a secular martyr in our post-Christian society,
her life dominated by the spectral love affair with her father, and her death
seen as directly attributable to her husband's infidelity. While feminism
has a good deal more to offer (Rose, 1992; Malcolm, 1995) than the vandalism
and abuse of its extremists in explicating the gender roles inherent in biomythography,
it is surprising to find that a standard account of psychobiography, published
at a time when the Plath story was at its height, ignores her case completely,
citing instead the safer instances of Emily Dickinson and Virginia Woolf (Runyan,
1984). 7) The fictionalizing of personal experience in Jane Eyre, Villette,
Childe Harold and David Copperfield moves into a new dimension with The Bell
Jar and Ariel. With Sylvia Plath, we have a myth within a myth. The autobiographical
compass swings 180 degrees with these fictions: whereas Charlotte Brontë,
Byron and Dickens drew upon their own lives and externalized their experiences
in their art, Plath uses her art to interrogate her life, constantly internalizing
and reliving, dramatiz- ing and analysing her experiences in her effort to
exorcize her past and understand it. Hughes describes her poems as `chapters
in a
224
mythology'
(Hughes in Newman, 1971: 187). The personal myth she created lies inside the
cultural myth that has grown up since her death. Richard Murphy, the Irish
poet whom Sylvia Plath visited in 1962, speaks of her then as sowing the `seeds
of the future myth of her mar- tyrdom' (Stevenson, 1989: 245, 352). Literary
biography is uniquely susceptible to the biomyths created by its subjects'
writings. 8) Biomythography needs a good death. Often it will act as the prologue
to a `life' as it does in Ackroyd's Dickens; sometimes its importance is enshrined
in a title, as in Hayman's The death and life of Sylvia Plath. If it is premature,
youthful, violent, in a good cause – so much the better. Of my main
examples, Dickens is the only one to outlive the `30-somethings'. And even
then we find Claire Tomalin promot- ing a new version of his final hours.
Death defines the `life' with its mythic shadow as well as its chronological
full stop. 9) Biomythography is a process of gathering and organizing the
scat- tered fragments of the past to meet the needs of the present. Actual
living is experienced as an unpredictable mixture of the known and the unforeseen,
of planning and serendipity. Yet its biographical rep- resentation into holistic
narrative patterns is more than the mere ordering of events; for biomythography
acknowledges a sense of fate in this narrativizing, recognizing that the `lives'
of those we mythologize assume a predetermined character as we look back ret-
rospectively for the `red thread' linking beginnings, middles and ends. This
urge to create a uni-directional, teleological reading of a literary life
reflects our profound human needs both to define a con- sistent sense of identity
and to give shape and coherent meaning to the pattern of events that make
up an individual's life. 10) For, biomythography is all we have. Poets and
novelists, writers and readers of biography, all have to live with `epistemological
insecurity' (Malcolm, 1995: 154). Faced with the fumbling uncertainties of
self- knowledge and the limitations of knowing another's life, we mask our
instability and partial ignorance with myths. Suspending our disbelief is
not an option with biography. This is not the `as if' of fiction; it's real
life and we want to know about it. Life writing cannot sustain the anxiety
of uncertainty: so its writers and readers keep it at bay by per- petuating
the necessary myths – which is why, in this article, I have urged the
insertion of `myth' into our concept of `biography'.
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NOTE
ON CONTRIBUTOR MICHAEL BENTON is an Emeritus Professor of Education at the
University of Southampton, Southampton, Hampshire, UK. His most recent book
is Studies in the spectator role: literature, painting and pedagogy (Routledge,
2000). His current research interests are in literary biography.