How Sylvia Plath’s Hebden Bridge grave represents her life of mistreatment
One of the most devastating facts in literary history is that Sylvia Plath’s death is, realistically, better known than her life.
A perfect encapsulation of the injustice she endured through her 30 years, and that she often directly addressed in her writing, it was one final blow after they ceased to relent.
“You do not do, you do not do / Any more, black shoe / In which I have lived like a foot / For thirty years, poor and white, / Barely daring to breathe or Achoo,” Plath wrote in her poem Daddy, summarising her life as one of being silent and being trodden on. From her strict parents and her especially overbearing father to her working days, even her greatest periods of success always seemed to come with harsh eyes glaring down on her.
There is no doubt that Plath suffered from bone-deep, chronic depression. It’s there in everything she wrote, but especially in her mostly autobiographical novel, The Bell Jar, where her ingenue protagonist grapples with yearning for success in the big city under a smothering fog of mental illness. That basically captures the majority of the author’s existence as her drive to be a truly great and known writer was clear as she attended a good college, took up a run of powerful internships, and earned a coveted job at Mademoiselle magazine.
But it was also obviously clear that Plath was struggling greatly. Her young life was a run of suicide attempts and treatments, yet one should not eclipse the other. Especially, her struggles should not eclipse her incredible work, but they do. Under it all, she was simply a woman who wanted to make art and have that art be respected, but over and over, that was denied as the world would rather dive into the sordid details of her personal life.
For the ultimate example of that, and the greatest injustice, look towards her grave.
Despite Plath being American-born and raised, her grave sits in West Yorkshire, near the town of Hebden Bridge, far from family. On her epitaph, it reads ‘Sylvia Plath Hughes’, despite the fact that the couple had been separated for sixth months due to his infidelity and abuse of her.
She had described her life-long depression and despair as “owl’s talons clenching my heart”, but in her final years, with children to care for, it is undeniable that Ted Hughes’ treatment of her worsened her condition. Not only had he been having an affair, but he was also tyrannical, as Plath wrote to a friend that he’d beat her, likely prompting the miscarriage she’d had in 1961. As his final act of immeasurable evil, Hughes did to her what is undeniably the worst thing anyone could do to a writer: he destroyed her notepads, wiping the diaries of her final months and final ideas. Plath was rightfully distraught.
But when marking the final resting place of an incredible writer whose name already carried deep impact, Hughes couldn’t help but tag his own on there, and bury her in an isolated spot. When he died, he didn’t even go to join her there in Hebden Bridge, and instead, requested his ashes be scattered far away in Devon, leaving her alone to forever bear his name.
