The Silent Woman Quotes

“Life, of course, never gets anyone's entire attention. Death always remains interesting, pulls us, draws us. As sleep is necessary to our physiology, so depression seems necessary to our psychic economy. In some secret way, Thanatos nourishes Eros as well as opposes it. The two principles work in covert concert; though in most of us Eros dominates, in none of us is Thanatos completely subdued. However-and this is the paradox of suicide-to take one's life is to behave in a more active, assertive, "erotic" way than to helplessly watch as one's life is taken away from one by inevitable mortality. Suicide thus engages with both the death-hating and the death-loving parts of us: on some level, perhaps, we may envy the suicide even as we pity him. It has frequently been asked whether the poetry of Plath would have so aroused the attention of the world if Plath had not killed herself. I would agree with those who say no. The death-ridden poems move us and electrify us because of our knowledge of what happened. Alvarez has observed that the late poems read as if they were written posthumously, but they do so only because a death actually took place. "When I am talking about the weather / I know what I am talking about," Kurt Schwitters writes in a Dada poem (which I have quoted in its entirety). When Plath is talking about the death wish, she knows what she is talking about. In 1966, Anne Sexton, who committed suicide eleven years after Plath, wrote a poem entitled "Wanting to Die," in which these startlingly informative lines appear: But suicides have a special language.
Like carpenters they want to know which tools.
They never ask why build.
When, in the opening of "Lady Lazarus," Plath triumphantly exclaims, "I have done it again," and, later in the poem, writes, 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, we can only share her elation. We know we are in the presence of a master builder.”
― Janet Malcolm, The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes

“This is what it is the business of the artist to do. Art is theft, art is armed robbery, art is not pleasing your mother.”
― Janet Malcolm, The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes

“I hope each of us owns the facts of her or his own life," Hughes wrote in a letter to the Independent in April, 1989, when he had been goaded by a particularly intrusive article. But, of course, as everyone knows who has ever heard a piece of gossip, we do not "own" the facts of our lives at all. This ownership passes out of our hands at birth, at the moment we are first observed.
The organs of publicity that have proliferated in our time are only an extension and a magnification of society's fundamental and incorrigible nosiness. Our business is everybody's business, should anybody wish to make it so. The concept of privacy is a sort of screen to hide the fact that almost none is possible in a social universe. In any struggle between the public's inviolable right to be diverted and an individual's wish to be left alone, the public almost always prevails. After we are dead, the pretense that we may somehow be protected against the world's careless malice is abandoned. The branch of the law that putatively protects our good name against libel and slander withdraws from us indifferently. The dead cannot be libelled or slandered. They are without legal recourse.”
― Janet Malcolm, The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes

“Perhaps when we find ourselves wanting everything it is because we are dangerously near to wanting nothing.”
― Janet Malcolm, The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes

“Life, of course, never gets anyone's entire attention. Death always remains interesting, pulls us, draws us.”
― Janet Malcolm, The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes

“Poets and novelists and playwrights make themselves, against terrible resistances, give over what the rest of us keep safely locked within our hearts.”
― Janet Malcolm, The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes

“...a fundamental rule of journalism, which is to tell a story and stick to it. The narratives of journalism (significantly called "stories"), like those of mythology and folklore, derive their power from their firm, undeviating sympathies and antipathies. Cinderella must remain good and the stepsisters bad. "Second stepsister not so bad after all" is not a good story.”
― Janet Malcolm, The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes

“The concept of privacy is a sort of screen to hide the fact that almost none is possible in a social universe.”
― Janet Malcolm, The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes

“The freedom to be cruel is one of journalism’s uncontested privileges, and the rendering of subjects as if they were characters in bad novels is one of its widely accepted conventions.”
― Janet Malcolm, The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes

“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. The voyeurism and busybodyism that impel writers and readers of biography alike are obscured by an apparatus of scholarship designed to give the enterprise an appearance of banklike blandness and solidity. The biographer is portrayed almost as a kind of benefactor. He is seen as sacrificing years of his life to his task, tirelessly sitting in archives and libraries and patiently conducting interviews with witnesses. There is no length he will not go to, and the more his book reflects his industry the more the reader believes that he is having an elevating literary experience, rather than simply listening to backstairs gossip and reading other people’s mail. The transgressive nature of biography is rarely acknowledged, but it is the only explanation for biography’s status as a popular genre. The reader’s amazing tolerance (which he would extend to no novel written half as badly as most biographies) makes sense only when seen as a kind of collusion between him and the biographer in an excitingly forbidden undertaking: tiptoeing down the corridor together, to stand in front of the bedroom door and try to peep through the keyhole.”
― Janet Malcolm, The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes

“Newspaper stories that were originally written to satisfy our daily hunger for idle and impersonal Schadenfreude—to excite and divert and be forgotten the next week—now take their place among serious sources of information and fact, and are treated as if they themselves were not simply raising the question of what happened and who is good and who is bad. I”
― Janet Malcolm, The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes

“The Olwyn force wins only when the writer bows to its power and puts down his pen.”
― Janet Malcolm, The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes

“The voices began to take over the book and to speak to the reader over the biographer’s head. They whispered, “Listen to me, not to her. I am authentic. I speak with authority. Go to the full texts of the journals, the letters home, and the rest. They will tell you what you want to know.”
― Janet Malcolm, The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes

“It is only by a great effort that we rouse ourselves to act, to fight, to struggle, to be heard above the wind, to crush flowers as we walk.”
― Janet Malcolm, The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes

“The lay reader, who knows only what the biographer tells him, reads it, as he reads every other biography, in a state of bovine equanimity.)”
― Janet Malcolm, The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes

“Listen to me, not to her. I am authentic. I speak with authority. Go to the full texts of the journals, the letters home, and the rest. They will tell you what you want to know.”
― Janet Malcolm, The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes

“Critics established the right to say whatever they pleased about the dead. It is an absolute power, and the corruption that comes with it, very often, is an atrophy of the moral imagination. They move onto the living because they can no longer feel the difference between the living and the dead. They extend over the living that license to say whatever they please, to ransack their psyche and reinvent them however they please. They stand in front of classes and present this performance as exemplary civilized activity—this utter insensitivity towards other living human beings. Students see the easy power and are enthralled, and begin to outdo their teachers. For a person to be corrupted in that way is to be genuinely corrupted.”
― Janet Malcolm, The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes

“We lied to our parents and we lied to each other and we lied to ourselves, so addicted to deception had we become.”
― Janet Malcolm, The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes

“Oh, yes indeed, after she died. I had read nothing of hers before she died. I have never read any of her poetry. I’m not interested in poetry. I like novels. I like memoirs. Best of all, I like biographies. I think I write rather well myself.”
― Janet Malcolm, The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes

“But she never once asked me what I did. She never asked me if I painted, or if I drew, or was I an artist. I could have done a portrait of her if she had been cooperative.” “Did you ask her what she did?” “Well, I just assumed she was a housewife,”
― Janet Malcolm, The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes

“The fear that I felt in Thomas’s house is a cousin of the fear felt by the writer who cannot risk beginning to write.”
― Janet Malcolm, The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes

“The goal is to make a space where a few ideas and images and feelings may be so arranged that a reader will want to linger awhile among them, rather than to flee,”
― Janet Malcolm, The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes

“All Plath’s writings are precious to her; all the genres she wrote in, all the voices she assumed—and all the voices buzzing around her since her death—are welcomed into Rose’s bazaar of postmodernist consciousness.”
― Janet Malcolm, The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes

“one. In fact, it bears a striking resemblance to the collages produced by later biographers,”
― Janet Malcolm, The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes

“The journals keep forcing us to engage with the idea of what a novelist she might have lived herself into.”
― Janet Malcolm, The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes

“When we are dead, we want to be remembered on our own terms, not on those of someone who has our most intimate, unconsidered, embarrassing letters in hand and proposes to read out loud from them to the world.”
― Janet Malcolm, The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes

“Letters are the great fixative of experience. Time erodes feeling. Time creates indifference. Letters prove to us that we once cared. They are the fossils of feeling.”
― Janet Malcolm, The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes

“We all invent ourselves, but some of us are more persuaded than others by the fiction that we are interesting.”
― Janet Malcolm, The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes

“And, as we all know from our own brushes with sexual jealousy, being crazed is the chief symptom of the malady. But what few of us have experienced during the progress of the illness is a surge of creativity, empowering us to do work that surpasses everything we have done before, work that seems to be doing itself.”
― Janet Malcolm, The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes

“The writer, like a murderer, needs a motive.”
― Janet Malcolm, The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes