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Post by Patrick on Mar 23, 2009 15:29:02 GMT
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Post by riotgrrl on Mar 23, 2009 15:38:13 GMT
I don't really know enough about Ted Hughes, and I'm extremely cynical of the sisters who glorify Path as a victim, but I think you may be on to some thing somewhere here.
I never really got Sylvia Plath, even though when I was a literary-minded teenager I sort of thought I OUGHT to get her.
And Ted Hughes just writes about birds and countryside and stuff, which is dull, although supposedly it's all metaphors 'n' that.
Did Plath not kill herself with her children in the other room or something unspeakably cruel? How would the son ever really get over that (if I've got it right)?
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Post by Flatypus on Mar 23, 2009 15:43:30 GMT
They do look to have been a couple asking for trouble. He even sounds a miserable bugger in recordings and most of his poetry is like freezing fog. She seems to have been hysterical at best, very likely with something congenitally unhinged at worst. Growing up with that pair as parents must have been pretty frustrating. I can't imagine either of them having time for anything that wasn't him brooding or her flapping.
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Post by jean on Mar 23, 2009 17:52:48 GMT
He didn't exactly 'grow up' with his mother at any rate, since he was only one year old when she killed herself.
Plath suffered from depression long before she met ot married Hughes. Her son may well have inherited a tendency to depression himself. It's not really something to joke about, is it?
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Post by riotgrrl on Mar 23, 2009 18:00:33 GMT
He didn't exactly 'grow up' with his mother at any rate, since he was only one year old when she killed herself. Plath suffered from depression long before she met ot married Hughes. Her son may well have inherited a tendency to depression himself. It's not really something to joke about, is it? Nobody's joking, are they? Was there not also another child of the Plath/Hughes marriage? What happened to her/him? |
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Post by Flatypus on Mar 23, 2009 18:08:22 GMT
Ted Hughes is not a man I would think ideal for a depressive. He'd probably give one depression. All the same, there's some disagreement about overlaps between depression and schizophrenia and that is thought to have hereditory components. It might at that time have been more acceptable to say she was depressed than to admit to schizophrenia.
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Post by jean on Mar 23, 2009 18:32:16 GMT
Nobody's joking, are they? I found the word 'flapping' used of the behaviour of a suicidally depressive woman less than serious. Frieda Hughes is the daughter. She has been involved in various rows over her mother's legacy. Here's one: www.guardian.co.uk/media/2003/feb/03/bbc.film |
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Post by housesparrow on Mar 24, 2009 8:55:15 GMT
Trying to blame others for someone else's depression - and even more so, your own - is unkind, and probably also dangerous. But I speak only from experience!
Genetics may play a part, of course. I like some of Ted Hughes' poetry and don't feel I need to know anything about him to appreicate it. Plath is a bit too heavy for me, I'm afraid.
Poor man, depression is a rotten thing to have to battle with all your life.
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Post by jean on Mar 24, 2009 13:44:26 GMT
It is unkind - but I don't think that recognising that you may inherit a tendency necessarily involves blaming the person you inherited it from.
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Post by riotgrrl on Mar 24, 2009 14:37:22 GMT
Nobody's joking, are they? I found the word 'flapping' used of the behaviour of a suicidally depressive woman less than serious. Frieda Hughes is the daughter. She has been involved in various rows over her mother's legacy. Here's one: www.guardian.co.uk/media/2003/feb/03/bbc.filmThe extract from Frieda's poem is quite striking (written as a protest against a film being made about the life of her parents.) Now they want to make a film
For anyone lacking the ability
To imagine the body, head in oven
Orphaning children.
The peanut eaters, entertained
At my mother's death, will go home,
Each carrying their memory of her,
Lifeless - a souvenir.
Maybe they'll buy the video.
They think I should give them my mother's words
To fill the mouth of their monster
Their Sylvia Suicide Doll.What must it be like to have one's flesh-and-blood parents being used as some kind of symbol by others? |
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Post by housesparrow on Mar 24, 2009 15:06:08 GMT
It is unkind - but I don't think that recognising that you may inherit a tendency necessarily involves blaming the person you inherited it from. Agreed. People with mental illness or a tendency to it may think twice before deciding to have children - but it isn't helpful to blame them if they go ahead. As for the film - I dislike films based on the lives of real people at the best of times, even those without living relations who remember them. I am always left frustrated because there is no way of separating fact from fiction. |
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Post by gIant on Mar 24, 2009 20:06:44 GMT
I believe it is possible to be genetically disposed to depression.
More so with parents like them!!!
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Post by Flatypus on Mar 24, 2009 20:11:54 GMT
I believe it is possible to be genetically disposed to depression. More so with parents like them!!! Exactly! If some schizophrenic tendencies can be inherited and there is some overlap with depression diagnosis, then some depressive tendencies could be hereditory too. I don't think we really know much about this yet and PC warns off it because of Eugenics beliefs that just about everything wes hereditory. I always thought she was more hysterical and he was more morbid but between the pair of them I'm sure Papa Freud would have had something to say about early influences. |
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Post by jean on Mar 24, 2009 21:38:35 GMT
I always thought she was more hysterical... Those women. It's their wombs, you know. |
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Post by Flatypus on Mar 24, 2009 21:42:39 GMT
I always thought she was more hysterical... Those women. It's their wombs, you know. So do you think it might be the lack of monthly loss of bad blood that accounted for his morbidity? Or does it suggest some correlation between mental stability in women and low reproductivity? |
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Post by jean on Mar 24, 2009 21:48:58 GMT
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Post by Flatypus on Mar 24, 2009 22:16:19 GMT
Probably because everybody recognises familiar terms like hysterical and in a flap or for that matter morbid than they are of their origins and technical usage, even if they can't define them exactly - in fact because they can't define them more exactly, much as they recognise a fit or spastic spasms without assumptions of actual epilepsy or cerebral palsy. Try finding a replacement.
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Post by riotgrrl on Mar 25, 2009 13:28:27 GMT
Piffle
I'm with Jean on this one. I really don't like the use of the word 'hysterical' and I'll tell you for why . . . if a word is only ever applied to one gender but does not really have anything to do with their gender ('hysterical' is, after all, a term used to describe colloquially a particular state of distress that we all recognise from the word) then it's questionable.
It's part of the whole use of language thing . . . a white man is ambitious, a black man is uppity ... to make people feel superior.
My basic rule of thumb is to be very, very careful of using a word which is only ever associated with one gender.
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Post by housesparrow on Mar 25, 2009 13:56:56 GMT
Hysterical, yes, that is something we associate with women... but I know men who get into flaps so think it can be used for either sex.
I tend to think of Plath as having what my mother used to describe as an "artistic temperament."
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Post by Flatypus on Mar 25, 2009 13:58:25 GMT
I've never used, or heard 'hysterical' used only of one gender outside of specific historical context when it meant something slightly different. I find there is a PC tendency to restore restrictive implications that words have long since lost, in order to complain about them. For intance, I've seen Obama called 'ambitious' in news items for and against him and nobody would use a word like 'uppity' without pejoriative implications - but it's a word I've heard occasionally to presume the attitude of conservatives to anybody they would consider a pushy social inferior, a sort of implied transference of pejaroative association from the described to the presumed describer.
I think this re-genderisation of words has dangeruos implications because it usually applies more to words with a feminine origin, so carries with it the implication of feminine as inferior, and at the same time it excludes females from criticism that can be applied freely to males.
I don't think there would be any problem if I'd desccribed him as the more hysterical of the pair and her as more morbid. But it happens the impression is always the other way round. It is likely to be the other way round because there were gender sterreotypes at word and therefore they encourage the male self-absorption to withdraw into gloom and the female into emotional outburst. I don't know a better term than Hysteria for emotional outbursts drawing attention to oneself, so maybe we should have suggestions for alternatives. I think Jean is just imposing her own gender stereotyping that frankly, I have no time for and don't believe anybody else has either.
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