SYLVIA PLATH and the Mythology of Women Readers by JANET BADIA

Author:JANET BADIA [BADIA, JANET]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-55849-896-9
Publisher: University of Massachusetts Press
Published: 2011-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

While Murphy’s account of the event at Colgate points to some unspoken hostility in the air (provided one sets aside the question of whether one professor could be responsible for an audience’s worth of animosity), the portraits he offers of Hughes’s audiences generally are far from threatening ones. In fact, Murphy’s description of both the Amherst and Colgate audiences may well remind us of Janet Hawley’s depiction of Hughes’s Adelaide audience, the audience that has come to stand in so often for Hughes’s vilification, the one so mesmerized by Hughes that even the rabid feminists in the room couldn’t help but abandon their cause.

In specific accounts of performances Hughes gave outside the United States, one encounters similar portraits of the audiences Hughes encountered. The news coverage of his public appearance at the International Authors Festival in Toronto in October 1983 suggests he faced a more than amiable crowd. According to the Globe and Mail, Hughes and the other “luminaries” were even greeted by adoring female “literary groupies.”51 In Britain, his reception at the Cambridge Poetry Festival in 1975 appears equally warm; there, according to Elaine Feinstein, his audience listened to him with “an impassioned stillness,” attention that continued at the post-performance party at Feinstein’s house, where “there were many young women attracted to his side.”52 Indeed, having spent months trying to track down descriptions of Hughes’s audiences at his poetry readings, I can attest that firsthand accounts of adoring—one might say seduced—young women are nearly as common as secondhand reports of harassing feminists.

Getting back to the question of the performances he offered in the United States, accounts of his 1986 appearance at Seton Hall University in South Orange, New Jersey, shortly after his appointment as poet laureate suggest it too was uneventful.53 Ample coverage prior to the event in the New York Times, Newark Star-Ledger, East Orange Record, and Seton Hall’s student newspaper the Setonian suggest a strong interest in Hughes’s reading; and the only post-event coverage to be found (which amounts to a photo of Hughes in the midst of the reading with a brief caption) offers nothing that might suggest Hughes faced a less than welcoming audience, though all reports confirm the rarity of his appearances in the United States between the mid-1970s and mid-1980s.54 Nearly all the papers note that the Seton Hall reading was his first U.S. appearance in over ten years, which, except for a brief trip to Alaska in 1980, appears accurate.

While it’s impossible to conduct a search that would exhaust all the possible sources that might have reported on Hughes’s performances over the years—or even to generate a comprehensive and definitive list of his performances—the information I have uncovered can still be useful, for at the very least it suggests a more complex narrative about what Hughes encountered at his readings than the one that has circulated, uncorroborated yet unchallenged, for the better part of three decades. Hughes’s letters, both published and unpublished, provide further dimensions to a revised narrative about his public performances and the feminist harassers who were ostensibly so problematic.

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