"Had She Plotted It All?": Mimetic representation and fictionalisation of Sylvia Plath in her work and in David Aceituno's "Sylvia & Ted"

Abstract

Sylvia Plath's poetry, after her suicide in 1963, has become as significantly notorious as her life and her failed marriage to the Poet Laureate Ted Hughes. Concerning her compositions, Plath had always been aware of the use she made of her life in her search for inspiration. In this sense, not only her poems but also full writings compilations –journals, letters and short stories– have been considered by biographers and critics as reliable information suppliers. In this regard, this MA thesis aims to state Plath's consciousness in the creation of her role as a character in her own fiction, with a focus on her inclination to take to the limits her own daily and vital experiences in order to creatively benefit from them. By the same token, this study intends to explore Plath's reasons to commit suicide by considering it a logical consequence of her work: it argues Plath's creation of her own character and its development in her artistic world, up to the point of being the reason of her last sufferings and ultimate death. Thus, it provides with significant examples of Plath's literary legacy in order to demonstrate this thesis through the analysis of her life and words. In addition to this, this work also traces how the author herself is not entirely the owner of her image as a character, but a potential character in other author's work –novelists, biographers, etc. This study goes further by claiming that the words and actions, in this particular case, do not belong to Plath any longer, but to fiction, where her legacy is as notorious as it was with the intention of reaching posterity in the constitution of her character. Lastly, these biofictions inspired by Plath's life and work are situated at the same level of reliability as biographies about the authoress are, concluding how the biographic genre has in this particular case the same component of fiction as biofictions do.