The (auto)biography of a self: Reconstructing 'Ariel'

When Ted Hughes published Ariel in 1965, amid growing controversy over his possible role in Sylvia Plath's suicide, critics assumed it was a collection of final confessional writings that explained Plath's motivation for suicide. Critics concluded, at the prompting of Hughes, that Ariel's psychotic speaker was Plath herself and that this speaker's inevitable, but enticingly vivid, journey into suicide mirrored Plath's death.; In 1981, Hughes revealed in his introduction to The Collected Poems that the published Ariel was his construction and not the Ariel manuscript arranged by Plath before she died. Analysis of Plath's Ariel reveals that the speaker, unlike the deranged, suicidal speaker of Hughes's volume, is aware of self-effacing, destructive patriarchal forces and is hopeful for new identity independent of these forces. When the two Ariels are juxtaposed, it becomes clear Hughes's editorial actions misrepresented Plath's artistry and made her suicide appear inevitable.