Daughter attacks film about Plath in poem

January 18, 2006 The 48-line poem, ‘My Mother’, accuses the BBC of voyeuristically exploiting Plath’s life and death:

Now they want to make a film
For anyone lacking the ability
To imagine the body, head in oven
Orphaning children

The poem will be published in the next issue of Tatler.

Hughes, who was two years old when her mother committed suicide in 1963, accuses the corporation of commercialising her mother’s death, The Guardian writes: "They think I should give them my mother's words/ To fill the mouth of their monster/ Their Sylvia Suicide Doll". She is horrified by the idea of an audience being entertained by Plath’s tragic story:

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.

Hughes said she had written the poem because nobody was taking her protests against the film seriously. "I wrote a letter to them saying 'No I don't want to collaborate', and they kept coming back," she told the Sunday Times. "Why would I want to be involved in moments of my childhood which I never want to return to? I want nothing to do with this film. I will never, never in a million years, go to see it." As the executor of her mother’s estate, she has denied the film-makers permission to use any of Plath’s poetry.

The BBC film, called Ted and Sylvia, stars Oscar-winning actress Gwyneth Paltrow as Plath. It follows the success of the BBC film about writer Iris Murdoch, Iris. The corporation maintains that Plath’s story has been approached “in a responsible and unsensational way.”