Her Husband

Comes home dull with coal-dust deliberately

To grime the sink and foul towels and let her
Learn with scrubbing brush and scrubbing board
The stubborn character of money.
And let her learn through what kind of dust
He has earned his thirst and the right to quench it
And what sweat he has exchanged for his money
And the blood-weight of money. He’ll humble her
With new light on her obligations.
The fried, woody, chips, kept warm two hours in the oven,
Are only part of her answer.
Hearing the rest, he slams them to the fire back
And is away round the house-end singing
‘Come back to Sorrento’ in a voice
Of resounding corrugated iron.
Her back has bunched into a hump as an insult.
For they will have their rights.
Their jurors are to be assembled
From the little crumbs of soot. Their brief
Goes straight up to heaven and nothing more is heard of it.
Summary

Sylvia Plath surely surpasses any other poet of her generation as a cultural icon and
center of controversy. Was she the victim of a misogynist husband? Is she a feminist
martyr? How did Plath come to write the stunning poems of her last year? What was
Ted Hughes’s role in advancing or retarding her reputation? Why did he destroy some
of her work? What kind of man marries two women who commit suicide?

To gauge the significance of Diane Middlebrook’s book, it is necessary to place it in the

context of the voluminous Plath canon. Although Middlebrook provides a bibliography, it
is unfortunate that she does not separate it into primary and secondary works so that
the reader can clearly see how the growth of literature about Plath coincided with
Hughes’s editing and publication of his late wife’s poetry and prose.

After Plath’s suicide in 1963, Hughes oversaw the publication of Ariel (1965), the
collection of poems that suddenly catapulted Plath into the ranks of the twentieth
century’s best-known poets. Until then, she had published only one book of poems, The
Colossus (1960), as well as the novelThe Bell Jar (1963) under the name Victoria
Lucas. Plath used a pseudonym because she did not want the autobiographical work
associated with the reputation she had established as a poet. Plath’s reputation first
took hold in England, where, however, she was seen as decidedly inferior to Hughes,
who had been hailed from his first book on as a major poet. The Colossus was received
as a worthy but by no means groundbreaking work. Before Hughes left Plath, she had
composed perhaps no more than four or five poems that were later considered to be
among her finest achievements. Her work while married to Hughes seemed somehow
too controlled, too perfected, too derivative of the great writers she absorbed with
scholarly intensity. After her husband left, Plath erupted, producing a body of poetry
that, for quantity and quality, has no equal among her contemporaries.

Middlebrook relates this part of the Plath saga extremely well, shrewdly noting that while
Plath may not have been producing her greatest work while living with Hughes, his
example and their constant interchanges as poets and as husband and wife were
having a cumulative effect that would issue forth in the creative flow of her last year.
Even at moments when Plath seemed quiescent as a writer—baking cakes and caring
for her two children—she was storing up metaphors and gearing up for her greatest
work. No completely satisfying biography of Plath has yet appeared, but Middlebrook
provides a mid-course correction, so to speak, by dislodging Plath from her early
passive role as Hughes’s consort and by propelling her into Hughes’s life as a goad and
inspiration for some of his best writing.

As Middlebrook makes clear, Hughes bears considerable blame not only for obscuring
Plath’s contribution to his own work but also for distorting his late wife’s achievement.
Although Plath had completed and organized for publication her masterpiece Ariel,
Hughes took it upon himself to rearrange the order of the poems and to suppress
certain works. Even worse, he destroyed two of her journals, claiming they contained
material that would hurt their two children. Later, as Middlebrook reports, he cast doubt
on this explanation when he admitted that, in fact, very little of those journals contained
anything that the children would find disturbing. When the remaining Plath journals were
first published in 1982, Hughes made the editor excise certain passages that he
deemed too personal (usually relating to him), and he exerted the same kind of
censorship on Plath’s mother when she published her daughter’s letters to her in Letters
Home (1975). Some of Hughes’s damage has been undone with the publication of The
Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath (2000).
Ted Hughes is more renowned for his portraits of animals and natural
landscape than people. Especially early on, he is more interested in, as
he expressed it, capturing animal and natural life in language as he
does so brilliantly in poems like ‘The Jaguar’, ‘Wind’ and ‘Thrushes’.
However, it’s not true to say Hughes does not write about human life
and some would argue that a poem like ‘Hawk Roosting’ though on the
face of it about a creature is really about human behaviour. In ‘Her
Husband’ Hughes is clearly focussed on the human in a marriage
which is full of bitterness and resentment.
‘Her Husband’ is written in the third person, giving a distanced but
vivid portrait of a marriage through the events of one evening. The
title of the poem forms part of the opening sentence so the poem’s
opening line, starting with “Comes home”, already gives the
impression of the husband as an almost impersonal force, unnamed
perhaps because already all too familiar to his wife. The thumping
alliteration of the opening line (dull – dust – deliberately), reinforces
the man’s brute entry into the house. As a working miner he spreads
“coal-dust” about the house but Hughes emphasises his inconsiderate
nature with the adverb “deliberately” and the forceful, unpleasant
verbs associated with his arrival: “grime” and “foul”. This opening
quatrain flows quickly, being unpunctuated from start to finish,
evoking an arrival which is sudden, sweeping, unstoppable. The ugly
internal rhyme of “foul towels” also contributes to the impression of
his disruptive arrival and Hughes conveys the husband’s resentful
attitude with the idea that he intends to teach his wife about the
“stubborn character of money”. This personification of money as a
person difficult to deal with, to persuade, cleverly conveys the
husband’s own difficulties with the exhausting character of his day’s
work. But he intends to impress this resentment on his wife who he
wants to work (repetitively) with “scrubbing brush and scrubbing
board”. This is not a relationship in which we see any love,
compromise or mutual respect, though we have yet to be shown much
of the wife’s perspective.
In fact the second quatrain continues in much the same vein with a
repetition of the phrase “let her learn”. All this repetition conveys the
husband’s determined intentions. Lines 4-8 also introduce a
vocabulary of a more moralistic kind. The narrative voice echoes what
must be the husband’s thoughts about the way he has “earned” the
“right” to go drinking in the pub before he returns home. He regards
the earning of his wage as a physical and personal “exchange” of his
physical “sweat” for cash and the hyphenated phrase describing
money as possessing “blood-weight” particularly conveys the sense of
his personal sacrifice as a working man, how he feels the day’s work
metaphorically costs him “blood” (as a miner this might be sometimes
literal too). I think Hughes goes some way here to encouraging
sympathy from the reader for the husband’s situation but the quick
return to his aggressive, even vicious, attitude to his wife in the heavily
alliterated and emphatic phrase “He’ll humble her” (line 8) definitely
lessens any sympathy I may be feeling.
The simple metaphor of casting “new light” on his wife’s role is used in
line 9. There is a sort of tired familiarity throughout this poem (on
both husband and wife’s sides) and I suspect this sort of encounter is
not the first of its kind so the idea of him casting/teaching “new” light
probably really reflects his sense that however much he tries to do this
she does not “learn” to behave as he expects by more obediently taking
note of what he sees as her “obligations”. I doubt whether he himself
would have used many of the moral terms that the third person
narrative voice employs in these lines, so the distancing voice Hughes
has chosen to use enables these more abstract points to be made. It’s
only at line 10 that we get a sense of the wife’s “answer” to her
husband’s demands. As has been implied already, her reply to his
demands is not at all submissive. We are told “part of her answer” is
the disgusting-sounding meal with its “fried, woody chips” though it’s
partly unpleasant because it has had to be kept warm in the oven “for
two hours” (the fact that he’s so late home increases our sympathy for
his wife). But her fight back is sustained it seems; the other “part” of
her answer to his demanding and bullying attitudes must be spoken to
him or probably shouted. Interestingly, Hughes gives us none of this
directly as it is only implied in the brief phrase “Hearing the rest” in
line 12.
The husband’s corresponding response to his wife’s uncooperative
(surely complaining) reply is immediate and violent. The husband’s
vigorous determination causes Hughes to run-on sentences at the end
of both stanza 2 and 3. Here, the violent verb “slams” shows how he
disposes of her cooked meal in the fire and sweeps out of the house
and “away round the house-end” all in one flowing, swift,
uninterrupted sentence. The husband’s singing voice is described as
“resounding corrugated iron” in a typical Hughesian metaphor
(linking the organic with the metallic or industrial). Also the song he
chooses to sing is full of irony and deliberately insulting as it is a
romantic song of lost love. Line 16 gives us a brief last glimpse of the
wife’s response, her body language suggesting her own stubborn
resentment, “bunched into a hump”. Hughes adds a simile to make her
antagonism even more clear: “as an insult”.

The final quatrain now departs from the specific actions of the married
couple and returns to the more moralistic and even legalistic language
that I noted earlier in the poem. Here the narrator’s distance from the
domestic argument is clear again. This poem was first published
in Wodwo (Faber, 1967) and, as a relatively early Hughes poem, it is
unusual in its focus on individual people though this distancing effect
suggests he may be observing their behaviour in the same way as he
does a jaguar in a cage or the power of the wind. Line 17 is the shortest
sentence in the whole poem and declares, in firm monosyllables, that
both sides in this conflict “will have their rights”. This makes it clear
there is no room or desire for compromise. The final three lines
introduce the language of the law court (a divorce court perhaps?)
though the jury are “to be assembled / From the little crumbs of soot”.
This soot reminds us of the coal-dust he brings into the house in line 1,
but also of the burnt dinner thrown into the fire-back in line 12. These
tiny black specks suggest to me that such a jury will never come to any
clear conclusion in this dispute. They suggest the hopelessness of the
couple’s situation. This rather depressing ending to the portrait of a
marriage is confirmed in the final line and a half as we are told that the
legal “brief” (a technical term for one side’s case in a law court) follows
the smoke and soot up the chimney. This suggests that the arguments
on both sides metaphorically go up in smoke. Hughes concludes in the
plainest language: “nothing more is heard of it”. The way in which the
events of the dismal evening vanish up the chimney suggest the
likelihood that something similar may happen again tomorrow and the
day after.
Conclusion
So Hughes’ portrait of a marriage is very bleak indeed. The narrative
voice describes events at a distance and though there are occasions
when the reader does feel sympathy for the people involved, the
language of the poem itself is not at all emotional. The poem’s voice
sees events from both husband and wife’s perspectives though it’s
interesting that we are never given any actual dialogue in this
domestic row. Hughes’ irregularly-lined and unrhymed quatrains suit
the poem’s plain description in a mostly colloquial tone: this is not a
poem or situation where any lyricism or poetically-charged language
would really be appropriate.