Conflicting Perspectives

Conflicting perspectives are an inevitable construction of context, emotions and purpose, and they lie at the heart of many significant texts. The acts of representation, such as the choice of textual forms, features and language, shape meaning and influence responses.Composers of texts attempt to convince audiences of the veracity of their arguments and manipulate them into adopting their perspective of events, personalities and situations. Ted Hughes’ anthology “ the Birthday Letters” is a skilful display of poeticism, offering his own personal mythology on his dysfunctional marriage with Sylvia Plath. Through the confessional poems Your Paris and Red, Hughes offers a conflicting perspective on Plath, persuading the reader that it was he who was the victim suffocating under Plath’s mental instability and her manipulative, obsessive nature with the men in her life. Hughes perspective is conflicted with the film portrayal of Plath’s life - “Sylvia” Christine jeffs 2003 . The biographical film sheds a sympathetic light on Plath as she is portrayed as a helpless, innocent young girl, who is corrupted by Hughes, the leading cause of her eventual demise. Plath is not seen as the cause of her many outbursts, again conflicting with whom really was the instigator for Plath’s unsound mentality.
The notion of Conflicting Perspectives embodies a clash of opposing viewpoints and accepts that different people will always have different perspectives of themselves, others and the world around them. Composers craft representations of personalities, events or situations to challenge preexisting perspectives by their anticipated audiences providing new insights and in some cases, provocative . Writing his poems as letters to Plath, Hughes indicates that from the beginning, their outlooks were different, even antagonistic in Your Paris. Hughes emphasises their conflicting perspectives through the repetition of “your Paris” and “my Paris”, foreshadowing the impending doom of their...