The Ethical Battle of Posthumous Art and Fame

Gabrielle O'Brien, Staff Writer

February 18, 2024

Background picture is of “The Silmarillion” a posthumously published book by J.R.R. Tolkien.

The human mind relies on guilty pleasure and what we were never meant to be aware of. We crave it like we crave water and food. We, as greedy creatures, want more. This is part of the problem with posthumous publication. A person’s epitaph can be contorted so greatly that we must wonder if the view we have of them ever be true. Why do we pry and beg celebrities online for more glimpses of their lives? Why do we want to be more than what we are? Why are we not satiated with what we have?

Five Authors & Artists Who Became Famous Posthumously

A copy of “The Journals of Sylvia Plath” (Gabrielle O’Brien)

Sylvia Plath

Sylvia Plath was an American poet and novelist known for her depressing themes, depressing life, and eventual suicide in 1963 at 30 years old. Her words, precious to her and frank, were never meant for anyone's eyes but hers. Her husband, Ted Hughes, chose to present her diary in the palms of his hands to the world himself.

A week before her suicide she had sent letters to her psychiatrist detailing the abuse alongside his infidelity. Even if the letters were found in 2017, there is reason enough that in publishing these diaries he would just try to cover up his terrible actions to her, making her seem crazy when she had been deeply hurt by many of the men in her life. The first published run was heavily abridged, why it was I cannot imagine. If you are to strip the dead of their privacy why try and be demure about it? Even her crude and unabashed prose is poetic, citing the white gleaming towers of citadels or dreary rainy England days that seep into your bones without reprieve, it's extremely beautiful until you get to the part where she outright admits to her depression and mood swings and outbursts, especially at being hurt, then it begins to become uncomfortable in a way that a diary is meant to be.

We cannot be dissatisfied with not knowing everything because who are we? If she did not make this known to those closest to her heart, why do we deserve such information? Diagnoses studies and overviews are too much. Her novel, The Bell Jar, was censored post-publication and banned in some areas because of "profanity and sexuality but for its overt rejection of the woman's role as wife and mother." If she in life was "too much to handle" for the blatant portrayal of the cruder parts of life then I do not believe society truly does care about her now. Mental health stigmatizations and denials happen far too often for people to say that society as a whole cares. She has lived such an aggrieved life that she deserves to rest without her legacy just being pain.
A copy of “Artists: Their Lives and Work.” by Ross King featuring Van Gogh (Gabrielle O’Brien)

Vincent Van Gogh

Vincent Van Gogh is one of the biggest pop culture artists known posthumously. From bookmarks to an episode of Doctor Who to shoes ,his work has dominated so much of the art scene post-1890, but much of his fame can be attributed to his family. His brother, Theo, held an exhibit in his honor a week after his death, which can be cited as the catalyst for his fame. Jo, Theo's widow, took some lasting letters between the brothers and published them 24 years after their deaths, similar to what Jane Austen's nephew did to her and her sister's letters, but much of the problem is like a diary. Yes, we get to see into the artist's mind but do we deserve it? Would we appreciate their art in life if they had lived longer? I believe they wouldn't. It's a cruel joke that death is the factor society deemed to make some people's lives and works have worth.

Sheldon Pearce from the New Yorker uses a different example with the same effect: "The unfinished project has become a common issue in rap, a genre that is seeing many of its young and talented artists die, leaving caches of uncurated, crude, and deferred music in their wake. The process of producing these albums comes down to the decision-making—who gets to make those decisions and why? What is the aim? And is the record label or the producer in charge asking the most important question: Should this album even be released?" The goal of "putting art first" is often just spitting in the face of that artist as their work never reached their full potential in life. Putting their art first would be appreciating them in life, this is why these posthumous publications are so much worse when it's family because they know intimately who they were, and if they didn't then they didn't fully recognize who they were.

We can also take into account taking advantage of the dead and the mentally ill. By publishing these letters and allowing so much personal information to be known about him we know every gory detail of his mental health struggle, such as Sylvia Plath's. We do not deserve to know all of these things, death does not equate to an open door in someone's life. A study on Springer Open found that "Several previously suggested diagnoses could be excluded as being highly unlikely, while other diagnoses could be classified as more or less likely." What is the purpose of this? He is dead. Is this so that people can more easily relate to him? Is it to prove others wrong or right? The dead will never disappoint but they sure can become beaten to death over and over.
A copy of “Pride and Prejudice” by Jane Austen (Gabrielle O’Brien)

Jane Austen

Jane Austen is one of the most renowned English authors of her time, her works continue to be loved and adapted to this very day with her most recent adaption being Persuasion starring Dakota Johnson, which was the last novel published in her lifetime and it shows. It's a more mature and solemn novel because she was so; being unmarried at 41 in 1817 was both for societal and personal reasons with her personal beliefs of self-sufficiency and worth. This is on the lighter end of the spectrum in which her works were handled with care by a beloved family member, but even then they still altered her image.

Most of her letters to her sister Cassandra were burned after her death, and other family members abridged the remaining letters to keep her image as clean as possible. It was a sign of the times, after all, being unmarried and unabashed about her life could have been a great source of shame for them. We hardly know anything of her, not what she struggled with or what made her tick, and while the attempt to figure it out to enhance her novels can be genuine it still is just speculation. And at what point do these speculations cross over from reality into fictionalizing the woman behind the books? In the film, Becoming Jane, it is said that the makers used what little knowledge known about her love interest combined with inspiration from her books, and it is likely to conclude that they did the same for Jane. In a surviving letter, Jane tells her sister "I am almost afraid to tell you how my Irish friend and I behaved ... Imagine to yourself everything most profligate and shocking in the way of dancing and sitting down together."

She was just a young woman and deserved to act as such, but her family did not trust her in life or death. Like with my point about Van Gogh, people will push their personal beliefs onto a figure they relate to, and because of the ambiguity in their actual lives, it's almost as if they are the perfect templates to do so. A woman who was unmarried until her death at 41 years old, wrote potentially proto-feminist works--proto-feminist in the way that Charlotte Bronte, someone who disapproved of her works, was "proto-feminist" which her sister Anne moreso was--when her novels could've been about a young woman behaving as such and observing the people around her.
A page out of Anne Frank’s Diary (Bryanne Elie)

Anne Frank

I believe that the Diary of Anne Frank is an exception to many of the examples in this article. The purpose of this work being preserved was to make sure that such a terrible point of human history would be preserved from the perspective of the victim, as history is so often told from that of the victor.

Otto Frank, her father, upon looking back at the publication of her "Secret Annex" said that he believes she would have been proud of the choice to share it with the public. The words are best said by the man himself: "The Anne that appeared before me was very different from the daughter I had lost. I had had no idea of the depth of her thoughts and feelings."

First-hand accounts of historical events provide something deeply intimate and personal, such as the other diary in this list, but on a wildly different scale. Both entail suffering and misfortune that eventually lead to a muddy pre-death waft of time. The depth of emotion and palpability of such is a rare commodity so often looked over; human emotion is something that so often cannot be put into words. It is a phenomenon that cannot be easily explained and has layers upon layers in a way that such a piece of historical context is a gem, as terrible to say given context. Through her, we remember so much more than just one girl named Anne Frank.
A copy of “The Silmarillion” by J.R.R Tolkien (Gabrielle O’Brien)

J.R.R. Tolkien

J. R. R. Tolkien is known as one of the greatest authors ever, with inventive and imaginative stories chock full of new languages, lives, and lands that will most likely never be forgotten. This is the happiest example in the article for it denotes a devoted and loving son who carried on his father's legacy with care. His son Christopher put much care into preserving the legacy of his father while sustaining the fan base of his father's works for decades until he died in 2020.

Andrew Biswell shares a similar perspective that I do, that the estate and Christopher cared enough to spend decades meticulously perfecting every detail is a clear example of posthumous publication done right. The avoidance of ethical issues, especially because Christopher disliked the live-action depictions of Lord of The Rings as they were "turned into action films for 15-25 year-olds." 50 years of his life were dedicated to his father, that is not just love for his father, but love for his legacy and love for literature.

An article by the Huffington Post, written by Gregory Beyer, includes an opinion about posthumous art I disagree with. A quote by Lloyd Jassin, a New York-based entertainment lawyer, said that if an author did not want their inflammatory work to be published posthumously then before death, they should destroy said work. Many times death is sudden and quite unexpected, so if an author waited until death to destroy a written work to avoid publication then of course there are so many unfinished pieces.

I then asked my fellow Tribe-mate, Bryanne Elie, what she thinks of posthumous publication as an avid reader herself. I gave her my original context, that being that humans yearn for more information and personal details and that the allowance of details of authors post-death is often given by people who took advantage of them she gave me a really insightful answer. She said that while it is a gray area and it is terrible that people who were taken advantage of in life are also in death it allows for humanization as well. With Anne Frank’s diary published we got to see the Holocaust from a first-person perspective because many of the details are anecdotes or artifacts. It’s personal and a bit intrusive but allows for empathy too. And concerning Sylvia Plath, people can better understand some techniques or allusions in her work.

Posthumous work has its place in literature but must be done in an empathetic and humanizing fashion, or else you could be taking advantage of the dead.

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The Ethical Battle of Posthumous Art and Fame

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