Even if works of the imagination could talk, they could never testify. Being fictional, how could they swear to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but? Nonetheless, a number of angry plaintiffs in recent years have brought libel suits charging that they were represented, and misrepresented, by fictional characters in stories, novels and films. The latest such suit, against the film version of Sylvia Plath's novel The Bell Jar, ended last week with a court-endorsed settlement that sent a cautionary and somewhat paradoxical message: when you make things up, be sure to tell the truth.
Dr. Jane V. Anderson, who teaches psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, * contended that she was the model for Joan Gilling, a central character in both the book and the movie. Claiming that the film defamed and humiliated her by presenting Gilling as a suicidal lesbian, she brought suit in a Boston federal court. The 14 individual and corporate defendants included Plath's widower, the British poet laureate Ted Hughes, who sold the movie rights of her novel for $60,000, as well as the filmmakers and two television companies that showed the movie, CBS and Time Inc.'s Home Box Office.
Anderson fell short of her stated goals -- $6 million in damages and a ban on further showings of the film -- but she won from the defendants an admission that the movie had "unintentionally defamed" her. All new copies, including new videocassettes, must now carry prominent disclaimers labeling the story as fiction. She was also awarded $150,000, a sum that will just about cover her current legal expenses. Said her attorney, Harry L. Manion III: "We've won a permanent record for all the world to see."
Before the settlement ended the trial just prior to her cross-examination, Anderson was an impressive witness in her own behalf, vehemently denying she had ever been a lesbian. "I never, never in any way attempted to seduce Sylvia Plath into a homosexual relationship," she told the court in unwavering tones. Referring to other details in the film, she added, "I also never made any suicide attempts or had scars on my breast. And certainly I never hung myself." Precisely, said defense lawyers, because the character is fictional. "Joan Gilling commits suicide, in the book and the movie, and yet Jane Anderson is here in court," Attorney Alexander H. Pratt Jr. pointed out to the jury in his opening statement. "Obviously the character was fictitious."
The law has no well-developed standard for judging the culpability of fiction; libel rulings have been concerned mostly with news reports. Real people have served as models for fictional characters, from Proust's Baron Charlus to Bellow's Humboldt. An author's weave of truth and invention is difficult to unravel, and never more so than in a semiautobiographical work like The Bell Jar, which was first published in Britain in 1963, just a month before Plath committed suicide. The story of a young woman's descent into madness spoke to the rising women's movement as well as the romantic instincts of the college generation, and when the novel appeared in the U.S. eight years later, Plath became a cult figure.