Sylvia Plath's Despair: It's Academic

Eighteen-year-old Sylvia Plath had written her mother Aurelia about exhaustion, sleeplessness and thoughts of suicide during her first semester at Smith College. On Sunday 10 December 1950 she wrote her mother about a fellow freshman who was suicidal over the college's academic demands. Reading between the lines, Aurelia wrote, in Gregg shorthand, on that letter's envelope:

Go to Dr. Booth Sylvia should go with her. If she wants they can should see Dr. Booth Tuesday. Girl will then be brought analyzed in one another presence. 

Aurelia, clearly rattled, seemed to misunderstand psychiatric treatment, yet wasn't ignorant or cold regarding Sylvia's depressions and was sharply aware that Sylvia needed something like analysis. Sylvia's previous letter (7 December 1950) had signaled Aurelia with triggering words:

. . . hoping that I can make it to Xmas vacation without going completely insane -- you know that sort of morbid depression I sink into. . . 

Whether the girls met with Dr. Booth, the college's psychiatrist, I don't know, but not 24 hours after writing the December 10 letter Sylvia wrote Aurelia that her friend seemed much better.

Getting all "A" grades was a distinction Sylvia wanted whatever its price. As a scholarship student, she only worked harder. Aurelia later told psychiatrists and journalists that overwork -- and not sexual matters -- had driven Sylvia to a breakdown. Academics were a double-digit percentage of Sylvia's trouble in summer 1953. In Sylvia's journal, October 1951, her sophomore year, Sylvia had written:

But worst of all I have this terrible responsibility of being an A-student. . . and I don't see how I can keep up my front. [1]

The tripwire for Sylvia's suicide attempt was academic: being denied admission to Frank O'Connor's writing course at Harvard. Sylvia tried killing herself in late August, the timing suggesting she dreaded returning to Smith for an extra-demanding senior year requiring an honors thesis about a novel, Finnegan's Wake, she hadn't yet read, and comprehensive English-lit exams she wasn't prepared for. [2] Which was her own fault. Esther Greenwood says:

I'd skipped [a course in eighteenth-century literature]. . . . They let you do that in honors, you were much freer. I'd been so free I'd spent most of my time on Dylan Thomas.  (TBJ, 139) 

She might even fail those exams. Or score less than brilliantly and not get a summa cum laude to go with her Phi Beta Kappa and college writing prizes, and so on.

Sylvia spent the fall '53 semester in mental hospitals and had electroshock treatments until in December she suddenly felt much better. In 1959 she pondered:

Why, after the 'amazingly short' three or so shock treatments did I rocket uphill? [3]

Sylvia wrote that the few treatments felt like sufficient "punishment." She doesn't say that if she claimed to be healed she could return to college for a gently scheduled extra semester to correct her path toward a triumphant senior year.

[1] Journal Fragment 17-19 October 1951, Journals.

[2] In the 1950s through the '60s, James Joyce was every English department's darling. Joyce scholars were the giants of the discipline (and acted the part). Sylvia wanted to be counted among them. Realizing she might not succeed, she chose another topic.

[3] "Therapy Notes," 3 January 1959, Journals. 

Otto Plath in the News

I'd thought a Nevada divorce was your own business and no one else's, so was surprised to read about Otto's in the old Boston American, January 5, 1932.

According to "dispatches"? From whom and where it didn't say. Otto Plath had divorced the day before, January 4. That news arrived in Boston overnight? Did Otto phone the Boston papers to tell them? Did Aurelia's mother phone in to get ahead of any gossip? Was Otto so well known? The fancy biology professor divorced in Sin City, U.S.A. some Lydia gal. Who knew?

The tattlers were Reno's squad of part-time newspaper "stringers." These freelance reporters wrote up and telegraphed to papers news too minor for full-time journalists. Stringers in Reno got the list of the day's divorces -- public information. They chose and distilled them, then wired them overnight to the parties' hometowns(!). A published dispatch paid the stringer $2, or $5. For a celebrity's divorce, maybe $10.

The Plath divorce notice again appeared January 8 in The Boston Post, specifying Carson City, Nevada. Not a peep about Otto and Aurelia marrying there.

Otto Plath wasn't in the newspapers much. He spoke to a beekeepers' society in 1923, gave a few other public talks. Aurelia took little Sylvia to hear Otto speak at Boston University, I think on February 23, 1935. The Boston Transcript said his topic was "Nature Study." Maybe it's that memory Sylvia wrote about in her short story "Among the Bumblebees":

Alice had thought, then, of the great hall at college where her father stood, high upon a platform. She had been there once with Mother, and there had been hundreds of people who came to listen to her father talk and tell them wonderful strange things about how the world was made.

Plath Ancestry, Solved

Plath ancestors. Sylvia's complete family tree is at FamilySearch.org.

Used to be that the Plath family tree went back only to 1826, the birth year of Sylvia's great-grandfather Johann, the man who disowned his grandson Otto. That's 200 years. It wasn't enough.

I recently added two confirmed generations to Plath ancestry, back to the 1700s.

Johann Plath and wife Caroline came to the U.S. from Prussia in 1885, bringing two young-adult children, Emil and Marie. According to locals, the Plaths arrived in Wisconsin "very poor people." I figured they had fled German/Prussian persecution. In fact Johann's brother had died in 1884 and Johann intended to run his brother's farm. When Johann retired he rented a house. By 1899 he was able to pay Otto's passage to America and for the boy's tuition. The string attached was that Otto had to become a Lutheran minister. When Otto, college graduate, told Johann he'd rather be a teacher, Johann crossed Otto's name out of the family Bible and cut him loose.

Otto might not be the only offspring Johann disowned. Either he or Caroline told the 1910 federal census-taker that they had eight children, five still living. [1] Documentation shows only two of the eight were dead: a son who died in childhood and Marie, dead in 1895. Johann, maybe along with his wife, considered one of his six surviving children dead to him.

Which child? Don't know. But if this wasn't a miscalculation it offered more of a sense of how Johann's love and money were contingent on obedience, even from a grandson who in 1910 was 25.

They said out of their eight kids only five were living.

Of old Johann's father, U.S. records said only that his name was Julius, and there the Plath family trail went cold. There were many ethnic-German "Julius Plaths" all over Prussia, and none a match.

A Plath descendant had met with this same genealogical "roadblock," and last year I promised I would scour German/Prussian records to find our man. Three weeks ago I found Julius and a bonus -- his parents' names and their wedding date.

Born in Luebbersdorf in northern Prussia, Julius Plath (1791-1847) was baptized Andreas Julius Plath, after his two baptismal sponsors. Other local records call him "Andreas Julius" and "Julius Andreas," but he went by "Julius" and his own kids didn't know otherwise.

Julius was copying his own father, Johann Heinrich Plath (born 1766) who amid the tons of other "Johanns" in the Grand Duchy of Mecklenburg-Schwerin chose to be called "Heinrich." Below is Julius's 1791 baptismal record. Heinrich's name starts beneath the inkblot, and the entry ends with his wife's name, Regina Maria Schroeder (b. 1763) whom Heinrich married in 1785. [2]

The name "Heinrich Plath" starts on the line below the ink blot.

Google Lens solemnly told me it couldn't read the above. So I applied my experience, and bingo.

The land that in Otto's time became the Polish Corridor has twelve (yes, a dozen) towns and villages named "Grabow." Via the Julius inquiry I was finally persuaded that Otto Plath's birthplace was the "Grabow" specifically in district Mecklenburg, Otto's now well-documented North German ancestral home. Then I tried finding a record of Otto's birth. The books covering his birth year, 1885, and a few adjacent years are missing.

[1]  United States, Census, 1910," FamilySearch (https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:MPVY-J66 : Thu Mar 07 18:28:20 UTC 2024), Entry for John Plath and Caroline Plath, 1910.

[2] I replaced the umlauts in the text with the "ue" and "oe" just for now.

Sylvia Plath family tree at FamilySearch.org. 

Pleased With Everything: Plath Family Papers at Yale

The Plath family has gifted Aurelia and Warren Plath's literary estates to Yale University's Beinecke Library. This donation ended my seven years of being bound by a non-disclosure agreement. 

I saw and photographed Aurelia Plath's estate materials, then privately owned, back in 2018, and despite temptation have kept quiet all this time, praying that the letters, postcards, photo albums, artwork, realia, and Aurelia's journals -- ranged across 22 different notebooks, entries dated 1924 to 1990 -- might not rot in boxes or be auctioned off piece by piece, that the archive would stay whole, a gift to all Plath scholars. I am grateful.

Aurelia's journals for 1963, photographed in 2018. I used the ruler for scale.

In 2018 I spent only two days with the 20-plus boxes of Aurelia's estate so couldn't see every bit, but it included treasures I hope haven't been sold or withheld. We will at last see what Aurelia did not sell to Indiana University or donate to Smith but kept until she died. Yale's archivists are currently processing the materials and told me they expect to finish in autumn. I plan to be there and report to you. I don't expect a mob. This is the stuff Aurelia valued and you know how she has been valued. My impression was that Aurelia was a very critical and love-hungry adult (so was Sylvia) and she could keep a secret.

Remember this is once again Aurelia-curated material. It might or might not alter the narratives we are used to.

Such a thrill, of the sort researchers get! And what a relief. For two days after I learned about this gift to Yale I quivered all over and couldn't sleep or eat. Call me a geek, but I'm a happy one.

The Beautiful Mrs. Plath: Rare Photos

Otto Plath's first wife Lydia Bartz, as she looked when they met.

Here's a new-found photo of Otto Plath's first wife, Lydia Bartz, in 1910 a clerk at the Fall Creek, Wisconsin, general store her father founded. She married Otto in Spokane, Washington, in 1912. The couple then moved to Berkeley, California, where in 1915 Otto split for New York without her, complaining that she was "not educated" and sexually cold.

Not only was Lydia Bartz "very pretty," as the town clerk told Harriet Rosenstein she was: Lydia was diligent. [1] When Otto abandoned her, owing her prosperous family a crippling amount of money, Lydia with Otto's sister Frieda enrolled in a Chicago nursing school, graduated in 1918, went to Ohio for post-graduate studies, moved back home, and soon supervised the surgical unit of Luther Hospital in Eau Claire, the city nearest Fall Creek. Below, in 1953, Lydia is honored by her college's alumnae for her years of service and for teaching "more than 500 nurses," but her service wasn't over; she passed her final annual nursing-license exam in 1960, age 71.

April, 1953

Yet Lydia's life wasn't anywhere near finished; she lived until 1988, dying at age 99. She was the only one of five Bartz sisters to marry, and even after a 15-year separation from Otto and no children she refused to divorce him, making his life difficult. Otto -- immortalized by his daughter Sylvia Plath as "Daddy" the fascist and "brutal male," doubtless deserved it, because Lydia, and Otto's second wife Aurelia Schober, learned to hate him, and Sylvia as a child "many times wished that he were dead." [3]

1. "very pretty": Fall Creek town clerk Marjorie Shong to Harriet Rosenstein, 22 February 1977, Emory.

2.  Luther is now a Mayo Clinic satellite campus.

3. Journals of Sylvia Plath, p. 293. 

Photo credits: 1910 photo from Henke, Patricia: Sights and Sounds of the Valley: A History of Fall Creek (1978); Eau Claire (WI) Leader-Telegram, 16 April 1953. 

Sylvia Von Platho

Baroness Charlotte Sophie von Platen und Hallermund (1669-1725)

Plath family lore says Sylvia Plath's paternal great-grandfather Johann, when he came from Prussia to America, gave his name as Johann von Plath, the "von" indicating descent from a line of nobles, specifically barons, who for 900 years had lived on land grants from Prussian rulers. An American official scolded Johann, "We do not allow titles in America."

Not contented to live the rest of his life as a common Wisconsin farmer, ten years later for his daughter Mary's death certificate Johann Plath gave his surname as "von Platho." His father and brother and his children and grandchildren were all from birth surnamed "Plath," none of them "von Plath," or "von Platho," which sounds like a made-up name anyway. But it's a real name.

Sylvia Plath's paternal line shared its home territory with generations of nobles surnamed von Platho, von Platen, von Plotho, von Plato (many scholars have that name), von Plathe -- all from the German root "plat," meaning "flat." The "plat"-rooted names were geographical, "von" meaning "from." So all those names, which in German sound much alike, mean "from the lowlands of northern Germany." That area's also called Pomerania, which is Polish and means "on the sea."

While everyone wishes to have noble or royal ancestry, and Johann Plath, Otto Plath's illiterate grandfather, was a status seeker, no evidence links Sylvia Plath with Prussian or German gentry. German chancellor Otto von Bismarck in the 1870s and 1880s liked handing out the "von" title to flatter and keep the loyalty of wealthy industrialists and parvenus, but Sylvia's family of farmers and small-town blacksmiths was unlikely to receive even that lowest of noble titles. [1] The surname "Plath," with no "von," is very very common.

[1] Spring, David, ed. European Landed Elites in the Nineteenth Century. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977. 

Sylvia Plath's Hair Ribbons and Headbands

Sylvia Plath, 1937.

The cut-out photo below is from Aurelia Schober's college yearbook 1928, and I wonder if it's really her; as that yearbook's editor-in-chief, Aurelia surely pasted her own photo, unlabeled, into a yearbook page titled "When We Were Very Young," showing about 30 childhood photos of women in her graduating class.

Sheesh, I thought; that white bow on the kid, big as her head! Leftover Victorian fashion! Dissuading little girls from playing, swimming, running, napping: enforcing feminine passivity.

The reproachful face makes me think this is Aurelia, around 1912.

Yet most little American girls wore ribbons and bows in the 1910s, '20s, and '30s, when grown American women wore them only to keep their hair out of their faces and and food. In the 2020s exhausted parents tug pink elastic bands onto the sensitive skulls of newborns just to show they are female. Such symbols of femininity and innocence can look cute, and some girls did like wearing ribbons and hairbands, or at least didn't hate them. They maybe thought every female wore them. Here's Sylvia, age three, and her mother at Winthrop in 1936:

I thought Sylvia's mother or grandmother forced her to wear ribbons and bows. But Sylvia spent her life wearing ribbons (pink for her wedding; pale blue for the childhood ponytail her mother cut off and archived), plus bandanas and bands that tamed and trained her hair. That famous "dip" over Sylvia's left eye -- worn long before she went blond in 1954 -- needed a hairpin to anchor it. Where's Sylvia's facial scar in the photo below? It's hidden beneath some quite obvious retouching:

Plath's accessories were pivotal. Her hairpins and watch were removed before electroshock. As you know, Ted Hughes tore off Sylvia's hairband and earrings when they first met. Sylvia mourned "my lovely red hairband scarf which has weathered the sun and much love, and whose like I will never again find." [1] I'd love a Sylvia Plath fanfiction about her hairband and earrings and how she got them back or lost them forever. 

It's in the nature of ribbons and hairbands to get lost and replaced. But because Sylvia so often wore hairbands we will always know that this bookstore finger puppet/fridge magnet, even if its tag goes missing, is Sylvia Plath.

Finger puppet. They're British! They don't ship to USA.

In Sylvia's poem "Parliament Hill Fields," an ordinary dimestore barrette makes the first appearance of its kind in literature:

One child drops a barrette of pink plastic; / None of them seem to notice. [2]

In the context of the poem, Plath made that moment resound.

While there are some articles and book passages about Sylvia's apparel, I hadn't noticed that about half the photos of her show her hair controlled with bandanas and headbands. I didn't even see that Sylvia so often wore headwear until I saw the monstrous white bow on what I think is Aurelia Schober. [3] That child's forlorn expression and wavy, light-ish hair have me thinking it's her. About Aurelia's childhood we as yet have no photos and know almost nothing.

By 1962 Sylvia's hair grew long enough to be braided and coiled into its own headband; the style is called a "crown braid" or "coronet." Sylvia exulted over hers and is wearing it in the famous "daffodil" color photos taken in April '62. Poet Amanda Gorman in 2021 started a media fuss by wearing a red headband crownlike, as if women aren't supposed to do that. It's regal.

A coronet. How to make one?

[1] Journals, 26 February 1956.

[2] "Parliament Hill Fields," written February 1961.

[3] For really small photos of little Sylvia's really monstrous bows, see the Plath family photos of Sylvia on the endpapers of Letters Home.