Aurelia Plath's Political Group

On 9 January 1953 Sylvia Plath, her leg in a cast, wrote from Smith College to her mother that she was less depressed after persuading the college to let her audit science courses she so dreaded she had talked suicide. Meanwhile, in a nation battered by the Red Scare and war in Korea and the new hydrogen bomb, with Eisenhower’s inauguration days away, Sylvia’s mother Aurelia Plath, Boston University professor, scribbled on the envelope’s verso:

subjects questions for political discussion group

1. religion

2. Are sororities and fraternities democratic.

3. Is liberal education desirable for everybody.

4. college education open to all / should a college education be public as one will be to high school students?

5. heredity or environment

6. are students taking advantage of the opportunities around them.

7. what will be religion’s should place [sic] in the modern world.

8. is there a course or lessons needed for college education work.

9. communism and how it affects us.

10. current events

11. the American negro [1]

 

Because “religion” and “sororities and fraternities” top the list, the political discussion group was for college students, possibly fellow Unitarian congregants or at Boston University where Aurelia taught. “The American negro” as a topic implies all group members would be white. A subject “1” on the list implies that the group had not yet formed or met.

 

Was this group Aurelia’s own brainstorm, or are these notes, written in Gregg shorthand, from a planning meeting? Regardless, the list opens a window onto Aurelia Plath’s politics.

 

Most of the discussion items center on Aurelia’s areas of expertise: religion, education, college life.  Topics 2 through 8 are formulated as questions, most posed with her answers implicit -- but open for discussion. Topics 9 through 11, nationwide and nonspecific, conclude the list because they were either too explosive for the initial group discussions or rearmost in Aurelia's awareness. Yet the plan to start the group is activist. And the agenda does not sound prescriptive.

 

Biographers assume that Aurelia voted for Eisenhower in 1952 because Sylvia supposed her mother had, but that’s not proof. Aurelia wrote in Letters Home that her Austrian-born parents “believed every word their idol, Theodore Roosevelt, ever wrote or uttered and, because of him, voted the Republican ticket all their lives.” But Aurelia didn't follow suit. What won her parents' lifelong loyalty was that Roosevelt was “the only candidate in the race in whose veins flows German blood, who has received part of his education in Germany,” according to the German-American Roosevelt League. Yes, there were German-American Roosevelt Leagues. [2] California voter-registration rolls show Otto Plath and his first wife Lydia registered as Progressives in 1912 when Roosevelt's Progressive party ran him for re-election.

 

Aurelia's political discussion group never met. A crisis erupted at Aurelia’s house: Her mother’s stomach pains were diagnosed as gastric cancer. Aurelia took summer 1953 off from teaching to care for her mother, and Sylvia, disheartened by a month as a guest editor in New York City, chose to spend July and August at home and became suicidally depressed.

 

[1.] Sylvia Plath to Aurelia Plath, 9 January 1953, Lilly Library.

[2.] Gable, J. The Bull Moose Years. Kennikat, 1978. When Roosevelt was 15 his parents sent him and two siblings to Dresden, Germany for five months, to learn German. Roosevelt did not become fluent.

 

Most Popular Posts of 2024

1955

The most popular AureliaPlath.info post of 2024 was "Warren," about Sylvia Plath and her brother, some readers responding that they never knew Sylvia had a brother. Glad they now know that Sylvia grew up with a kid brother just as exceptional as she, and for 14 years -- from Warren's birth until he went to boarding school in 1949 -- Sylvia treated him as a usurper and a rival. 

As far as I know Sylvia never wrote a poem about her brother.

I'll be more opinionated in 2025 because the next most popular posts were the two book reviews, for Sylvia Plath Day by Day, by Carl Rollyson, and Loving Sylvia Plath by Emily Van Duyne. Next most-read were "Poems About Aurelia Plath" and "Atlantic City Waiter," about Sylvia's African-American grand-uncle, Christopher Nicholson. I continue to seek information about Nicholson, having found his family of origin in Warsaw, North Carolina. And don't forget the Aurelia Plath video and audio recordings available through this site.

Out of 45 posts my personal-favorites were of primary materials: The never-before-seen photos of Sylvia Plath's mad grandmother, Ernestine, young and old; and, for amusement, Aurelia's list of "Bones to Pick with Dick Norton."

This was also the year I enjoyed traveling to Winthrop, Mass., and Wellesley, Mass., to see the settings the Plaths saw every day. Happy New Year from your researcher.

When Aurelia Plath Said Something Good About "The Bell Jar"

Aurelia Plath loved the November 1975 review of Letters Home that novelist Erica Jong wrote for the Los Angeles Times. Aurelia quoted the sympathetic review in notes and letters, savoring in particular the words, "Had Sylvia lived, she would have created many mothers, many daughters, and written in a voice other than that of the raging adolescent crying out in The Bell Jar." [1]

Aurelia gave an author's talk about Letters Home soon afterward. Part of this talk was recorded on tape. Aurelia told the audience The Bell Jar (U.S., 1971) was a hurtful book, but then said something she never otherwise said: "It's a wonderful book from many points of view. I was talking to the psychiatrist a few days ago and she said Sylvia has done a great service because she has explained so accurately what goes on in the emotions and in the mind of a person throughout depression. [The psychiatrist] said the same thing about Erica Jong's book, Fear of Flying. People criticize that there's four-letter words on practically every page. I've read it too, and it treats subjects that uh, certainly don't fall into the class of gentility. . . but is of invaluable importance to psychiatrists."

Sylvia Plath researcher Harriet Rosenstein, then in her early 20s, heard this tape shortly after it was made. While it was playing, another tape machine recorded both Aurelia's tape and Rosenstein's response to what Aurelia had just said.

Rosenstein [incredulous]: Fear of Flying?

Aurelia Plath: [some words inaudible] a great deal across the spectrum gone when a person is distressed.

Rosenstein: In Fear of Flying? [2]

So Rosenstein had read the Jong book, a bestseller in 1973. Like many high-literates she did not think it great. Yet "the psychiatrist" (female; identity unknown) was not wrong to compare the novels.

The narrator of Fear of Flying is an American woman who came of age in the 1950s, so frustrated sexually and otherwise that she can't believe in herself. Analyzed by six male psychiatrists and married to a seventh, she runs off on a road trip with another psychiatrist she has just met. Like The Bell Jar, Fear of Flying is semi-autobiographical but more graphic, and Jong's protagonist is an upper-middle-class New York Jew, age 29, more Sex in the City than owlish Esther Greenwood could be.

After re-reading Fear of Flying this week I'd say The Bell Jar was Fear of Flying's template. Quotations and phrases from Sylvia Plath's poems dot the text, and the voice is comparably first-person and contemporary. Both protagonists, well-educated, wanting to be writers, believe they must choose between "happy homemaker" or "intellectual nun." For them, any one choice cancels out the rest. 

In hindsight we can see the novels were not as useful to psychiatrists as they were to readers who began questioning what psychology and psychoanalysis said about women and did to them. Aurelia Plath had a front-row seat on that, seeing a radical difference in her daughter before and after electroshock and psychotherapy. Ultimately neither treatment seemed to do Sylvia any favors.

Fear of Flying (1973) sold more than 20 million copies; what I have is its 50th-year anniversary edition. Its story is dated and overlong -- unlike The Bell Jar, which is tidy and timeless -- but they were the right books at the right moments -- thus, bestsellers -- when Second-Wave women's liberation was new and questioning everything.

[1] "Letters Focus Exquisite Rage of Sylvia Plath," Los Angeles Times, 23 November 1975.

[2] Rosenstein Papers, Stuart Rose Library, Emory University, Collection 1489, tape v7b4x, side B.

Holiday Break

Did you have an aunt like mine? Mollie Albrecht (1920-2024). (Dig her rosary.)

I am on a one-week holiday break. Actually I'm researching my own family tree, using the genealogy website FamilySearch.org. Yesterday it found me a great-grandmother with a name, and as the default keeper of the family albums I have uploaded photos of each family member who has died. For privacy reasons, people still living cannot be added to the family tree. If you add yourself, only you can see that.

The Mormon church in 1894 set as a goal a family tree of all humanity, so to register on FamilySearch.org is free, and the site will not send emails or other bother. Familysearch is also rich with digitized historical documents. Anglos, you are in luck; your tree has probably already been researched and posted by distant relatives back to the 1400s. My own family of origin was barely represented, so I'm on it.

God rest ye merry!

This is Not a Nazi Salute

Pledge of Allegiance in 1941

Sylvia Plath wrote an essay in January 1963 about her "rowdy seaside town where I picked up, like lint, my first ten years of schooling," intending to sell the work to the British humor magazine Punch; she was at her most desperate for money and lived only three more weeks. Titled "The All-Round Image" and published as "America! America!" it is a lyric essay: loosely autobiographical and low on dialogue and anecdotes. Although Plath took nothing lightly, she provided the type of humor she knew: satire, meaning "ridicule with intent to improve." The Bell Jar is satirical, and approaching the novel as such reveals how much Plath was making fun of her avatar Esther.

So in writing about her "first ten years of schooling" in her hometown, Plath exaggerated, simplified, belittled, and undercut ("the lot of us" at school were "a lovely slab of depressed American public"), to amuse. She wrote, "Every morning, hands on hearts, we pledged allegiance to the Stars and Stripes, a sort of aerial altarcloth over teacher's desk." I love the spot-on phrase "aerial altarcloth." Except Plath and her classmates never did "hands on hearts" in school in seaside Winthrop, which she and her family left in autumn 1942. In a detail too horrid to be funny, and that I'd never seen or heard of, from the time the Pledge of Allegiance was imposed on U.S. public schools (around 1890) an extended-arm salute went with it. 

Pledge of Allegiance with full Bellamy salute

This was the "Bellamy salute," standard with the Pledge of Allegiance until December 1942, when Congress for good reason replaced the gesture with "hand on heart." Charles Lindbergh was photographed in 1941 giving the Bellamy salute, and with the flag cropped out of the photo looked as if he was saluting Nazi Germany. His reputation never recovered. I mention this because Aurelia and Sylvia Plath both did this, and I expect, in the U.S., the Bellamy salute's revival.

Sylvia Plath's Astrology

Pleased that the U.K.'s Urania Trust asked permission to reprint my article "Sylvia Plath's Fixed Stars" from Plath Profiles, and you can read it on their webpage here. But at holiday time let's talk generally about Sylvia Plath's birth horoscope. Birth horoscopes, basic to astrology, are literal sky maps unique to each person and through symbolism show talents and tendencies.

• Sylvia Plath, like most Americans of her time, knew her Sun sign, Scorpio, but astrology was not pop-culture until around 1970, and it's the 1990s before the mainstream knows their Moon sign, and we can thank Internet astrology sites for that.
  
• Astrologers say a person's Sun sign reveals what they want, the Moon sign what they need, and the "rising sign" (a.k.a. "ascendant") how they go about getting it. Sylvia took pride in her Sun sign, Scorpio: intense, including a Scorpio's always Tragic Backstory.™
• Sylvia's Libra Moon made her artistic, dextrous, and judgy. Her rising sign was Aquarius, so her modi operandi were to be brilliant and eager for acclaim, and try to hide that she was socially and emotionally fragile as a teacup.
  
• Re "Venus in the Seventh": Sylvia abandoned her first novel, and all that's left of it is one chapter titled "Venus in the Seventh." Sylvia's horoscope indeed had the planet Venus in the astrological seventh house (or sector), which represents marriage and partnership, so she wanted and loved the security and intimacy of marriage. Neptune also in the seventh house inflated her expectations. Ted Hughes, her house astrologer, told Sylvia this and also told his sister, who used this info against her.
  
• Sylvia and her mother Aurelia, a Taurus, were exact astrological opposites, and astrology says astrological opposites have a bond whether they like it or not.
  
• Assia Wevill was a Taurus. 
• Otto Plath was a Mason, but Masons are not astrologers and never were.
• Otto's and Aurelia's wedding horoscope (4 January 1932, Carson City, Nevada, 1:30 p.m.) is the most threatening wedding horoscope I have ever seen.
• Astrologically, Plath's Hollywood counterpart is not Marilyn Monroe but Audrey Hepburn. They share the fixed star Regulus, the "royal star," on their charts' western horizon, so they have some interesting biographical parallels.
• There's a crater on the planet Mercury named "Plath."
• Shura Wevill's birth horoscope is the most angular I have ever seen.
  
• Astrology is metaphor. It has no scientific basis, yet is said to augur the future. Freudianism is metaphor. It has no scientific basis. Yet it's said to augur the future.
  
• Sylvia's heliacal fixed star is Spica, astrological granter of glittering talent, often world-class.

Do "fixed stars govern a life"? Not really. Stars are only one factor in astrology, and humans govern our own lives according to our lights. Does Sylvia's chart say she'll die early? No. Birth horoscopes are about life and character. They do not foretell death.

• 

  Sylvia Plath's birth horoscope chart [above], like her life, is a popular case study. If the chart looks technical, that's because all horoscopes are. Learning to interpret horoscope charts takes years, but it's fun, and there's always more to learn.
  

Otto and Aurelia Plath as a Couple

Boston University Women's Building, once Aurelia's refuge, now the Elie Wiesel Center for Jewish Studies

"She was not happily married; she thinks because of her husband's incipient illness, which he refused to have treated, made him emotionally unbalanced, leading to loss of temper." Aurelia Plath in 1953 was describing her eight years of marriage to her late husband Otto, twenty-one years older than she. The transcript continued, "Age difference too great. He led narrow life; no entertaining, no outings." [1] 

That meant Aurelia led a much narrower, more isolated life than she was used to as a student and dedicated teacher. The only visitors Otto allowed at their house were her parents. Aurelia couldn't entertain old or new friends. Within a year of their wedding, with Sylvia a newborn, Aurelia famously decided she "had to become more submissive," adding, "although it was not in my nature to be so." She quit arguing and trying to reason with Otto and, within the limits of safety, began subverting him, going as far as having secret dinner guests while Otto taught night school.

The couple did go on a few outings, but with one exception those on record were Boston University German-language events such as the annual College of Practical Arts and Letters variety show (1933, 1934), emceed by Marshall Perrin, Aurelia's favorite professor of German. At the college's annual scholarship banquet the Plaths and fellow German teachers the Haskells were guests of honor. When the Plaths moved to Winthrop and attended a civic banquet, the news clipping called them "Mr. and Mrs. O. E. Plath representing Boston University." [2]

Limited to university-related functions, Aurelia created for herself a Boston University social life. Before marriage she had represented her college for the university alumni association, and continued to do so while pregnant and after Sylvia was born. [3] Both Marshall Perrin and Mrs. Haskell died in 1935, depriving Aurelia of allies who had known her as the shining star of her college class. At BU's Faculty Wives' Club, Aurelia confessed to at least one woman that Otto was a tyrant and hurt her. [4] This woman sympathized and introduced Aurelia to Mildred Norton, a future best friend and decisive influence on Aurelia's parenting.

Aurelia had another baby, who was sickly, and Otto's health declined. She had to serve as nurse to both. In 1937 Aurelia wrote to Mrs. Helen Gaebler:

". . . I haven't been in Cambridge once during the last three years. Usually I can slip away on the average of once a week . . . At the Women's Building of Boston University, where the wives of the faculty members meet, I thoroughly enjoy my connection with these women, for we have much in common, and these monthly gatherings comprise all the social life I have." [5]

Aurelia then wasn't counting as "social" her recent election as recording secretary to BU's Boston alumni association, or the banquet in Winthrop with 500 attendees. She wanted friends who were intellectual peers. Otto in their courting days promised her an ideal partnership and failed to deliver. If in the 1930s  your husband was controlling or abusive you were pressured never to say so -- except Aurelia did.

I don't think it was Otto's death and the burden he left her that Aurelia was bitter about. I think it was what she underlined in Sylvia's copy of Middlemarch: "Only those who know the supremacy of the intellectual life -- the life which has a seed of ennobling thought and purpose within it -- can understand the grief of one who falls from that serene activity into the absorbing soul-wasting struggle with worldly annoyances." She was not so much bitter as grieved about what might have been.

[1] McLean Hospital intake interview with patient's mother Aurelia Plath, page 2.

[2] Winthrop Review, 21 Oct 1937, "Tercentary Banquet of Deane Winthrop House Monday."

[3] Boston Globe, 13 December 1932.

[4] C. Loring Brace to Linda Wagner-Martin, 13 July 1984, Lilly Library.

[5] ASP to Mrs. Helen Gaebler, 9 December 1937, Smith.