Killing Her Kids

-Did Sylvia Plath in her final days really think about killing her children?

What Plath thought, nobody knows. We know what Plath wrote in her first draft of the poem "Edge," probably the last poem she wrote: "She is taking them with her." It seems to say that the dead woman "who wears the smile of accomplishment" has killed her children along with herself.

Click to enlarge

"She is taking them with her" appears only in that draft. Plath chose to delete that line. It's not in the finished poem. Nor did Plath take her children "with her" when she killed herself. She took care that they survived.

-But if Plath had killed them, could she be held responsible? She was in such a state, post-partum depression, taking poisonous prescription drugs, suicidal, deserted --

You mean we play "court of criminal law" and exonerate Plath, our favorite writer, our idol, of having written that line, on the basis of insanity? Deny that a sane Plath could ever have thought that awful thought? Did the line "The illusion of a Greek necessity" not hint that the poem might be metaphorical, a creative work, not 100 percent literal? Even if Plath did mean it, why does what did not happen engross you? Does this unpublished, deleted, sensational line somehow reflect so badly on Plath that it reflects on you?

Sylvia's mother Aurelia Plath had a unique denial strategy for the deleted line first exposed in Judith Kroll's Plath study Chapters in a Mythology (1976). Aurelia wrote in her copy of Kroll's book a response to a footnote. Kroll's footnote explaining "Edge" says in part:

The children must be dead in order for the woman's history to be perfected, for she regards them as extensions of herself; that is why she speaks of folding them "back into her body."

Alongside that, Aurelia wrote "not correct." Taking the line literally, Aurelia wrote that it "really meant" that Sylvia folded the future children she wanted, two unconceived that she had already chosen names for, "back into her body." Aurelia further clarified:

"These are 'Jacob' and 'Megan', the two she still hoped to bear." Aurelia added as a reference "1961 & 2."

From Aurelia's copy of Chapters in a Mythology. She and Kroll had been in mutually respectful correspondence about the manuscript. Click to enlarge.

How Much Money Aurelia Got For Sylvia's Letters

It was such a big event in Aurelia's life I had to pursue the question although told the answer was confidential, none of my business, they didn't know or they wouldn't say.

Aurelia Plath was paid $190,000 for her daughter Sylvia's letters and other items now in the Sylvia Plath mss. at the Lilly Library at Indiana University at Bloomington.

The sale, through a dealer, was completed in March 1977.

$190,000 in 1977 is worth in 2024 either $985,150 or $1,101,400. In either case, a cool million.

Worth it, for Sylvia's letters home, early short stories, diaries, paintings, and memorabilia: more than 3,000 items. Aurelia opened the Lilly collection to the public having decided what the public should see. I think she removed Sylvia's "lost" short stories "The Trouble-Making Mother" and "The Mummy." But let's admire Aurelia's amazing foresight in amassing and preserving for 45 years this dazzling literary trove and making it available. Many a scholar has made money from it.

Aurelia's writings and correspondence never mention meeting an appraiser or dealer, or negotiations over the price and dealer's fee.

Aurelia -- in 1977, age 70 -- for tax reasons divided the $190,000 into 10 annual payments. [1]

I heard more than once that the dealer held back some items and sold them.

Aurelia at a later time donated further Plath materials to the Lilly Library's Sylvia Plath archive.

[1] In 1977 a single filer with a taxable income of $19,000 (in 2024 money, $100,000) was taxed at 34 percent. $190,000 would have been taxed at 70 percent. TaxFoundation.org.

Beth Hinchliffe's Unpublished Sylvia Plath Biography

How differently we would read Sylvia Plath's work and life story had Elizabeth Hinchliffe's Plath biography been completed and published, showing Sylvia and Otto and Aurelia at their weakest and most helpless, portrayals that biographies have tried to avoid.

Part One of The Descent of Ariel, 58 pages, depicts Sylvia, in London in her final winter, as a nuisance who pounded on her downstairs neighbor's door until he opened it and wailed for his help: Would he please crawl over the roof and through a window because she'd locked herself out of her flat? Did he know a plumber? Clearly we're getting the neighbor's view of Sylvia. (In this manuscript he's called "Evans.") Hinchliffe notes that when snowbound, Sylvia had no other adult besides "Evans" to talk with; she didn't yet have a telephone.

Now, I don't believe everything I read unless I can find corroboration and I had to find my own because this manuscript has no footnotes.

Corroboration: Sylvia's anguished letters from fall and winter 1962 and '63, and Dr. Anita Helle, a Plath relative: "Sylvia was almost beside herself with grief and terror in her last months."[1]

In the next chapter Otto Plath's fellow graduate students at Harvard's Bussey Institute describe Otto as a a timid, sniffling outsider who agreed with whatever anyone said and defended himself by quoting other people. A nice guy, someone said, who didn't "carry the guns" to be a scientist. Feared completing his dissertation because then he would have to defend it.

This matches the Otto of the 1918 FBI report: a nervous, morbid man who made no friends, lied that he thought he was a U.S. citizen, and when asked about the war did not say he was a pacifist. 

Otto saved his "Daddy" act for home. His kids learned to shed their real selves at the door and became quiet, well-mannered robot children so he wouldn't yell at them the way he yelled at their mother. They'd assume this outer armor for the rest of their lives.

Aurelia described her own parents as sources of love and laughter -- not as Austrian immigrants who shut out neighbors and tried to re-create Austria in their living room, speaking only German, teaching obedience to authority, to hide one's emotions, work hard, and expect the worst. I'd add that Aurelia's parents were Roman Catholics, a faith centered on sacrifice. They were taught to believe that mother pelicans, when they had to, tore their own flesh to feed the blood to their children. Although pelicans don't really do that. 

Interesting: It was Aurelia's mother who looked for houses and found the one on Elmwood Road. Aurelia was at work, of course. Aurelia's mother had a car and was the household's only driver. So quit saying Aurelia chose the WASPiest house she could find because becoming a WASP was her ambition.

About Aurelia Plath -- plainly the source and link to much of this information -- the unfinished biography says Aurelia wanted her children to have the fun and freedom her own childhood did not. It doesn't mention Aurelia's job or college years, or any of her triumphs; in fact portrays her as friendless. So even a neighbor and professional journalist was another in a long line of biographers who didn't ask Aurelia about herself. 

The text is well-woven, well written and absorbing.

The manuscript, in the Fran McCullough archive at the Hornbake Library at the University of Maryland-College Park, is 123 pages and incomplete. It includes a few photos. It's undated.

[1] A. Helle, "Family Matters," Northwest Review, Vol. 26 No. 2, 1988.