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 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.