It's Aurelia's Story and She's Sticking To It

Aurelia's indignant "Fran X'ed this! out!"

I guess Aurelia Plath decided if daughter Sylvia could make shit up, she could too, although without Sylvia's talent and her years of practice and tutoring by some of the best living teachers and writers. Mentors too paved Sylvia's way to writing what her mother experienced as lies, half-truths, and personal attacks on her mothering and character, which Sylvia's thousands of readers devoutly believed.

Undaunted by the odds, Aurelia spent the rest of her long life trying to neutralize what Sylvia had written about her, aiming mostly at The Bell Jar's unsympathetic portrayal of mother figure "Mrs. Greenwood." One thing Aurelia tried was making up or fictionalizing events from her own life and Sylvia's. Sylvia had got away with it; why shouldn't she?

The single largest body of Aurelia's writings, of those available in archives, is what she wrote in her own self-defense.

Aurelia was a competent writer and most of what she wrote is true enough, but with a critical eye one can tell when Aurelia Plath wrote a fiction because it is badly written. Expert editor Fran McCullough deleted several anecdotes Aurelia wanted in her preface or the headnotes for Letters Home (1975) -- Aurelia's project to prove that she had been a good, liberal mother and not a conventional Mrs. Greenwood who made her daughter suicidal.

Aurelia Plath saved the inserts McCullough deleted and Smith College holds the carbon copies. The following example, set in 1953, is labeled in pencil "Basis of the Bell Jar." Aurelia wanted us to know that while Sylvia recovered from her suicide attempt, Aurelia met with psychologist Dr. Paul, a female, for regular counseling sessions, where unlike Mrs. Greenwood she was humble and contrite:

I asked [Dr. Paul] where I had been at fault, what in myself I should change to help my daughter, what I could do to help her when visiting her and when she returned home. 

She exclaimed, "My dear, you have been through a most harrowing experience, and you are doing magnificently! Follow your own instincts; they are sound. In Sylvia's present depression, no matter what you do or say just now, it will be wrong. Let her talk, but don't take issue with her present misconceptions."

In four sentences Dr. Paul absolved Aurelia of all blame for her daughter's problems by blaming the daughter's depression.

I call these "set pieces" or "idealized scenes," sometimes repeated in print or in Aurelia's letters. The more fictional, the worse the writing, especially the stilted dialogue. To her credit Aurelia was very bad at lying.

McCullough rejected too another set piece: Sylvia at Court Green reading to Aurelia excerpts from a draft of her lost, "happy novel of joy and romance," which only Aurelia ever heard of or saw. Aurelia in this scene put words in Sylvia's mouth -- why not? Sylvia had put words in hers! Sylvia explains that her novel in manuscript is "autobiographically based, more or less -- facts serve Art, you know." She then tells her mother:

"I feel I have been living a series of novels, really, and this is, so far, the most exciting part." She paused, then added, slowly and thoughtfully, "It is life seen through the eyes of health," a statement I did not fully understand until after her death and after my reading of The Bell Jar.

Signals of falsity: Cringey dialogue, adverbs, Sylvia's two acknowledgements that she knew The Bell Jar fused facts with fiction and its narrator was not normal but sick, things Aurelia tried for twenty-five years to prove to her critics. In set pieces Aurelia is always the only witness. They include exposition and unnecessary detail, different iterations, and emendations on the typescript:

On July 10, 1962, I saw Sylvia toss this manuscript tear apart this Ms., section by section, into a huge bonfire she had built and set to blazing at the far end of the courtyard.

Fictionalizing is not illegal. The only thing it should be is believable. Making it so requires multiple skills harder to acquire than it might seem.

Let me say here that everyone involved in Sylvia Plath's story lied and edited events, as humans do. Fran McCullough carefully steered Aurelia through Letters Home and then Ted Hughes's hectic edit of The Journals of Sylvia Plath (1982; by then Harper & Row had let McCullough go). Those closest to Sylvia, husband Ted and mother Aurelia, when exposed, fought back: Ted with edits and rearrangements of Sylvia's works and finally, with Birthday Letters, poems styling Sylvia's suicide as inevitable. In archives she created, Aurelia pointedly left notes for future scholars to see and analyze. That she left such notes was just another count against her.

I'll discuss this more later. It will save you ten years of reading Aurelia's notes and letters.

[1] Sylvia Plath Collection IX Aurelia Plath, Letters Home [book] Commentary by AP, folder 67, Smith College Libraries.