The Working World

Boston University, class of 1967

Troubled Esther Greenwood "had always looked down on" the city college where her mother taught, because "it was coed, and filled with people who couldn't get scholarships to the big eastern colleges." We now know author Sylvia Plath was imperfectly disguising Boston University, a private university where her mother Aurelia was a tenure-track professor, although The Bell Jar doesn't say that. And if all we know about its students is Sylvia Plath's impression, we don't know those students at all.

From Boston University yearbooks for female College of Business graduates 1967 and 1968 I drew names, photos, and hometowns, tracing about 40 alumnae. I then mailed requests for an interview about Boston University's campus life and its College of Business Secretarial Studies degree program in its waning days, the middle 1960s, when Aurelia taught there.

So far, one graduate responded: Rose Casparro Williams, B.U. College of Business, 1967; M.S. in counseling, Northeastern University. She still has her B.U. transcript, diploma, and class ring. In her hometown, Lowell, Mass., Rose says it was taken for granted that women had to get jobs and support themselves.

Interview with Rose Casparro Williams

You’re one of the Business Education secretarial-program graduates who actually went on to a business education teaching career. After graduating I taught in New Hampshire for three years at a business college, then for twenty years in Medford, Mass., then worked in New Hampshire guidance counseling.

Courses you taught? Typing, shorthand, accounting, business math, business English and Office Practice, where we ran the classroom as an office and the students each had positions with my company, so to speak.

How did you choose a business education major? We started at B.U. at the College of Basic Studies and took our liberal arts courses for the first two years, and then transferred to our specialty school in the B.U. system. One day there was a sign at B.U. looking for young ladies – they didn’t include the guys then – to type papers, for extra cash. Most of the girls could type but the guys couldn’t, and they paid to have their papers typed. It was fun and interesting. We tried to teach the boys how to type, but then it clicked in my mind that teaching was something I could pursue. And I did.

What B.U. courses do you remember? Another typing class, shorthand, and some marketing and accounting classes. I failed economics and had to repeat the class, but the second professor approached it from a mathematics angle and I aced it.

Who was on the faculty? I had Virginia Waller as a typing instructor. She was tough. She made it tough on us so that we really learned from her. The other was Elizabeth Hemmerley. She was excellent as well.

As you planned your career did you ever consult with faculty members about your future or your opportunities? Virginia Waller used to say she was preparing us for a world of work, whether we chose to be secretaries or to teach business courses. And she would find out what you wanted and steer you toward what classes you needed or how to approach things so you would be either a good secretary or a good teacher. If you were going to teach, you were going to do it well.

Do you remember your shorthand? My group of friends -- we were referred to as the "Uneven Dozen," because the thirteen of us hung out together. One of them lives now in London, and we still communicate back and forth and do it in shorthand. We still do!

I was mystified by shorthand. Like, wow: I can do this! We used to get a magazine every month that was tied in with one of our courses, a whole magazine in shorthand, and it had a story in shorthand, and we couldn’t wait to get that magazine to read the next installment.

Did people look down on you for studying secretarial work rather than studying to be a business executive? I would always say to them, if you know how to type you could always get a job no matter what. And from there you can go anywhere.

What swayed you to the educational rather than the secretarial track? I can remember my mother telling me that when we used to play school I wouldn’t let anybody else be the teacher. It was either that or nursing, and I gravitated more toward teaching. I can’t say teaching is magical, but it is. When you teach a concept and they finally get it, it’s like, wow, I gave them something they can hold onto and take with them.

Tell me more about The Uneven Dozen. We were all in business ed, and all commuter students. I came from Lowell, 45 or 50 miles from B.U. We talked about our classes and the instructors, and all hoped to find a teaching position close by and not lose contact with each other. Our goals were to get through school, graduate, and take the next step of finding a position, a job. Some of the girls said, we’re gonna find a husband, find a husband, and two of my friends married, but the rest took time to work before settling down.

Did you have  a scholarship, or did you pay your way? My parents helped me out and I worked during the summers and I also worked for a temporary agency, and for two summers in Bedford, Massachusetts, for the aerospace industry.  There was also a company called Miter that did government work, and I worked for them one summer.

I can't believe you commuted 45 miles each way every school day. It wasn’t bad. We got to know the people on the train who were going to Boston to work, and they were delightful. On the days they knew we were having exams, nobody on the train spoke, it was very quiet, because they saw us studying our books. They really knew us. Lots of times they would bring us coffee or doughnuts or a little something. We got to know them very well over the course of our commuting time. And a couple of times, like, if we forgot to buy a pass – instead of a daily ticket, we would buy a pass, it was easier -- the conductor would just let us take the train and get our pass later.

The Armchair Nazi

About Aurelia Plath's opinion of Sylvia's poem "Daddy" which so shocked readers when it appeared in Ariel (1965 UK; 1966 USA): "It was the poem that sold the book." Strangers phoned Aurelia, asking "Was Otto Plath really a Nazi?" Aurelia denied it, and truly, Otto was not, but there are clues that he behaved like one. Sylvia recalled in a journal entry (8 December 1958) which is famously bitter about her upbringing, that Otto had "heiled Hitler in his own home."

I don't think Sylvia made that up.

Like Aurelia, we like to deny that Otto ever heiled Hitler, but the context makes me think he did, at least once, and available examples of his pacifism are limited to when there were uniforms or insects around. Aurelia also reported that he said he'd take up arms, but only in defense.

Aurelia in Letters Home and personal letters, and Sylvia in poems, described Otto as autocratic, verbally and loudly abusive, obsessed with control. I think he was like modern-day would-be domestic dictators who raise their fists in solidarity with the meanest-looking movie villain, the ill-mannered, the assassin, the big bruiser, the dominator with the power to punish and destroy. And in the late 1930s, during the two-plus years it took him to die, Otto Plath, coughing and growing thin, barely got through his day of teaching before "collapsing" on the couch in his study. 

I had a husband who took two and a half years to die of esophageal cancer, and as he lost weight, height, and hair he only got meaner, mouthier, and more controlling, and fried himself pounds of forbidden bacon and ham. Late in his illness came a startling change of spirit: He began preaching about Jesus. 

Unaccustomed to, in fact flailing in his weakness, he tried to align with whatever power was most available, no matter how bizarre or out of character.

In the poem "Daddy" there is also the husband-is-a-Nazi factor ("I made a model of you") that critics ignored and Aurelia identified only in a marginal note. And I find Sylvia's introduction to the "Daddy" BBC recording a clue to her parents' marriage.

While fading away, Otto Plath heard on the radio Hitler's barking in German, and maybe Otto raised his fist and heiled in solidarity not exactly with Hitler or the Nazi party -- Otto left Germany 20 years before the party was formed -- but with the desire to rule the world, although all he could rule was his household.

Jerks know they are being jerks and it makes them hate themselves, and those around them, even more. Aurelia told McLean Hospital that Otto never yelled at the children until the last year of his life. I think that was enough time to yell. Remember, Sylvia and Warren barely knew a healthy father.

And by being ill and refusing treatment, and dying, Otto displaced his children as the family's focus and power center.

Fifteen Posts I Haven't Written

After a six-day work week, the working girl gets the memo "We missed you last Sunday at Sunday School." Source unknown.

I am stocked up with two years' worth of research for new posts. Here's a selection, in capsule form:

"Anxiety is Terror": Sylvia Plath thought her mother's anxiety was cowardice, but labeling anxiety a disease and a personal weakness, and medicating it, disguises systemic threats which for very good reasons cause chronic terror and dread.

"A Place for Mom": Sylvia's mad grandmother Ernestine Plath probably preferred life at an insane asylum over wifehood and motherhood.

"Aurelia Plath's Archive": Aurelia curated the 3000-piece Plath mss. II archive at Indiana University's Lilly Library so we see only what Aurelia wanted us to see. What is missing?

"Aurelia the Peacenik": Oddly, "peace" was an important value in the family of a famously troubled writer.

"Herr des Hauses": Examples in period literature show Otto's dictatorial ways at home were the norm in Prussia.

"How I Read Essays About Sylvia Plath": I read critical essays and biographies way differently than before.

"I Am An American": How Sylvia and family were entangled in the first-generation-American assimilation process.

"It Has a Gothic Shape": obstacles to Sylvia's learning German.

"Miss Mucky-Muck and Lady Jane": Nicknames and labels people hung on Esther Greenwood and on Sylvia.

"Rude Speculations: When Your Rival is Your Mom"

"Sylvia and Her Family's Secrets"

"Sylvia Plath, Drama Queen"

"Sylvia Plath, Harriet Rosenstein, and Ms. Magazine"

"Visage de Aurelia Schober Plath": Probably will be a video.

"When Nervous Breakdowns Were Cool": They were. 

Ready for a Comeback . . .

Now feeling heartened enough to think about Plath, I wonder what were Sylvia's real first words after her three-day coma in her family's basement?

The Bell Jar's Esther Greenwood in Chapter 14 says that in the "thick, warm, furry dark" of unconsciousness, she heard a voice call  "Mother!" I buy that, chiefly because when Mrs. Greenwood first visits her daughter in the hospital she tells Esther, "They said you asked for me."

Aurelia Plath in Letters Home claims Sylvia's very first words were "Oh, no!" and that in the hospital Sylvia "said weakly, 'It was my last act of love.'" But that sounds like something Aurelia made up and put in Sylvia's mouth as a noble excuse for trying to kill herself and as proof of daughterly devotion. (For the telltale markers of Aurelia's fictional "ideal scenes," see this recent post, "It's Aurelia's Story and She's Sticking To It.")

Gordon Lameyer in his unpublished memoir Dear Sylvia wrote that Sylvia's first words were, "Do we still own the house?" Lameyer, then Sylvia's current boyfriend, hadn't been present, so he heard about this secondhand. I can't imagine that during her own medical emergency the house was Sylvia's overriding concern, but she might have said it a day or two into hospitalization.

Sylvia in her journals and letters did not specify what her first words were. I am betting that as she was first dragged from her hiding place, she said "Oh, no!" I am also betting that as helpless and semiconscious she cried out "Mother!" when a "man with a chisel" forced open one of her eyes and tried to make her see.