Aurelia Plath's Childhood

1 Roslyn Place, Jamaica Plain, built 1910. Aurelia wrote that family visits to her uncle here were among "the sweeteners of my childhood."

Only two sources about Aurelia Plath's childhood presently exist: Aurelia's own narrative in Letters Home and Beth Hinchliffe's unpublished Plath biography for which Aurelia was a primary source. The latter is painful reading, yet rings true:

. . . the family was disciplined into formal Germanic obedience, an almost martyr-like acceptance of hard work and self-deprivation . . . 

. . . acquiescent exterior . . . nursing the old grievances, remembering the persecutions and loneliness, seeing the world in terms of black and white and expecting the worst . . .  

Aurelia in other interviews and letters says nothing about her childhood and little about her parents, with whom she lived for forty years. Unless there is more in the Plath Family archive soon to open at Beinecke Library we must say Aurelia withheld her childhood for a reason.

The Letters Home preface says Aurelia's immigrant parents, the Schobers, headed by her father Frank, sent Aurelia to school speaking only German. Did he have no inkling she'd be treated like a freak? Francis spoke English. If he wasn't ignorant, what was he thinking? "From that time on," Aurelia wrote, "we always spoke English at home." 

Given English, Aurelia bloomed at school, but home was no picnic. In Letters Home Aurelia said she had no playmates, not saying her parents shut out the neighbors. In her book's one full childhood scene Aurelia's father spanks her. He then begs her forgiveness. I think the latter is whitewash: Hidebound patriarchs of a century ago did not apologize to five-year-olds. The Hinchliffe manuscript says Aurelia seethed but hid her anger and was always slow to forgive. 

Frank and Aurelia Greenwood Schober were married ten months when daughter Aurelia Frances was born in 1906. Being named for both parents suggests she was conceived and born to prove a point. Baby Aurelia's mother, eighteen, had married without her wife-beating father's permission. Her sisters spited their father too: One had a baby at fifteen and the other married an African-American. Burdened with a child, the Schobers waited five years to have another. They never prospered -- Letters Home styles Frank, a waiter, as a "cost accountant" -- and lived with widowed Aurelia and their grandchildren. Spite begat spite: After her mother died in 1956, Aurelia ejected her father from her house and went to Europe where Sylvia was surprised to see her careworn mother suddenly as effervescent as a girl.

Hinchliffe's manuscript describes the Schober household as insular and humorless, so it is no wonder that Aurelia escaped into the alternate reality of books, preferring self-help and stories of survival. In summer 1918 Aurelia's family moved from Jamaica Plain to a remote landspit with the ocean front and back. We know why: In December 1917 the wartime U.S. declared Austro-Hungarians like the Schobers "enemy aliens" just like Germans. That the Schobers were citizens did not matter: The local "gang" called Aurelia "spy-face" and pushed her off the schoolbus, and Sylvia remembered hearing from her mother that the kids threw stones. 

So we know how much Letters Home sanitized Aurelia's childhood. If there isn't any text maybe the archive's family photos will open a new route into her childhood and biography.