A Place for Mom

Sylvia Plath's paternal grandmother (1852-1919)

I think now that this photo is exactly what it looks like: Somebody hit the old lady. This is Otto Plath's mother, Sylvia Plath's paternal grandmother Ernestine Kottke Plath, photo taken in 1916 in Oregon State Hospital (formerly "Hospital for the Insane") at Salem.

I'd learned that its new patients lined up every few weeks for a traveling photographer. If the photo was not taken the day of admission, I thought it fair to imagine Ernestine had walked into a doorframe or something, but context changed my mind, especially:

What are the odds that among three known photos of Sylvia's grandmother, one shows her with a black eye? Not makeup or a trick of the light. And likely it wasn't the first she'd ever had.

A immigrant from Prussia and mother of six, Ernestine first broke down in 1905 while living in North Dakota with husband Theodor and their five younger children. Depressed, anxious, and feeling persecuted, Ernestine walked the floor all night with a leg ulcer that only hurt more when she lay down. Her frightened family had her judged insane and sent to the state mental hospital at Jamestown. When Theodor signed her out in 1910 Ernestine didn't want to leave. Theodor had been chasing opportunity in Harney, Oregon, where he'd failed at homesteading and was back to working as a blacksmith. Yet machines had evolved from iron to steel, and horsepower to steam, and in 1911 Theodor was 60, late in life for a master blacksmith to learn another trade.

The couple's eldest son Otto told his wife Aurelia he had been raised without love, and in particular he "constantly voiced his recollections of his mother's type of child care," I guess trying aloud to process trauma forty years past. Family lore says that Ernestine communicated "absolutely nothing to her children for the last thirty years of her life." If literally true, Ernestine went silent in Prussia in 1889 when Otto was four and her two youngest not yet born. If not literally true, we get the idea that six children were too many for her.

In 1911 Theodor, Ernestine, and grown sons Paul and Max left arid eastern Oregon and shared a small house in Oregon City where Max, the only able-bodied one, found work with a lumber company. Theodor and Paul looked for jobs and came home to their sick wife and bad mother now aging and complaining of overwork. Maybe to reduce the tension, the family between 1912 and 1915 tried to place Paul, always sickly, with Otto and his wife in San Francisco. Otto and his wife said no. By 1916 Paul and Max couldn't tolerate their mother and Max wanted to move out and get married. There followed a turbulent scene that ended with Ernestine at the mental hospital begging the staff to please take her in, not to send her back home.

Her diagnosis was dementia. A physician making rounds a year later called Ernestine a harmless old lady. Her nurse noted that Ernestine knew enough to use the toilet. If she'd been battered at home -- we call it elder abuse -- the institution might have been preferable. Tuberculosis killed her in 1919 and her ashes sat in the hospital's basement for a hundred years, her tin among hundreds unclaimed and forgotten. 

Theodor might seem like the family's rock and good guy but he was no prize parent either. If his father Johann and son Otto are indicators, Theodor with family was rigid and punitive, the type Sylvia memorialized in her poem "Daddy." To spite his grown children Theodor willed the first five of them a dollar and left the youngest 120 acres in Washington State. Theodor died in Oregon City, alone; a neighbor found his body. He was buried in a pauper's field with no marker.

After Otto Plath died, his long-suffering widow Aurelia went on living as if he had never existed; as Sylvia said, "buried him in her heart." Sylvia hated this and got revenge on her mother in print. Sylvia herself became an abused wife. This was part of a larger pattern of generational and spousal abuse and resentment that can sink not only marriages but children and families.