For Aurelia Plath only perfection would do -- her ideas of perfection. Which were others' ideas of perfection. These overwhelmed her. Where Aurelia had control, she fixed matters, wary of what other people might think and say. She took criticism very personally, dreading it, warding it off. Sylvia when criticized got furious. No one would so fear criticism unless there were real and painful penalties for falling short of expectations.
Was Aurelia a born conformist? No. She had pranced around onstage in men's clothes. She had a premarital sexual affair with a man her father's age. She dated a married man and in sinful Nevada lied that she lived there, and after his instant divorce instantly married him. Wife of a Jekyll-and-Hyde, Aurelia became hypervigilant and learned subterfuge and shutting up. And the longer Aurelia lived the more chance of criticism, because standards for womanhood and motherhood rose so eye-wateringly high, and kept rising, that criticism tipped over into judgement.
Judgement: deciding who a person is, based on one trait or incident. Such as a hairdo.
The above portrait of Sylvia is her lovely college graduation photo, signed by photographer Eric Stahlberg, taken in Northampton, 1955. He retouched the photo's glass negative, covering Sylvia's facial scar and the bobby pin that anchored her wave. Not so you'd notice.
It wasn't perfect enough. I have it on good authority, plus photos, that like many (most?) midcentury women, Aurelia was very conscious of the look of her hair. Everybody knew that hair is a woman's crowning glory, and if her hair is neat and tamed so is the woman, and if it's been coifed, she's a somebody. And ideally women had curls or at least a wave. And was blond. This was a lot, but for this milestone photo, Sylvia or Aurelia or both cared enough to want it all.
Aurelia reproduced her personal print of the photo in Letters Home. I took a photo of it good enough (above) to show that the split ends at the back of Sylvia's head had been painted out. Enlargement showed beneath the bobby pin words in cursive, hard to read. Those must have been drawn on the negative after printing the print sold by Sotheby's.When greatly enlarged (and the image flipped vertically, not shown) I saw that between the set of short lines pointing upward and downward are the words "Retouch marcel."
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Close-up at Sylvia's temple: Can you see the writing? |
It isn't clear whether Aurelia or Sylvia ordered this done. Both were perfectionists, and I can't tell you how much women of the time -- and later -- aspired to perfect immunity from criticism by those they knew and judgement by those they didn't.
Sure, retouch the flyaway strands. Yet the request was to widen and deepen the wave or "marcel" in Sylvia's hair -- so brightly-lit one can't tell if she was blond or brunet. I always thought -- maybe you did too -- this photo showed her blond. But then why darken the bottom of the hairdo, thickly repainting it a cloudy black, obscuring individual strands? Compared to Stahlberg's print, the book version's higher contrast and taming create almost a zebra effect.
This must have satisfied, or Aurelia wouldn't have reprinted the photo.