This Famous Plath Happy-Family Photo

I finally read Otto Plath’s book Bumblebees and Their Ways (1934), by a bee geek who spent the 1920s digging up and micromanaging 225 colonies of bees, observing their eating, breeding, and warring and compiling his discoveries. The first 131 pages are prose; the other 70, taxonomy. Otto got stung enough to put him into bed. His introduction says, “It is my ambition and hope to continue the investigations of the past thirteen summers by devoting at least three months each year to the study of bumblebees in various parts of the world.”

Three months per year? One wonders: with or minus the new wife and baby acquired in 1932? Finishing the manuscript – a dissertation he and Aurelia rewrote for lay readers -- and signing with a publisher got Otto promoted to full professor of biology at Boston University. Aurelia Plath later wrote about the book: “Won my husband recognition and lost him money.” But before the book was published they hoped it might make them rich.

So the family celebrated in July 1933, taking the only known photo of Sylvia Plath with both her parents and the only one of Aurelia with Otto. They’re on a hillside at a colleague's farm south of Boston, where Aurelia and Otto had their first date in 1930. In the Plath Family Papers at Yale, opened in 2025, are two alternate photos, one of them shown below, and yet another showing Otto lounging on the grass with his German department colleague Marshall "Daddy" Perrin, Aurelia's favorite professor of German, with Aurelia and her mother in the background. So yet another adult was present to take that photo.

On this clearly hot and sunny Sunday Aurelia is wearing a fur piece over her shoulder. A wintertime photo shows her with a fur scarf – fur was fashionable – but Aurelia's more substantial piece resembles a wrap or collar. Puzzling over fur in July I have imagined it was Otto’s thank-you for the year and a half he browbeat Aurelia and yelled while they edited the book that ate their marriage (“My, how he lit into me” when she used too many adjectives, Aurelia said.) Aurelia called their home “too academic an atmosphere” for infant Sylvia and brought in her own parents to supply "love and laughter" [Letters Home, 13]. The other photo from that day shows Aurelia looking much happier posed with her mother and Sylvia, with no Otto and no fur unless it’s beneath Aurelia’s hat. I don’t want to read too much into Sylvia’s expressions.

Aurelia Schober, Sylvia Plath, Aurelia Plath

The "Manipulatively Controlling Mother"

A respected critic called Aurelia Plath “a manipulatively controlling mother” without stating any facts to back that up. [1] That Sylvia Plath had good reasons to hate her mother is something fans seem to “know” and accept without question. Here are their primary proofs that Sylvia hated her mother: one long, searing journal entry dated 12 December 1958; the assertion that priggish Mrs. Greenwood in the novel The Bell Jar is exactly what Aurelia was like; and the poem “Medusa” (originally titled “Mum”) that portrays Mum as a monster.

It turns out, however, that Sylvia in 1953, after her suicide attempt, spent her first month in the mental hospital telling her psychiatrist she loved her mother, and had to be talked into hating her. This is what the psychiatrist said in papers in a new Sylvia Plath archive opened to the public in January 2020. See what those papers say here.

Almost all of what biographers and critics write about Aurelia Plath is negative, as if facts were few and scanty. They aren't. They have simply been ignored. 

Did you know Aurelia Plath had a first love who kept a diary about their affair? Do you know what courses she taught and where? Do you know where she traveled? Those who know only what Sylvia wrote about Aurelia don't know Aurelia very well.

Please see this short video introducing some facts about Aurelia Plath's life: her college years, her job, how if Aurelia wasn't an easy mother to have, Sylvia was not an easy daughter to have. 

But didn't her mother manipulate her anyway?

We underestimate Sylvia if we think she was easy to manipulate and control!

More on this topic in "How Did Aurelia Plath Manipulate and Control Sylvia Plath?" blog post, 11 July 2023.

[1] David Trinidad, “Hidden in Plain Sight,” Plath Profiles, Vol. 3 (2010) Supplement: Autumn 2010, p. 126.