Only Perfection Will Do

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 -- Plath's portrait is all about her hair -- and if it's 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 were blond. That was a lot to ask, 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; It is a different photo: The chin is less lifted and the face very slightly turned so the right eyelash is absent. 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, drawn on this particular negative.

When lightened and greatly enlarged (and the image flipped vertically, not shown) I saw on this second, retouched version, between the set of short lines pointing upward and downward, the words "Retouch marcel."

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 feared judgement by those they didn't; judgement so severe it could not bear a visible bobby pin. Meanwhile mother and daughter spoke snidely of others and were super-critical of themselves. 

Sure, retouch the flyaway strands. Yet the request was to widen and deepen the wave or "marcel" in Sylvia's hair, so brightly studio-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.

Sylvia Plath's Hair Ribbons and Headbands

Sylvia Plath, 1937.

The cut-out photo below is from Aurelia Schober's college yearbook 1928, and I wonder if it's really her; as that yearbook's editor-in-chief, Aurelia surely pasted her own photo, unlabeled, into a yearbook page titled "When We Were Very Young," showing about 30 childhood photos of women in her graduating class.

Sheesh, I thought; that white bow on the kid, big as her head! Leftover Victorian fashion! Dissuading little girls from playing, swimming, running, napping: enforcing feminine passivity.

The reproachful face makes me think this is Aurelia, around 1912.

Yet most little American girls wore ribbons and bows in the 1910s, '20s, and '30s, when grown American women wore them only to keep their hair out of their faces and and food. In the 2020s exhausted parents tug pink elastic bands onto the sensitive skulls of newborns just to show they are female. Such symbols of femininity and innocence can look cute, and some girls did like wearing ribbons and hairbands, or at least didn't hate them. They maybe thought every female wore them. Here's Sylvia, age three, and her mother at Winthrop in 1936:

I thought Sylvia's mother or grandmother forced her to wear ribbons and bows. But Sylvia spent her life wearing ribbons (pink for her wedding; pale blue for the childhood ponytail her mother cut off and archived), plus bandanas and bands that tamed and trained her hair. That famous "dip" over Sylvia's left eye -- worn long before she went blond in 1954 -- needed a hairpin to anchor it. Where's Sylvia's facial scar in the photo below? It's hidden beneath some quite obvious retouching:

Plath's accessories were pivotal. Her hairpins and watch were removed before electroshock. As you know, Ted Hughes tore off Sylvia's hairband and earrings when they first met. Sylvia mourned "my lovely red hairband scarf which has weathered the sun and much love, and whose like I will never again find." [1] I'd love a Sylvia Plath fanfiction about her hairband and earrings and how she got them back or lost them forever. 

It's in the nature of ribbons and hairbands to get lost and replaced. But because Sylvia so often wore hairbands we will always know that this bookstore finger puppet/fridge magnet, even if its tag goes missing, is Sylvia Plath.

Finger puppet. They're British! They don't ship to USA.

In Sylvia's poem "Parliament Hill Fields," an ordinary dimestore barrette makes the first appearance of its kind in literature:

One child drops a barrette of pink plastic; / None of them seem to notice. [2]

In the context of the poem, Plath made that moment resound.

While there are some articles and book passages about Sylvia's apparel, I hadn't noticed that about half the photos of her show her hair controlled with bandanas and headbands. I didn't even see that Sylvia so often wore headwear until I saw the monstrous white bow on what I think is Aurelia Schober. [3] That child's forlorn expression and wavy, light-ish hair have me thinking it's her. About Aurelia's childhood we as yet have no photos and know almost nothing.

By 1962 Sylvia's hair grew long enough to be braided and coiled into its own headband; the style is called a "crown braid" or "coronet." Sylvia exulted over hers and is wearing it in the famous "daffodil" color photos taken in April '62. Poet Amanda Gorman in 2021 started a media fuss by wearing a red headband crownlike, as if women aren't supposed to do that. It's regal.

A coronet. How to make one?

[1] Journals, 26 February 1956.

[2] "Parliament Hill Fields," written February 1961.

[3] For really small photos of little Sylvia's really monstrous bows, see the Plath family photos of Sylvia on the endpapers of Letters Home.