A Talented Mother

Aurelia Schober's college classmates read, sort of sub rosa, the pop-psychology book The Nervous Housewife (1920) by neurologist/psychiatrist Abraham Myerson. He wrote:

One of the commonest and saddest transformations is the change of the gay, laughing girl, radiant with love and all aglow with the thought of union with her man, into the housewife of a decade -- complaining, fatigued, and disillusioned.

This was an open secret, but no one had ever put it quite that way before. I thought of Aurelia Schober, her college class's valedictorian, yearbook editor, German-language actress, voted by her peers "Most Studious," with a dashing Austrian boyfriend who was one of the century's greatest engineers, and in her sophomore year her headshot was published in The Boston Transcript:

Aurelia, 19, in The Boston Transcript, 12 January 1926.

Much of Aurelia's creativity and spunk got shell-shocked and died during an almost-nine-year marriage to human land mine Otto Plath, a behavioral scientist, at home a thrower of tantrums and a monocrat. The lasting effect on Aurelia was perpetual anxiety. I believe that from her marriage and husband's needless death Aurelia had PTSD. The day after his death she signed a contract drawn up by her eight-year-old daughter never to marry again. And never did.

 

Then Aurelia had to support her children on a single woman's salary. Good thing she had prepared herself with a master's degree and let her parents do live-in childcare. From their births Aurelia supported her children's education and growth in every possible way, was positive and honest with them: Aurelia was a talented mother.

Aurelia Plath couldn't become a writer but seems to have used a surviving part of her dramatic talent and resonant voice to read aloud to family and friends Sylvia's and Warren's letters from college. Her children knew their letters were shared, and wrote accordingly.

 

Aurelia also used part of her talent for her 29-year university teaching career: Teaching can feel like performance, and the show must go on whether your stomach aches or your daughter killed herself. In retirement she edited and published a bestselling book of her talented daughter's letters and recited her talented daughter's poetry on video.

 

Abraham Myerson (1881-1948), who thought socio-cultural pressures triggered addictions and mental illness, published other books for laymen such as The Foundation of Personality, and one of his dozens of papers appeared in The American Journal of Insanity, later renamed and still known as The American Journal of Psychiatry.

Gender-Swapper Aurelia Plath

Researching Aurelia Plath's life means seeking unconventional sources, and more than once I've hit the jackpot on eBay whence came the above press photo from a dealer unaware that it pictures Sylvia Plath's mother. Then college sophomore Aurelia Schober is kneeling in a scene from the German-language play Das Ganschen von Buchenau ("The Little Goose of Buchenau").

College German Clubs liked to perform Ganschen, which in 1926 -- when Aurelia starred in her college's production -- was a two-act chestnut everybody loved. Harvard performed it in 1893.  Radcliffe's program [pictured] from 1904 includes the following synopsis:

"Fink has been sent by his uncle to woo Agnes, but having been told by Silberling that she is coarse and stupid, "ein Ganschen," he behaves in the rudest manner possible, hoping to have his suit rejected. Agnes's grandmother, disgusted by Fink's boorishness, urges her to accept Silberling, a dandy of the town. In spite of all this, Agnes falls in love with Fink. He soon learns how he has been deceived as to her, but not before her hand has been promised to Silberling, who wishes to marry her for her dowry. Agnes discovers how matters stand, and in order to make Silberling free her, pretends to be not only brainless and awkward, but poor as well. Her ruse succeeds. Silberling's true character is exposed; Agnes bestows her hand on Fink, with the full approval of her grandparents."

Aurelia played von Fink. You didn't need to know German to like what I hope was a broadly acted farce and big fun.

Aurelia was the leading "young man" in three annual Boston University College of Practical Arts and Letters German Club plays, Ganschen the first. In 1927 she was lovesick poet Strubel in Die Ferne Prinzessin ("The Faraway Princess"); then Prince Goldlande in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs in 1928, years before the Disney movie. 

Tall and big-boned ("statuesque") Aurelia also had a resonant voice comparable to Sylvia's BBC-recorded voice; at least two people who know have said so. Publicity photos exist for Ganschen and Die Ferne with Aurelia and her leading lady in much the same pose. Notice how if Aurelia had stood up she would have towered over her Ganschen co-star, Selma Orlov.

Their college's German Club was no slouch about publicity and distributed press releases and professional photos to newspapers -- which published them, including a headshot of Aurelia Schober as herself, headlined "Star in B.U. Play," and a headshot of Aurelia as mustachioed von Fink. The von Fink headshot, identified as "Miss Aurelia Schober," appeared in Florida and Oklahoma small-town newspapers, evidently for the entertainment value cross-dressing could provide. Aurelia never again looked so rakish in any photo I have seen. 

Aurelia wanted to become a writer, but her artistic talent was for acting, or the stage. That was attested by her peers not only at her college but at Brookline High School, where Aurelia performed as a female with other teachers in the modern comedy The Show-Off in 1930. A very sedate cast photo ran in the Boston Globe. Aurelia wrote that an agent in the audience told her she had talent and mentioned Broadway. Like several anecdotes showing Aurelia as a person who had any talent or success, that anecdote was cut from her preface to her selection from daughter Sylvia's letters, Letters Home (1975).

One of my Shakespeare professors made a career of spinning Shakespeare's cross-dressing characters into transgressive gender-benders (a male actor playing a girl playing a guy!). There might be a Ph.D. in studying Sylvia Plath's mother -- a single mother -- whom Aurelia and Sylvia said had the burden of being, in real life, both a woman and a man.

[Notes: Das Ganschen von Buchenau by Wilhelm Friedrich Reise, c. 1830; "Harvard performed it," Crimson, 3 March 1893; "In 1927," "German Club to Present Play at B.U. Tomorrow," Boston Post, 3 February 1927; "Star in B.U. Play" with photo, Boston Transcript, 12 January 1926; "appeared in Florida," this blog 10 September 2020; "Boston Globe," 8 December 1930 p. 22.]

Aurelia in Drag

"When students of the Boston College of Practical Arts and Letters gave a play recently, Miss Aurelia Schober was the leading man," says the caption.

Discovered in the obscure Eustis [FL, near Orlando] Daily Lake Region newspaper, March 4, 1926, page 8: a unique photo of college girl Aurelia Schober in faraway Boston, Massachusetts, outfitted as a man for her role in her college's German Club play. At the all-female Boston University College of Practical Arts and Letters (CPAL) German-Club theatricals, Aurelia was often (always?) cast as a man, being tall and talented. [See an earlier, related post noting her acting.]

The image must have been quite striking for an editor in Eustis, population then 2800, to clip from its original background and print.

Boston University's College of Arts and Letters' well-staffed and industrious Press Club regularly sent press releases with college news to numerous papers. Occasionally the Club's copy or photos were published in the Boston Herald, Boston Traveler, Boston Globe, Boston Evening Transcript. Photos were expensive to print and send, so how did this get to Florida? We do know that CPAL enrolled at least one student from Florida.

Aurelia's stage career extended beyond her college graduation in 1928 to a role (as a female) at Brookline High School in 1930, a performance Aurelia remembered impressed a theatrical agent in the audience.