"Be Sure That You Conform to the Rules"

The student handbook from Aurelia’s alma mater divided its rules into sections:

• Rules
• College Rules
• Dormitory Rules
• Miscellaneous College Rules
• Reminders

“Remember that you are being watched”

These rules, formulated by the college’s student government, include a 5 percent reduction in your final grade for each unexcused absence from class, and 2.5 percent off for tardiness. The dormitory had mandatory study hours and curfews. The handbook said that more important than good grades were high standards of personal conduct and character.

“to be very strictly enforced”

 

My point is that at Aurelia’s all-female college in midtown Boston in the 1920s and early 1930s caution and conformity were not unusual values. Nor were they Bostonian or working-class values; handbooks from women’s colleges in all regions, including Smith College, said much the same. [1] So what Plath fans like to call “Aurelia’s Victorian values” were not Aurelia’s own inventions or her personal failings. They were cultural and institutional norms. [2]

 

I was delighted to find on eBay three consecutive Boston University College of Practical Arts and Letters (CPAL) handbooks/personal appointment calendars for the school years beginning in 1932, 1933, and 1934. That was not too long after Aurelia’s graduation in 1928. CPAL student Gudrun Hetzel owned and wrote in all three of them brief personal notes about her classes, campus events, and social life. I hoped Hetzel’s cellphone-sized handbooks would bring me nearer to understanding Aurelia Schober Plath’s undergraduate experience.

 

Hetzel noted that CPAL tuition in 1932 was $180 per year; textbooks $1-$5 each; lunch 25 cents. On Hetzel’s calendar were dances, sorority rush, the German Club play, teas, numerous meetings of clubs and classes. She took and proctored exams. She wondered, “Is a real Christian ever blue?” Every Wednesday a mandatory assembly featured a guest speaker. In 1932-33 Hetzel penciled several pages of undated notes about Richard B. Harrison, African-American actor who at 65 had his first Broadway role as “De Lawd” in Green Pastures. The performance was so celebrated it landed him on the cover of Time. [3] Hetzel’s calendar does not say she saw the play.

 

From year to year CPAL rules did not change, but the 1932 handbook’s gleeful pages about earning pins and letters for CPAL athletics were reduced and moved to the back of the handbook in 1933-1934, the worst year of the Great Depression. Hetzel made these notes:

 

1933, February 4: “all banks in country closed for bank holiday – no one can draw out money except for payrolls and necessities after holiday ends”

 

1933, March 13: “Poverty party” [4]

 

1933, March 18: “Papa stopped working”

 

Hetzel said no more about her home or family. CPAL had opened in 1919 as a business-science a.k.a. secretarial school, but like Aurelia, Hetzel was a “degree student” preparing to become a teacher of languages. Hetzel’s senior-year courses in fall 1934 were Philosophy, Foreign Affairs, French, German Drama, and German 13-14. In spring 1935 Hetzel studied Psychology of Education, French, “Soc,” Shakespeare, and Ethics.

Hetzel’s calendar, September 1934. Sat. 29 says, Picnic at Haskell’s Farm, the shorthand says “with Sam”. Sun. 30 says, “Football game in the afternoon, supper, movies in the evening.”

 

Several of Hetzel’s notes are in Gregg shorthand. Hetzel met a man named Sam in December 1933. In February he brought her Valentine candy. I liked seeing their romance unfold week to week. Sam became her only date for dances. They also went sledding, and to a Red Sox game, and horseback riding. Just before graduation in 1935 Hetzel wrote, “Engaged to Sam.” Her Gregg shorthand notes say nothing scandalous, and only one surprised me:

 

In her senior-year handbook Hetzel wrote that a Mr. Benson recommended her to the North Andover (MA) school district to teach German, or French and English. He might have been the one who advised her:

 

Applying for position

• smooth appearance
• no nail polish
• Type-write letter 
• [in Gregg shorthand] religion will make a difference
  

 

[1] For example, North Carolina College for Women handbook, 1929-30: “The best things in life must necessarily come from service and self-sacrifice.” Typical of men’s-college handbooks was the dean’s message to Amherst’s class of 1933 stressing how others had sacrificed so that they might flourish. https://acdc.amherst.edu/view/asc:1407028/asc:1407057

[2] Gordon Lameyer’s unpublished memoir, p. 214, refers to “her rigid, Victorian values” (but wanted Aurelia to be his mother-in-law anyway).

[3] Time magazine, March 4, 1935, retrieved 24 April 2022.

[4] Guests at a poverty party wear ragged or dated clothing and hairdos, speak with ethnic or regional accents, take refreshments in tin cups, etc. Usually such parties were fundraisers.

N.B.: Gudrun Hetzel and Sam Hodges married in June 1936 and had three children. Gudrun died in 1988 and Sam in 1991, both in Florida, and were buried in the Hetzel family plot in Woburn, Massachusetts.

Where Aurelia Plath Went to College

Voyeur Arthur Inman lived across from Aurelia's all-female college, its campus here portrayed in its handbook, 1932.

Boston University in 1900 didn't want a business college. The word "business" itself was tainted; it stank of corruption and money-grubbing, and only grudgingly--responding to a survey of what male high-school seniors wanted, because female B.U. graduates outnumbered males--did B.U. allow in 1913 a College of Business Administration. The university's president and board of trustees, holding their noses, imposed certain conditions: 1) Night classes only. 2) The business college, being "unacademic," must be strictly separate from B.U.'s College of Liberal Arts. 3) The business college must fund itself; B.U. allowed the use of its classrooms but none of its money.

Hundreds of males enrolled. At last, a college that taught something practical: accounting, business law, economics, advertising, and also Spanish, because trade with Latin America was trending and Pan-Americanism was a live ideal. In three years the college more than paid for itself, and B.U. made it full-time and degree-granting. It was the first undergraduate business college in New England, its first graduates the class of 1917. [1]

During the Great War, men enlisted and women had to fill their office jobs. Without any fuss, B.U. in 1919 opened for women the College of Secretarial Sciences, degree-granting but with many options. College graduates and those with some college could earn secretarial credentials in one year or two. With two more years of literature and languages, women as cultured as they were self-supporting received a bachelor's degree. In its first semester 300 women enrolled. Aurelia Schober enrolled in 1924, when the school, offering a four-year teaching track, renamed itself the College of Practical Arts and Letters (CPAL). Aurelia earned the two-year secretarial certificate, as her father required, and could then have found a job, but the flourishing college where she was a star inspired her to want a career.

B.U.'s CPAL was first located in the old Massachusetts College of Pharmacy building on Garrison Street in Boston's Back Bay. In short order CPAL expanded into three adjacent buildings. One was the dormitory Aurelia lived in during her senior year. [2] [3] [4] In 1942, CPAL hired its own alumna, now named Aurelia Plath, to develop a medical-secretarial program at its new location, Dunn Hall on B.U.'s more picturesque Charles River campus [color photo]. CPAL in the 1940s had other specialty majors: business education, applied art, home economics, and retailing. But secretarial studies was its bread and butter and that was what Professor Aurelia Plath taught.

Where Aurelia Plath taught: Dunn Hall, Boston University

As crucial as such training was to women who needed it, at universities "secretarial science" was reduced to "skills" that high schools and vocational schools could teach in less time and with fewer books. CPAL was dissolved in 1955, its courses and faculty portioned out to B.U.'s art school, school of education, and thriving College of Business Administration, where Aurelia was promoted to associate professor. Dunn Hall today houses the Elie Wiesel Center for Jewish Studies.

[1] https://www.bu.edu/articles/2015/birth-of-a-college/

[2]

The Journal of Education, Sept. 29, 1922.

[3] Recluse and diarist Arthur Inman lived from 1919 until the 1960s in Garrison Hall, a residential hotel at 8 Garrison Street. His September 21, 1921 diary entry describes looking through field glasses from his sixth-floor apartment down into Boston University's gymnasium, where, in an office, naked female students were being measured and examined. The Inman Diary (Harvard Univ. Press, 1985).

[4] After CPAL left Garrison Street, two other colleges moved in. The buildings were razed in the 1970s for apartments and senior housing. Garrison Hall, on the next block, still stands.

Aurelia Moves Out of the House

Built in 1925

Aurelia Schober roomed her first year after college at 86 Vinton Street in Melrose, Massachusetts, teaching at Melrose High School in 1928-29. In the group photo of the faculty she looks older than 22. Melrose, where no windows look out upon the sea, isn't far from her parents' and siblings' house in Winthrop. But she'd lived during her senior year in her college dormitory in mid-town Boston, and instead of moving back in with her family, the novice teacher roomed in this house perched on a hill, with the elderly homeowner, his wife, their grown daughter, and a seamstress.

Vinton Street was a half-hour walk from Melrose High School, then at 585 Main Street. One of her students, Mary Stetson (1911-1994), later known as novelist Mary Stetson Clarke, became Aurelia's good friend and correspondent. [1]

Whether teaching at Melrose was a one-year appointment, or what the rooming arrangements were, we do not know. On November 5, 1928, as Aurelia and her boyfriend of two years, her first love, Karl, were hiking in the Middlesex Fells Reservation just west of Melrose, he broke up with her. She cried and was horribly grieved. Karl moved on to date and marry a Radcliffe graduate student. Fifty years later, Aurelia incorrectly remembered their painful parting as taking place in 1927. We know it was autumn 1928 and the exact date and place because he kept a diary.

Aurelia waited tables in New Hampshire in summer 1929 and attended Boston University graduate school during the academic year 1929-1930 (while Mary Stetson was a freshman there). Aurelia lived in Winthrop with her parents while earning her master's degree, and remained at home after securing a very good full-time teaching job at Brookline High School. In 1932 Aurelia quit her job and moved in with her new husband Otto Plath. But we cannot say Aurelia otherwise ever really left her parents. They rented out their Winthrop house and stayed with Aurelia and Otto during the summer of 1932, while Aurelia was pregnant with Sylvia, and also in summer 1933.

[1] Aurelia S. Plath to Mary Stetson Clarke, letter 15 March 1959.

"Forbidden Fruit": Aurelia Plath's Poems*

 

 

Aurelia Schober was 17 years old when her high-school yearbook, The Echo, 1923, published her poem "Forbidden Fruit." The Winthrop, Massachusetts High School yearbook, like many high-school and college yearbooks of the time, printed samples of students' creative writings. Aurelia's college yearbook in 1928 published another of her poems, unsigned (p. 196), but in the 1970s Aurelia Schober Plath identified it for Plath biographer Harriet Rosenstein:

 

A CHILD'S WISH

 

The sky is blue and the wind blows free,

Oh come for a run on the beach with me!

 

We will delve in the sand and race with the waves

We will jump on the rocks where the salt sea laves,

We will ponder the driftwood strewn up by the tide,

We will search for a cavern where mermaidens hide.

 

And then in a calm we might hear a roar

Of very great waves on a distant shore.

Far out on the point a light tow'r we see,

Oh won't you come for a run with me?

 

Emotionally and technically "A Child's Wish" is such a regression that if Aurelia wrote it after writing "Forbidden Fruit," and after reading contemporary poetry books that we know Aurelia owned and annotated, such as Sara Teasdale's Dark of the Moon (1926) and Edna St. Vincent Millay's The King's Henchman (1927), "A Child's Wish" might be a "decoy" or "dummy" poem. Remember, Aurelia in 1928 was not yet married, a mother, or a schoolteacher, so did not write this poem for her children.

 

A "decoy" poem is what a college student caught in and crushed by a fiery love affair with a man 22 years older writes to show her parents, who want her to be a secretary, that she is still pure and innocent. Aurelia was her college yearbook's editor that year. The yearbook's creative-writing pages printed 17 pieces, all unsigned; at the end are listed ten different authors, including Aurelia. What I call a "dummy" poem is a bloodless exercise on an unobjectionable topic, such as a child on the beach. Maybe a reader of "Forbidden Fruit" had hinted to Aurelia that young women should not write, for all the world to see, about succumbing to temptation, and suggested to her that poetry in general led into morally dubious territory.

Or else "A Child's Wish" was the best Aurelia could do.

 

Aurelia's annotations on her daughter Sylvia Plath's letters and papers show how habitually Aurelia expressed one thing while thinking another. Proof that she wasn't born that way is that Aurelia never hid her feelings well. What's building as I research Aurelia's life is a picture of young Aurelia as a leader, intrepid, adventurous, game; then backpedaling. Sylvia too played at feminine artifice, but became renowned for finally telling it like it was.

Aurelia also wrote a greeting-card-type poem for her daughter Sylvia's 13th birthday, rather cliche, nothing special. Yet it is fortunate for literature that Aurelia loved poetry and had practiced the craft, hands-on, and then guided and supported her gifted Sylvia, although Aurelia herself ultimately gave it up.

*Aurelia Plath did not compose the poem "Rebecca," about a little girl with a doll, Rebecca, who "caught a chill" and needed special care. The poem, credited to Eleanor Piatt, first appeared in St. Nicholas, a magazine for children, vol. 36, in 1909. Aurelia copied it into a letter she sent to Sylvia in 1938, specifying that it was a poem she had enjoyed as a child.

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.