How Did Aurelia Plath Control and Manipulate Sylvia?

Aurelia Plath is called a “manipulative, controlling mother.” I wanted to identify what Aurelia manipulated and controlled.

 

I mean what Aurelia said or did hoping to alter her daughter Sylvia’s choices and behavior to match Aurelia’s own desires, and succeeding in altering them.

 

Sylvia was not easily manipulated or controlled. She resisted Aurelia’s “suggestions” to

• learn shorthand
• make a “secure” marriage
• maintain chastity

• 

  Aurelia Plath in 1971

  
  

  rest
• continue teaching at Smith College
• learn stenotyping to support a jobless mate
• have Frieda treated medically so she would not grow “too” tall
• write about “decent courageous people”
• move with her children back to the United States. 

 

About the larger things, at life’s turning points, Sylvia made her own choices.

 

Aurelia did try. She urged her young daughter to write cursive and practice the piano and inscribed her gift of a new diary with "Not to be written in after 8 p.m." College-aged Sylvia when depressed volunteered in a hospital as her mother advised. That soon ended. On record is one parental threat from June 1954, when Sylvia told her psychiatrist Dr. Beuscher that her mother said something like, “If you have sexual affairs I will stop funding your schooling.” This was an empty threat, because Sylvia did as she liked that summer and her mother continued to pay.

 

Adult Sylvia typically did the opposite of what her mother wanted. You've "heard" that while visiting in 1962, during the week of July 9, Aurelia urged Sylvia to throw her husband Ted out of the house, but the fact is that while he was in London, Sylvia ordered her houseguest Aurelia to move out by Friday when Ted was returning for the weekend. Unable to find a hotel room, Aurelia moved in with Winifred Davies. (Aurelia portrayed the move as her own idea, but it wasn’t.) Ted left for good on 11 October 1962, Sylvia ejecting him on the advice not of her mother but of Dr. Beuscher, whom she trusted more. “I keep your letters like the Bible,” Sylvia wrote Beuscher, and actually carried those letters around. Rather than taking pleasure in the breakup, Aurelia pleaded with Sylvia not to leave her children without a father.

 

"Feeling" manipulated into overachievement, or that her mother demanded of her happy letters and “dividends of joy” – well, Sylvia could have quit or modified her achieving and letter writing at any time. She didn't.

 

Sylvia noticed her mother’s passive-aggressive smiling through pain, calling anger “hurt,” wearing dowdy secondhand clothes to advertise her sacrifices, quoting books and sayings instead of speaking her mind, worrying, identifying too closely with her. But as attempts to control or manipulate Sylvia, these all failed.

 

We do not see here gaslighting, deception, stalking, monitoring, abuse, coercion, trickery, isolating, stonewalling and other tactics controllers and manipulators use.

"One Sweet Ulcerous Ball": A Chronology

Aurelia Plath suffered from and wrote frankly about her stomach ulcer before studies in the 1980s proved that most chronic ulcers are caused by a bacterium, H. pylori, spread by person-to-person contact and treatable with antibiotics. Before then doctors said stress caused ulcers. In white-collar cases, it was “executive stress,” which gave those ulcers value as proof the sufferers had worked too hard and given too much.

 

So Aurelia very much wanted her ulcer story, and its dramatic surgical cure, written into the Plath narrative. She tastelessly told People magazine (October 27, 1975) about her ulcer, and in her introduction to Letters Home linked its origin and episodic activity to the burdens she carried as a wife, widow, and breadwinning mother. She linked ulcer attacks to Sylvia’s 1953 suicide attempt in Letters Home (138) and blamed those events for her 1955 subtotal gastrectomy in a letter to Judith Kroll (1 December 1978) and in notes for a speech in 1979. For the latter, Aurelia wrote, in Gregg shorthand, “Mention my operation following her [Sylvia’s] recovery for her breakdown. She had said, ‘You pretended it hadn’t happened.’ With 3/4 of my stomach removed, the long scar on my abdomen alone would not allow me to forget! I lived in dread of a recurrence.” (1)

 

Otto Plath’s final illness and leg amputation haunt Sylvia’s life and later creative work. Aurelia Plath’s 17-year illness, with its gruesome internal hemorrhaging, does not; or maybe it does and no one has yet perceived it. (2) Sylvia’s Journal belittles Aurelia’s bleeding as drama, calls her “one sweet ulcerous ball,” and mentions bad breath, a symptom of H. pylori infection. (3)

 

Aurelia in Letters Home wrote that her duodenal ulcer formed two years before her husband Otto’s death, meaning 1938. The family was then living in Winthrop to enjoy its beaches, so it is possible Aurelia became infected or co-infected with the parasitic Giardia duodenalis from the sewage piped into Boston Harbor. (4) In February 1943, the Plaths’ first winter in Wellesley, Aurelia hemorrhaged while shoveling snow and was hospitalized. In March, Sylvia mailed letters to Aurelia at Pratt Diagnostic Hospital, where Aurelia’s brother-in-law Joe Benotti headed the chemistry laboratory. Aurelia hemorrhaged again in July, and from summer camp Sylvia, age ten, wrote Aurelia c/o Aurelia’s sister, Dorothy Benotti, “Are you well? I worry when I don’t receive letters from you” (July 18).

 

Aurelia had unrelated surgery in September 1947. This is noted in Sylvia’s diary and commemorated in Sylvia’s poem “Missing Mother,” mailed to Aurelia at Carney Hospital. Brief and scattered mentions in Sylvia’s letters, and a few notes, then become our only clues to Aurelia’s health. The ulcer stirs in February 1951; its stressor is not clear. Aurelia’s mother, Sylvia’s “Grammy,” the Plath family housekeeper, falls ill in early 1953 and Aurelia is distraught. On May 13 Sylvia writes her brother that their mother is eating baby food “again.” Aurelia takes that summer off from teaching, but Sylvia’s suicide attempt in August and months of hospitalization vex the ulcer. It begins bleeding, Aurelia noted, in April 1954, but she might have kept this from Sylvia because it is July before Sylvia mentions her mother’s “nasty ulcer pains.” That September Sylvia chides her mother, “You know that any problem makes you sick.” On October 1, 1954, Sylvia writes Aurelia c/o The New England Medical Center, and the ulcer is an issue at least until November.

 

On January 29, 1955, Sylvia comforts Aurelia after another ulcer attack. There is yet another in April. Now Aurelia has been sick for a year. Admitted to Newton-Wellesley Hospital in May, Aurelia is intravenously fed to build her up for her gastrectomy. Then, the death-defying-mother moment: With doctors’ permission, Aurelia on June 6, 1955 travels in a station wagon, flat on a mattress, to Sylvia’s graduation from Smith College. One witness says Aurelia was carried on a litter to the ceremony grounds. The gastrectomy is June 10. On June 24, Sylvia writes Aurelia, “Welcome Home!,” and on July 6 writes her brother that Aurelia is convalescing and friends are lining up to see her.

 

Aurelia, and Napoleon, and that character on Mad Men—if their chronic ulcers came not from responsibilities but from H. pylori, are they still to be admired? Stress aggravates whatever ill one has, but it turns out that “executive stress” is a myth from a misbegotten study of rhesus monkeys, its result pushed by antacid manufacturers. The fact is that ulcers afflict low-status workers much more often than bosses. (5) Today a popular meme blames “working too hard, being strong for too long” for another life-threatening, invisible illness—depression; Sylvia’s cross.

 

(1) Box 9, folder 11, “Letters Home – Notes.” Sylvia Plath Papers, Smith College.

(2) https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/324990#symptoms. Sylvia Plath in summer 1951 overheard her employer, a physician, discussing a patient’s duodenal ulcer, and quoted his description of its symptoms in her journal, wondering how she might work it into a story. (Journals, entry 109, p. 87)

(3) Journals, December 12, 1958.

(4) The anti-parasitic drug Flagyl was not available in the U.S. until 1962.

(5) https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-myth-of-executive-str/.

Beyond "Medusa" and "Mrs. Greenwood": From the Rosenstein Papers

Notes and tapes of 1970s interviews with Sylvia Plath’s friends, dates, and teachers, now in the Harriet Rosenstein research files at Emory University, are wonderfully valuable Plath resources, and include random comments and observations about Aurelia Plath. Interviewees such as Marcia Brown Stern or Elizabeth Compton Sigmund, whom Sylvia prepped to dislike Aurelia Plath before ever meeting her, had harsher things to say, but I sought first-hand impressions that went beyond “Mrs. Greenwood” and “Medusa”:

Marcia Brown Stern, Sylvia’s college friend: “Bitter and careworn” Aurelia was “struggling every minute of every day of every year to pay the bills and to keep herself together – just holding on for dear life – and there is no room for color – in her tone of voice or her hairdo or her aprons or her living room or inside her head.”

J. Melvin Woody, Sylvia’s date from Yale: Sylvia insisted he accompany her from New Haven to her Wellesley home “so she wouldn’t be with her mother alone. I found that a little hard to understand when I met Sylvia’s mother, who seemed harmless . . . . an intelligent, alert woman who was probably much better qualified to deal with a daughter like that than most women.”

Richard Sassoon, Sylvia’s boyfriend, met Aurelia once: “I remember her as sort of cold and academic and I suppose repressed. New England style.”

Pat O’Neill Pratson, Sylvia’s friend since tenth grade, a frequent visitor to the Wellesley house: Aurelia Plath served as a “bridge” between her own Austrian-immigrant parents and her Ivy-League children. Aurelia “recognized things she might like to have done that she saw the children doing in her place. It was very lonely for her.”

Peter Davison, Sylvia’s “summer romance” in 1955: Aurelia was “Terribly eager for her girl to get ahead. And very interested in someone [Davison] who worked for the Harvard University Press.”

Jon K. Rosenthal, one of Sylvia’s dates: Aurelia was “a very attractive woman at that time. Almost statuesque.”

Elizabeth Compton Sigmund, describing Aurelia visiting Devon in the summer of 1962: “And Mrs. Plath – ‘These are my grandchildren. You come to Grammy – Grammy will read it to you – Grammy will do it—’” 

Nancy Hunter Steiner, Sylvia’s college roommate: Aurelia was “sweet and well-meaning and very intimidated by Sylvia.”

Susan Weller Burch, Sylvia’s Smith classmate: Aurelia “just seemed to slip into the shadows.”. . . “gone at work most of the time. Grandparents in residence.”

Wilbury Crockett, Sylvia’s high-school English teacher: “Mrs. Plath was very much in control. I always had the feeling that she was very much aware of Sylvia’s gifts and considered Sylvia a precocious child. I think she was driven by the thought that Sylvia and Warren might not get all that they ought to have. Financial security was a very real factor.”

Aurelia and the Great Equality Debate: Winthrop High School, 1924

Debating team, Winthrop High School yearbook 1924, p. 58

 

Among the first four girls to break Winthrop High's debate team's gender barrier was senior Aurelia Schober [front row, third from left]. A packed auditorium heard the boys debate the girls about whether female teachers should be paid as much as males. The school yearbook, The Echo, narrates:

By reason of the fact that we of the class of '24 have been as radical in all our enterprises as one could reasonably expect from students who want something different, it is not at all remarkable to note that the debating team has also been changed somewhat and is now co-ed.

 

The girls made their debut, and debut it was, for they completely took the boys off their feet with their eloquence and ability that had previously been a joke among the opposite and superior (?) sex, on Friday evening, February 29 [1924], in a debate with the boys on the subject: Resolved that women teachers should receive a salary equal to that of men teachers for equal device.

 

Much propaganda had been broadcasted during the first term but no results were apparent until the girls began coming to the boys' trial debates and holding sessions of their own. Then from a group of aspirants that rivaled one of our athletic turnouts, [team coach] Miss Drew selected four of the best and issued a challenge to Coach Sowle, which was to prove a nemesis to his well organized crew ere long.

 

In the meantime several outside debates were talked of and even scheduled for the boys as in the past, but because of various affairs that conflicted and made these impossible, they were one by one cancelled until the high school debate, that of the boys and girls, was the main feature in this field.

 

The affirmative was upheld by the girls, comprising: —

Aurelia Schober, Rebuttal Speaker

Esther Chisholm

Marjorie McCarthy

Elizabeth Kent, Alternate 

 

And the negative by the following boys: —

Morris Jacobson, Rebuttal Speaker

Charles McCarthy

Walter O'Toole

Newall Perry, Alternate 

 

Speaking in an overcrowded auditorium, the girls won a unanimous vote from the judges, and also the right to be represented by two speakers at any other debate in which the High School might participate during the rest of the year. Miss Chisholm was chosen best speaker of the evening.

Aurelia Schober in the News, 1926-1932

During her college years in the 1920s, The Boston Herald daily newspaper, relying on press releases from the student Press Club at Boston University's College of Practical Arts and Letters, mentioned Aurelia Schober more often than one might imagine. It was not unusual for students to have so many extracurricular interests. The surprise is that Aurelia had such a high profile.

1926, May 25, p. 31: "B.U. Writers' Club Elects Officers" -- Aurelia Schober, elected Writers' Club vice-president, was also "president of the college German Club, and is well known for her ability in dramatic work."

1927, February 3, p. 28: "B.U. German Club to Present Play" -- "Miss Aurelia Schober of Winthrop has been assigned the leading part of Strubel in Sudermann's play "Die Ferne Prinzessin," to be produced by the German Club of the Boston University College of Practical Arts and letters Friday night, in place of Miss Emmi Koster of Hamburg, Ger., who is ill." [In this one-act comedy, "Strubel," a male poet, declares his hopeless love for a princess to a male who is actually the princess in disguise.]

1927, May 23, p. 4: "Who's Who in B.U. Yearbook" -- Under "Senior Honors" bestowed by peers at the College of Practical Arts and Letters, Aurelia Schober ranked third in the category "Busiest," second in the category "Most Studious," and first in the category "Class Dictionary."

1928, May 25, p. 3: "Miss Schober to give B.U. Class Valedictory" -- ["Class" means College of Practical Arts and Letters, class of 1928.] Besides being valedictorian, Miss Schober "was editor-in-chief of the junior yearbook, and has served as president of the German Club, and as a member of the student government board, the English Club, the Writers' Club, and Sigma." [Sigma was a scholastic society for seniors; according to the College's yearbook for 1929, page 44, Aurelia had been elected to that society as a junior, an honor granted to one student per year. Graduation day was June 6.]

1932, September 13, p. 13: "B.U. Alumni Directors Meet This Evening" -- "Mrs. Aurelia S. Plath, '28, Jamaica Plain" is listed as one of two women representing College of Practical Arts and Letters alumni. Mrs. Plath was then pregnant with Sylvia, to be born on October 27.