I Was Playing Paper Dolls

Aurelia in Sarasota, Florida, Easter 1967

Early in the Plath Family Papers research I saw I’d been working with paper dolls and of course I had, because between Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes, and Aurelia Plath and I there had never been anything but paper. 

Although they had been real living people, what I’d read determined the faces I gave them and how I clothed them. Gwyneth Paltrow in the movie Sylvia wore upper-middle-class clothes, as if the costumers never met anyone like Sylvia Plath who bought off the rack aspirational clothes not quite so expensive or  flattering. And a whole generation now thinks Sylvia had blue eyes when they were plain common brown. 

That only proved that Sylvia imagined is not a person with an eye color. She is a cutout to be costumed: The Marilyn Monroe of literature, if you like. A feminist. A mystic. Political. Suicidal Esther Greenwood. Clothe her however you want. And instead of outgrowing our Sylvia Plath paper doll we got farther and farther away from the doll and deeper into the paper. Thinking Sylvia is her paper we generate more paper arguing whether paper equals truth. Any eight-year-old can tell you that’s a misapprehension.

In the new Plath Family archives I’m at my keyboard as at a sewing machine upstyling some old togs papered onto Sylvia, Ted, and Otto -- they're all in the archive -- and trying to craft for Aurelia a face and presence I am now privileged to see. Reading Aurelia's diaries and the lists of hundreds of friends in her bursting address book and seeing notes and inks and photos she cherished I felt as if her live warm body was stirring and arose as after a long sleep. She is more alive, more colorful and collected, more Queen Elizabeth II, than the Aurelia on whose life I thought myself an expert.

Maybe You Too Have Felt Like This and Know It's Not a Joke

Unable to look on the bright side. Aurelia is 22.

While I take a week's break from posting, here is a yearbook photo of Aurelia Schober with Melrose High School's faculty, winter 1928-29. Distanced and then dumped by her boyfriend that November, Aurelia cried, despaired, then angrily told him she did not want to be "an episode." He said, too bad. Unlike her colleagues in this photo she is too dispirited to rustle up a smirk or close her coat.

But the sting wakes her up. Aurelia, 22, resolves to next year earn a master's degree, lines up a summer job waitressing at a fancy resort to make tuition money, envisions a teaching career like the world has never seen, and so on.

Aurelia Plath in 1984 recalled that while she was teaching a high-school English class a school inspector came by to observe her. Aurelia had memorized and was acting out, word for word, for her students, all the parts of the most dramatic scene in the novel Ivanhoe. The students loved it and eagerly took up the original. Afterward, the inspector came up to Aurelia, “shaking his head in wonderment,” and said to her, “Sheer genius; sheer genius.” [1]

[1] AP to L. Sanazaro, 2 December 1984.