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| Progress. From The Making of Sylvia Plath (2024) by Carl Rollyson. |
Before disposing of Kate Moses's Wintering: A Novel of Sylvia Plath (2003) I wanted to share a scene from its Chapter 27, set on a fictional 21 December 1962, a week after the real Sylvia and her children moved into a historic London flat. On the real 14th the real Sylvia wrote her mother Aurelia, "Safely in Yeats's house!" and that she'd never been so happy; on the real 21st she wrote her mother about her new furnishings and: "I spent the rest of Mrs. P's clothes money & feel & look like a million." "Just had two long bee poems accepted by the Atlantic." "I am out of Ted's shadow." "I have never been so happy in my life."
By contrast, Wintering has Sylvia on the 21st collect-calling her mother from a phone booth near a schoolyard. Fictional Aurelia had cabled saying Sylvia must call; it was urgent. Their conversation:
. . . ."So you're all right, sweetheart?" Aurelia asks, stalling.
"Yes!" Sylvia says, impatient. "Tell me what's wrong with you! Is everyone all right? Your cable said it was urgent. What's happened?"
"Oh, darling," Aurelia answers, hesitant, her subterfuge bobbing to the surface. "I was just getting worried. I thought you would call me right away when you got to London."
"Mother, I don't have a phone," Sylvia answers, vexation countermanded by relief. The schoolchildren's shouts rise and fall at random, raucous and piercing. "It's almost impossible to call within this district, let alone to the States. But I wrote to you right away, all the details. You'll see. You should have my letter any day." Six hundred times! Six hundred times she's written to her mother since she left for Smith at seventeen, flooding the envelopes with reassurance, gratitude, filial praise, innumerable dazzling inventories of accomplishments for Aurelia's delectation, the convenient distance of letters keeping their intrusive bond remote, but advantageously--for both of them--intact.
"Well, I was frightened," Aurelia hedges. "There was such a whirlpool of events and decisions to be made, and I hadn't heard. . ."
"Mummy, thank you for being so worried," Sylvia soothes, momentarily unguarded, attracted into the open by the tantalizing lure of maternal sympathy. "But really, we'll be fine. The flat is lovely; the children are happy. I'm relieved to be back in London". . .
Fictional Aurelia then nags Sylvia to bring the children to America for Christmas and offers to "take early retirement" (in real life, nine years early from her tenured-professor job) to serve as Sylvia's mother's helper while Sylvia gets a job teaching.
If you cringed as you read the above, rejoice that Plath studies has evolved.
I preserved that fictional passage to study how in the absence of facts Aurelia was depicted for the public as weak yet domineering, with nothing to do but pursue and harry Sylvia as if she were prey. This fictional Aurelia does only wrong: stalling, hedging, lying, posing, worrying, blandishing, intruding. Selfishly she'd forced poor Sylvia to excel at school and feed 600 happy letters into her motherly maw. Now Aurelia has fooled Sylvia into phoning her. This Aurelia is too lame-brained to have discerned in Sylvia's breathless letters about her busy, spendy new life the manic phase of her daughter's cyclic emotional extremes.
This portrayal also infantilizes the fictional Sylvia, at age 30 still a sucker for her mother's subterfuge. In real life Sylvia at 30 was as yet dependent on her mother's money, gifts, surety, and stateside support.
