"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.

Which Shorthand Did Aurelia Teach?

Gregg shorthand, its first manual published in 1888 by Robert Gregg, who initially called his phonetic shorthand system "Light-Line Phonography," evolved along with the business world’s requirements and vocabulary. Periodic revisions also made it leaner and easier to learn. 

Aurelia Schober (b. 1906) was probably schooled in what is now called “Pre-Anniversary” Gregg, likely that edition’s fifth and final iteration (1916). In 1929 the “Anniversary” edition superseded it. Mrs. Plath would have taught that edition at Boston University’s College of Practical Arts and Letters from the time she was hired in 1942 until the “Simplified” edition of Gregg came out in 1949. The “Simplified” edition was later superseded by the “Diamond Anniversary” edition (1963-1978), the edition I learned.

No iteration of Gregg is a truly radical departure, but each can be different enough so that, for example, a single shorthand character formerly transcribed as “love” now represents the phrase “will have.” Gregg’s efficiency is such that the stroke representing “d” can also be read as “would,” “did,” “dear,” “date,” “dollars,” or the suffixes “-ward” or “-hood”; pre-1963 it might also represent the diphthong “ch”. Context is everything. Change the angle slightly and write it as a downstroke instead of an upstroke and it's the letter "j." How to know an upstroke from a downstroke? Context is everything.

While Everyone Was Reading The Bell Jar . . .

The Bell Jar was new in the U.S. when I was in high school, and reading about Esther Greenwood's unnamed mother trying to force steno on her daughter, I was delighted and envious that Esther had been allowed to refuse. Little did I know I'd end up transcribing The Bell Jar's author's mother's shorthand.

Here's my high-school transcript. The left side records the office-skills track my own mother determined I would take. The Gregg shorthand courses were 1972-73's STENO 32 and 1973-74's STENO 42, graded B and A respectively.

The courses with "1.00" lasted all year; the .50 courses, one semester.

Aurelia Plath and Shorthand's Evolution

The Gregg Shorthand Manual Simplified, second edition (1955) arrived in the mail today, and will be used to sharpen my shorthand transcription skills before I visit the Sylvia Plath archives at the University of Indiana. Aurelia Plath made shorthand and longhand annotations on her famous daughter’s letters and books. Although Plath scholars are many and avid, no scholar has ever transcribed the shorthand annotations. That is up to me and I accept the challenge.

The version of Gregg shorthand Aurelia learned depends on when she learned it, and that is not yet known. The first Gregg shorthand textbook, a pamphlet titled Light Line Phonography: The Phonetic Handwriting (1888) was published in England by John Robert Gregg in an edition of 500 copies, and in the U.S. in 1898 as a book, Gregg’s Shorthand Manual. Succeeding editions presented refinements—the 1929 edition is the most lauded—but the 1949 edition had a new title: Gregg Shorthand Manual Simplified. “Simplified” emphasized speed and accurate transcription. All earlier versions of Gregg shorthand are called “pre-Simplified.” The 1949 version would have appeared during Aurelia Plath's business-school teaching career, when she was 43.

I was taught from the eighth edition, called the Diamond Jubilee Series (1963-1977), edited to “make shorthand easier to learn.” Even so it wasn’t easy to learn: in high school I studied it for two years.

The Gregg shorthand versions Aurelia learned or taught await discovery. But last autumn in Sylvia’s archives I saw and read Aurelia’s annotations (they are of textbook quality) and think that they will be of interest when transcribed.

What The Bell Jar Says About Shorthand

I am taking an online refresher course in Gregg shorthand to prepare for my week in the Sylvia Plath archive, seeking and transcribing Aurelia Plath's shorthand notations on Sylvia's books and correspondence. I did Lesson 2 today. Gregg shorthand is a unique and graceful written language, with parallels to, and a learning curve similar to, cursive writing. But it'd be hard to convince two generations of Plath scholars that shorthand has any value, because Sylvia, in her autobiographical novel The Bell Jar, wrote dismissively about it. Her stand-in character Esther Greenwood, age 19, decides against learning shorthand from her mother, a business-college teacher, during the lowest point of her young life, the summer of 1953.

For the record, The Bell Jar's mentions of shorthand are quoted here. Page numbers correspond to the Bantam paperback edition, published in the U.S. in 1972:

My mother had taught shorthand and typing to support us ever since my father died. . . .She was always on to me to learn shorthand after college, so I'd have a practical skill as well as a college degree. [32]


I started adding up all the things I couldn't do.

I began with cooking. . . .

I didn't know shorthand either.

This meant I couldn't get a good job after college. My mother kept telling me nobody wanted a plain English major. But an English major who knew shorthand was something else again. Everybody would want her. She would be in demand among all the up-and-coming young men and she would transcribe letter after thrilling letter.

The trouble was, I hated the idea of serving men in any way. I wanted to dictate my own thrilling letters. Besides, those little shorthand symbols in the book my mother showed me seemed just as bad as let t equal time and let s equal the total distance. [61-62]


My mother was teaching shorthand and typing to a lot of city college girls and wouldn't be home till the middle of the afternoon. [94]


By the end of supper my mother had convinced me I should study shorthand in the evenings. Then I would be killing two birds with one stone, writing a novel and learning something practical as well. I would also be saving a whole lot of money.

That same evening, my mother unearthed an old blackboard from the cellar and set it up on the breezeway. Then she stood at the blackboard and scribbled little curlicues in white chalk while I sat in a chair and watched.

At first I felt hopeful.

I thought I might learn shorthand in no time, and when the freckled lady in the Scholarships office asked me why I hadn't worked to earn money in July and August, the way you were supposed to if you were a scholarship girl, I could tell her I had taken a free shorthand course instead, so I could support myself right after college.

The only thing was, when I tried to picture myself in some job, briskly jotting down line after line of shorthand, my mind went blank. There wasn't one job I felt like doing where you used shorthand. And, as I sat there and watched, the white chalk curlicues blurred into senselessness.

I told my mother I had a terrible headache, and went to bed.

An hour later the door inched open, and as she crept into the room I heard the whisper of her clothes as she undressed. She climbed into bed. Then her breathing grew slow and regular.

In the dim light of the streetlamp that filtered through the drawn blinds, I could see the pin curls on her head glittering like a row of little bayonets.

I decided I would put off the novel until I had gone to Europe and had a lover, and that I would never learn a word of shorthand. If I never learned shorthand I would never have to use it. [99-100].


I thought I'd better go to work for a year and think things over. Maybe I could study the eighteenth century in secret.

But I didn't know shorthand, so what could I do?

I could be a waitress or a typist.

But I couldn't stand the idea of being either one. [103]