"My Mother Is My Best Friend" -- Uh, No

Reacting in 1972 to an article called "My Parents Are My Friends," Aurelia Plath judged it "excellent and was my aim in life because my mother was my best friend!" Aurelia and her parents shared a house for 40 of Aurelia's first 50 years, so warm feelings or feigning them was required, but being friendly with parents is one thing and "best friend"-level intimacy with one's mother is another. 

Sylvia wrote that her mother was "always a child" while her grandmother lived, but let's take Aurelia's word that Aurelia and her mother were each other's best friends. For exploring what mother-daughter "best friends" meant in the Plaths' house, we have what Aurelia wrote in 1982:

Maybe parent-child friendship was once an ideal, but today it's widely agreed that children feel emotionally burdened when their parents try to be friends and confidants. Thank goodness Millennial parents know better:

The emotional burden of "best friendship" with parents usually falls on daughters. Did "friend for life, such as I was for my mother" oblige the daughter to fulfill the mother's needs?

Sylvia's letters home are "intimate correspondence" as Aurelia said, and they read like best-friend letters, but Sylvia was not into fulfilling Aurelia's needs. Aurelia fulfilled Sylvia's needs and hid or downplayed her own. She liked keeping Sylvia close, but didn't depend on Sylvia for best-friendship because Aurelia had her own good friends who valued and helped her.

Aurelia had friends from her decades-ago college days and high-school teaching days. A friend from the 1920s, a novelist, in 1969 wrote her editor about Aurelia's idea to publish Sylvia's letters as a book. When the time was ripe, it happened! Friends in 1953 had hosted Aurelia for two weeks and six weeks, and in the 1970s, hosted her five days a week for three years while Aurelia taught at Cape Cod Community College. Sylvia's juvenile diaries mention Aurelia slipping out of the house to visit the "Ortons," meaning the Nortons, Aurelia's intellectual equals and, for her first ten years in Wellesley, her very good friends.

As friends and family members, including Sylvia, died, moved away, or distanced themselves -- the family saw close-up Aurelia's faults and critical side -- new people such as playwright Rose Leiman Goldemberg even wanted to be Aurelia's friend. Goldemberg was concerned that it might be asking too much. Others weren't so concerned and pretended friendship, love, and goodwill to get closer to the late great Sylvia Plath. 

Pretending she did not know some pen friends were opportunists, Aurelia feigned affection as long as both parties could keep it up. To us this seems strange and unnecessary. To women of Aurelia's time, it was only polite.

Bereft of old friends and increasingly injured as Sylvia's meaner words about her were published, aging Aurelia hungered for love and friendship. Her move into senior housing in 1984 separated her from neighbors who esteemed her and set her among people unfriendly because of what Sylvia had written. She had counted on family to love her as she had loved them. Only daughter-in-law Margaret Wetzel Plath regularly wrote Aurelia, and arranged for her an 80th birthday party. She made Aurelia feel loved, and according to Aurelia's last good friend, Dr. Richard Larschan, Aurelia was desolate when Margaret died of cancer in her fifties.

Sylvia was not around to be Aurelia's best and lifelong friend.

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.

"I Love Her Work, I Hate Her Mom"

Looking for the root of the general contempt for Aurelia Plath, I thought some popular article or influential essay, some Ur-takedown, must have seeded it. Whether Aurelia deserves contempt is not the issue here. Contempt is in place before Sylvia's abridged Journals (1982) reveal Sylvia's now-canonical "hate her hate her" entry. It precedes the Letters Home backlash (1975). It precedes "Mrs. Greenwood's" appearance in The Bell Jar (U.S., 1971), "her face a perpetual accusation," the review in the New Yorker  said, although the novel does not say that.

Critical contempt was in place by 1970, when researcher Harriet Rosenstein, planning a Plath biography, interviewed Aurelia in Wellesley. Previous interviewees briefed Rosenstein on the whole tragic Plath story, and Rosenstein's interview notes show frustration at what Aurelia did not say (Aurelia never said "suicide") and judged what lay beneath what Aurelia did say: bitterness, resignation--nothing good. No other interviewee, of about sixty in all (and we are very grateful for these interviews), gets treated as if they failed a test of character. Rosenstein later reminded herself that her book's purpose was not to nail Aurelia to the wall but to explain the Ariel poems.

The Bell Jar in German, 1968

Rosenstein's biography was never published. In her early twenties, a feminist and up on the trends, she had read The Bell Jar in its U.K. edition and learned Esther hated her mother. Rosenstein located a short German review (1968) of the German translation of The Bell Jar. It said, "the mother smiles, suffering and forgiving and being a little too sweet." That scrap of a critique must have been reassuring, since U.K. reviews of The Bell Jar (1963) and subsequent essays, even one titled "An American Girlhood," do not mention a mother. At all! Instead they spotlight Buddy Willard, or Esther Greenwood's frequent references to babies. 

By 2003, Mrs. Greenwood looms very large:

In the novel The Bell Jar, Sylvia depicted her mother as a dominating, soul-destroying woman responsible for a good deal of the psychological pain that eventually led to Sylvia's suicide at the age of 30. [1]

The novel's text does not support such a reading. Re-reading shows Mrs. Greenwood's role in the novel is quite small.

Reviews and essays about Ariel's debut (1965, 1966) focus mostly on suicide and the poem "Daddy." Mom was such a bit player in this father-daughter drama that she is absent from the decade's Anglophone lit-crit except as a nameless factor in Sylvia's Electra complex. Critics didn't even know her name. M.L. Rosenthal in 1967 read The Colossus and wrote about the poem "The Disquieting Muses" as if it were about Sylvia's muses! In 2016 even the best of us firmly believed the same poem is "a fateful family romance" making it "easy to see what is wrong with Aurelia." [2]

My best efforts did not locate any "root." I saw instead faddish pop psychology expanding precisely alongside of Sylvia Plath's rise to fame. Sylvia in the 1950s knew Freudian theory was insubstantial but when troubled she returned to it, as to a faith, and in the 1960s put it in her novel. That fellow poets of the era wrote about their mental health problems and treatments made Sylvia Plath an ideal case study. Armchair analysis boils down to blaming mothers for whatever on the globe is wrong. Plath scholar Jacqueline Rose protested exactly this in her 2018 book Mothers (for example, governments blame mothers for having "too many children" or "not enough"). Yet Rose still manages to blame Aurelia Plath for quoting from Plath's "Three Women" lines other than the ones Rose thinks she should have.

The difference pop psychology has made between the 1960s and today is the difference between early Plath critics' dismay at the poem "Daddy"'s appropriation of the Holocaust and today's readers saying, "Sylvia's husband cheated on her and left her, and that was her personal holocaust. And her mother actually being there only made the breakup worse. Probably even caused it."

[1] Anita Gales, "What's My Motivation, Mom? Oh, It Must Be My Anger at You." New York Times, 7 September 2003, p. AR69.

[2] Pollack,Vivian. Our Emily Dickinsons. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016.

The "Manipulatively Controlling Mother"

A respected critic called Aurelia Plath “a manipulatively controlling mother” without stating any facts to back that up. [1] That Sylvia Plath had good reasons to hate her mother is something fans seem to “know” and accept without question. Here are their primary proofs that Sylvia hated her mother: one long, searing journal entry dated 12 December 1958; the assertion that priggish Mrs. Greenwood in the novel The Bell Jar is exactly what Aurelia was like; and the poem “Medusa” (originally titled “Mum”) that portrays Mum as a monster.

It turns out, however, that Sylvia in 1953, after her suicide attempt, spent her first month in the mental hospital telling her psychiatrist she loved her mother, and had to be talked into hating her. This is what the psychiatrist said in papers in a new Sylvia Plath archive opened to the public in January 2020. See what those papers say here.

Almost all of what biographers and critics write about Aurelia Plath is negative, as if facts were few and scanty. They aren't. They have simply been ignored. 

Did you know Aurelia Plath had a first love who kept a diary about their affair? Do you know what courses she taught and where? Do you know where she traveled? Those who know only what Sylvia wrote about Aurelia don't know Aurelia very well.

Please see this short video introducing some facts about Aurelia Plath's life: her college years, her job, how if Aurelia wasn't an easy mother to have, Sylvia was not an easy daughter to have. 

But didn't her mother manipulate her anyway?

We underestimate Sylvia if we think she was easy to manipulate and control!

More on this topic in "How Did Aurelia Plath Manipulate and Control Sylvia Plath?" blog post, 11 July 2023.

[1] David Trinidad, “Hidden in Plain Sight,” Plath Profiles, Vol. 3 (2010) Supplement: Autumn 2010, p. 126.