Dispelling Ignorance About Aurelia Plath

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.

Books About Sylvia Plath That I Hate to Love

-Claiming Sylvia Plath: The Poet as Exemplary Figure by Marianne Egeland (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013) An academic work roundly hated by every big name from Al Alvarez on down the alphabet who ever bullshitted about Sylvia Plath. Cohorts grouped as Critics, Biographers, Feminists, Psychologists, and Friends all get bitch-slapped for crafting the Sylvia Plath they liked best or could sell. Also they were crafting and positioning themselves. The original "strong smell" of Sylvia's hair that Alvarez later called a "faint smell" is an example of the type of gaming that has Egeland calling for some ethics around here.

Egeland says cultural change has made it easier for not only highbrows but middlebrows to find in Plath's life and works proofs of whatever one wants to prove. I delight in every word except for the conclusion, “The Sylvia Plath Formula,” explaining why readers still care about Plath. It has to do with ancient hero-worship. Author could not imagine Plath displaced by singer-songwriters. Egeland's scholarship is solid as rock. A book never popular, hard to find and so expensive I considered thievery. Traded a week’s groceries to buy a copy from its publisher--so promptly mailed that I sensed it felt relieved.

-I hate Sylvia Plath novelizations, so when given as a gift Euphoria by Elin Cullhed (Canongate, 2022, translated from Swedish) I opened the book weeks later only to be enthralled as its Sylvia Plath ruminates and rages (“Can’t they see my greatness?”) from December 1961 to December ’62. Thrilling first-person narration of the birth of Nicholas, of the artist picking fights with Ted, her manic desperation at being deserted and unfucked, beset with the care of her beautiful children and pathetically swanning for her nanny. I often dip into this book to marvel at how the author vivified Plath’s mind and motherhood. I genuflect to Jennifer Hayashida, translator. Cullhed clearly drew on recently published primary sources.

-After many years I spent $2 to re-buy and re-read Sylvia Plath: Method and Madness (wait! Keep reading!) by Edward Butscher (Seabury, 1976). This very first Plath biography impressed me with how author Butscher (pronounced “Boo-shay”) before the Internet found his sources--most valuably some people who'd die soon or were later skittish about interviews. Its frame is “Sylvia Plath’s central obsession with her father,” and its engine the unleashing of Plath’s inner “bitch goddess” via the Ariel poems. “Bitch goddess,” an unfortunate phrase to use at the high-water mark of second-wave feminism, got the book sneered at and shoved to the sidelines.

Butscher said his critics were classist and I am weighing that. His interpretations of the poems were never good, and no one knew that the Ariel of 1965 was Ted Hughes making Sylvia look "mad" when Plath’s own edit was really a women’s magazine complete with parody ads. Method and Madness is dense with facts and rich in quotations from Sylvia's letters.

-Letters Home (Harper & Row, 1975), edited by Aurelia S. Plath. Jeered as a 500-page whitewash of The Bell Jar’s caustic author, Aurelia’s selection from Sylvia’s letters was edited to balance the popular novel's “raging adolescent voice” and hide a certain widower's perfidy. Aurelia's preface told more about Sylvia than anyone knew, and instead of being grateful Janet Malcolm twenty years later -- it still wasn't out of her craw? -- thought Sylvia's mom had released a toxic "oil spill.” 

If it were really poisonous, everyone would have loved the book. Instead it was anodyne and focused on Sylvia’s efforts to become a professional writer. How dull. It is best read as a view into a gifted young hothouse female and her mother, survivors of an autocrat who married Aurelia to make her write while he took credit. Sylvia believed Aurelia was doing that to her. At this distance, how Sylvia was patterned by her family is so obvious it's blinding. Published without an index. Letters Home is so far out of favor there’s no electronic download. I wish for an autographed copy.

-Pain, Parties, Work: Sylvia Plath in New York, Summer 1953, by Elizabeth Winder (Harper Collins, 2013). Yes, the author is a poet, not a Ph.D., meaning I should belittle this girly claret-jacketed book arranged in thematic fragments like a book of poems. I like Winder's substantial interviews with people who met Sylvia and share their impressions and their experience at Mademoiselle magazine and after. By their fruits you shall know them, and this is a tasty read about a time and place long gone yet crucial to Sylvia's biography. Did you know her favorite drink was a strawberry daiquiri? Only this book makes me wish I had been there, or even--never otherwise--wish I were her: 

"As always, she was wearing lots of cherry red lipstick, and Mel got close enough to catch its carnation scent. Sylvia was fetching, but not beautiful enough for her looks to overpower her personality. In the end it was her enthusiasm--her own sexy, leggy sort of optimism--that bewitched. Though he would not see her again for another year, Mel Woody 'fell in love' with Sylvia that night in the Village, in a cloud of hops and smoke and fermented grape."

Facts are not lacking. "Sylvia Plath appears in the issue four times: on page 54 in a silvery strapless frock and deep blackberry lipstick, on page 213 interviewing Elizabeth Bowen, on page 235 in kilted star formation, and again on page 252 dangling a rose."