Your Genius I.Q.

A modern IQ puzzle designed for non-English speaking children, ages 7-8.

 

 

Stanford-Binet intelligence testing kit, 1937-60, like the one used on Sylvia and Warren Plath; Science Museum Group Collection,
© The Board of Trustees of the Science Museum

Most of us believe that an IQ of 130 or above means "genius," and although intelligence testing did away with that category in 1937, nearly a century ago, the word enchants us more than ever, especially if our own score is in that neighborhood. 

The Stanford-Binet IQ test, standardized in 1916, reduced human intelligence to numerals, stirring up the racists and nativists with its convenient two- or three-digit proofs that people of color and immigrants scored lower than whites, and those categorized as "feeble-minded" should be sterilized. Twenty years later, the test's second edition walked back the idea -- so seductive -- that a quotient from a sit-down test identifies "genius" (etym., "to beget"). They clarified that "IQ" measures cognitive ability or potential, and "genius" is an aptitude or gift that manifests if opportunity allows.

Sylvia Plath, age 12, took the Stanford-Binet intelligence test for children, second edition [pictured], in 1944 and scored "about 160." Today her IQ category is called "very gifted or highly advanced." Plath's IQ score first appeared in print in Sylvia Plath: Method and Madness (1976); the source was a student teacher who gave tests for practice. [1] Aurelia Plath told psychiatrist Ruth Beuscher Warren Plath's IQ was 185. [2] She didn't mention Sylvia's. However, Warren was two and a half years younger than Sylvia, and test scores were relative to the ages of the test-takers, so the siblings' IQs can't be rightly compared. The third edition (1960) resolved that problem but then faced accusations of cultural bias. Same with its rival test, "the Wechsler," for children and adults.

A whole bunch of people now call intelligence testing pseudoscience or a measure of how well one takes tests.

Aurelia Plath gave IQ tests, but not to her children. Concerned that Boston University, her employer, might ax its Secretarial major and her job, in 1959 she enrolled in evening courses seeking another subject she might teach. Aurelia struggled in a German refresher course. Then, at friend Miriam Baggett's suggestion, Aurelia switched to studying how to teach remedial reading. To identify students in need of remedial guidance, Aurelia had to practice giving IQ tests. By then IQ tests for children and adults had become a craze and big business as the U.S. competed with Russia in the Space Race.

 

Aurelia wrote Baggett on 15 December 1961:

How often I have thought of you while giving these Binet and Wechsler tests! I find this work fascinating. My whole neighborhood is co-operating with me and nearly as excited as I am. I had a fine letter from Dr. Cole this fall, wherein he said that he would be glad to have me work with them in the department when I was ready. I hope my program will be such that I can give some time there in the fall of 1962.

All along, Sylvia Plath, from her home in England, cautioned her mother not to "lash'' herself through night courses and unpaid practice-teaching while working full-time. Fall 1962 brought such awful crises to mother and daughter that Aurelia never started a remedial guidance career.

[1]  Edward Butscher, author of Sylvia Plath: Method and Madness (1976), p. 27, interviewed Dorothy H. Humphrey, in 1944 "a senior in Boston University's School of Education, taking a course on 'ability testing' during the 1943-44 school year" who chose to practice-test students at Perrin School, where Sylvia was a sixth-grader. Humphrey said she could not recall the exact score but it was around 160.

[2] When giving Dr. Ruth Beuscher Sylvia's history in 1953, Aurelia Plath said that Warren's IQ was 185. When or where he was tested is not known. Typed transcription by Harriet Rosenstein of "McLean Hospital Record #17878, Sylvia Plath," Collection 1489, Box 3, Folder 10, Stuart Rose Library, Emory.

Aurelia Plath's Heart Attacks

"A heart attack laid her mother out two months ago," Ted Hughes wrote to Al Alvarez in November 1971. He meant Sylvia's mother Aurelia Plath. In September of that eventful Plath year Aurelia, age 65, had a heart attack. Today we call her ailment "broken heart syndrome" or takotsubo cardiomyopathy. Its trigger is sudden and grievous stress.

What happens: One heart ventricle balloons. "Takotsubo" means "octopus pot." No joke.

Aurelia described "long periods of excessively rapid and irregular heart episodes," pain and unconsciousness. The doctor prescribed bed rest 12 hours out of 24 and no stress. Neither was possible. The Bell Jar U.S. rollout in spring 1971 made Aurelia's daughter's novel the talk of the nation, and Aurelia felt ashamed as its Boston-area characters were matched to her neighbors and to Sylvia's dates, classmates and mentors, and herself.

Aurelia also made it her business to keep Sylvia's benefactress Olive Higgins Prouty, then almost 90 and unwell, from ever reading The Bell Jar, a task because Prouty lived until 1974. As of July 1971 forcibly retired from Boston University after 29 years, broken-hearted or not Aurelia had to work, commuting weekly to a community college on the Cape. On October 30, 1971, a month after the heart attack, she wrote:

Five days a week I walk the hill from the parking lot to the College, then the 43 steps up to my office (no lifts!)—slowly and with pauses. If, between classes, I have no student to counsel and I feel exhausted, I lock my door, take a pillow from my chair and stretch out on the rug on the floor to relax and gain enough energy to continue. I drive the 100 miles from Brewster to my dear home in Wellesley only about once a month now.

 

Aurelia wrote a friend the following year that "I did not expect to reach Christmas '71 alive." Olwyn Hughes, who published the U.S. Bell Jar over Aurelia's protests, wrote a letter feigning concern and suggesting yoga. Aurelia replied just as insincerely, blaming her heart attack on Sylvia's old boyfriend Gordon Lameyer's unpublished memoir in manuscript. By contrast The Bell Jar's portrayal of clueless mother figure "Mrs. Greenwood," read by thousands that year, cost Aurelia friends, social standing, and any sympathy for the mother of a suicide. The book probably factored into Sylvia's decision to die. It spoiled other lives too. Only the Hugheses got any money, and they were not the happier for it.

Takotsubo can kill, but most patients recover within weeks. Aurelia's next "pressure heart attack" was in 1987, after reading a draft of Linda Wagner-Martin's Plath biography. Aurelia objected to hints about Sylvia's birth as "three weeks early" and that she had been an absent parent. "You have hurt me deeply," Aurelia wrote Wagner-Martin. "You did a massive undertaking well, except for the portrayal of me." Whether this heartbreak was a medical event or a guilt trip is not clear.