Plath and Sleeping Pills

Sylvia Plath mentioned sleeping pills in numerous letters. The pills were barbiturates, some available over-the-counter.

From Sylvia Plath's Letters, Volume 1:

28 June 1949 to Aurelia Plath: "I really don't need any sleeping pills by the time the day is over." (Plath at the time is 16 years old.)

29 October 1950 to Aurelia: "I have taken a hot bath and a sleeping pill"

3 December 1950 to Aurelia: "I'm going to take two little pills and be asleep by nine o'clock"

31 January 1951 to Aurelia: "I guess I'll take sleeping pills till after exams are over"

9 May 1951 to Ann Davidow: "swallowing a handful of cold pills"

18 October 1951 to Aurelia: "It's wonderful how comfortable strong nosedrops, hot compresses and penicillin and sleeping pills can make a sinus sufferer."

20 October 1951 to Aurelia: "I was dosed with pirivine [nose drops] and pyribenzamine [antihistamine] and sleeping pills"

3 March 1952 to Aurelia: "I took two sleeping pills two hours apart, as you said" 

17 November 1952 to Aurelia: "got the first good night's sleep (with the aid of a phenobarb) for weeks." 

(Plath takes sleeping pills prescribed by her aunt and family doctor, Francesca Racioppi, M.D., for most of spring semester 1953. That summer, Racioppi prescribes for Plath a stronger sleeping pill. In August, Plath overdoses on sleeping pills and barely survives.)

28 December 1953 to Eddie Cohen: "I became immune to increased doses of sleeping pills"

27 October 1955 to Elinor Friedman: "Gone are the good old Smith days with cocaine, codeine, and sleeping pills" [1]

Journals, 5 November 1957: "First I couldn't sleep without pills, now I can"

In Letters, Volume 2, as Sylvia's marriage falls apart she becomes addicted to sleeping pills and knows it.

29 September 1962 to Kathy Kane: "I can't sleep without pills."

12 October 1962 to Aurelia: "Every morning when my sleeping pills wear off, I am up about 5, in my study with coffee, writing like mad."

16 October 1962 to Aurelia: "I live on sleeping pills"

14 December 1962, to Dorothy Benotti: "I hope to get off sleeping pills"

26 December 1962, to Daniel and Helga Huws: "I am going to the doctor this week to see if he can help me get off those sleeping pills"

4 February 1963, to Ruth Beuscher: "I am living on sleeping pills and nerve tonic"

Because most of Sylvia's mentions of sleeping pills are in letters to her mother, I think her mother, who herself took sleeping pills, got her started on them. There are very few studies about Plath and drugs.

[1] U.S. pharmacies legally sold cocaine and the morphine derivative codeine most of the 20th century, at first over-the-counter and then by prescription. Sylvia Plath was prescribed cocaine for sinus pain.

Toxic Handwriting

Sylvia Plath's distinctive handwriting

A professional handwriting analyst in 1953 assessed Sylvia Plath's character through a sample of her handwriting: 

"Strength: Enjoyment of working experience intense; sense of form, beauty and style, useful in fields of fashion and interior decoration. Eager for accomplishment. Weakness: Overcome superficiality, stilted behavior, rigidity of outlook."

Was he right? We can discuss that all day.

There are few online images of Aurelia Plath's handwriting, and as far as I know it's never been analyzed. So here is a sample from her college's yearbook of 1928, when she was Aurelia Schober. On top is a classmate's inscription (to the yearbook's owner), to compare with Aurelia's inscription at bottom left.

The yearbook's owner, named Muriel, asked each classmate to write "something original." Aurelia's text says, "Dear Muriel: It's hard to be original during exam time, so I'll just hope that you'll recover from them & have a delightful summer. Here's to the day when we wear cap and gown. Sincerely, Aurelia."

In Muriel's 1927 yearbook, Aurelia had drawn a pointer to herself in the group photo of the English Club. She printed rather than using cursive, again using very tiny lettering, here taking up 1.5 vertical inches of the page's inner margin.

It says, "Here's to two more years of joy and struggle at P.A.L. Like Browning we must get our joy out of the struggle. Sincerely, Aurelia"

"P.A.L." was short for Boston University's College of Practical Arts and Letters, founded as a women's business and vocational college. To help pay her way, Aurelia after her sophomore year got a summer job as a secretary and translator for an M.I.T. guest professor in his forties. In his diary he noted his young secretary's handwriting. He saw in it "something stiff and sober I cannot well digest.”

He digested it anyway, and he and Miss "Sober" soon fell into a red-hot two-year love affair (described in his diaries) you can read about here. He and Aurelia nearly married. He married someone else. Aurelia on the rebound dated and married Boston University professor Otto Plath.

So, our analysis?

How about: "The Plath women lived in a culture that presumed to judge women through isolated examples of their writings and their effing handwriting."

Notes: The analysis of Sylvia Plath's handwriting by Herry O. Teltscher, 1953, for Mademoiselle magazine, is in the Plath mss. II at the Lilly Library. Quotation from the Karl Terzaghi Diaries, October 1926.