"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.

Beyond "Medusa" and "Mrs. Greenwood": From the Rosenstein Papers

Notes and tapes of 1970s interviews with Sylvia Plath’s friends, dates, and teachers, now in the Harriet Rosenstein research files at Emory University, are wonderfully valuable Plath resources, and include random comments and observations about Aurelia Plath. Interviewees such as Marcia Brown Stern or Elizabeth Compton Sigmund, whom Sylvia prepped to dislike Aurelia Plath before ever meeting her, had harsher things to say, but I sought first-hand impressions that went beyond “Mrs. Greenwood” and “Medusa”:

Marcia Brown Stern, Sylvia’s college friend: “Bitter and careworn” Aurelia was “struggling every minute of every day of every year to pay the bills and to keep herself together – just holding on for dear life – and there is no room for color – in her tone of voice or her hairdo or her aprons or her living room or inside her head.”

J. Melvin Woody, Sylvia’s date from Yale: Sylvia insisted he accompany her from New Haven to her Wellesley home “so she wouldn’t be with her mother alone. I found that a little hard to understand when I met Sylvia’s mother, who seemed harmless . . . . an intelligent, alert woman who was probably much better qualified to deal with a daughter like that than most women.”

Richard Sassoon, Sylvia’s boyfriend, met Aurelia once: “I remember her as sort of cold and academic and I suppose repressed. New England style.”

Pat O’Neill Pratson, Sylvia’s friend since tenth grade, a frequent visitor to the Wellesley house: Aurelia Plath served as a “bridge” between her own Austrian-immigrant parents and her Ivy-League children. Aurelia “recognized things she might like to have done that she saw the children doing in her place. It was very lonely for her.”

Peter Davison, Sylvia’s “summer romance” in 1955: Aurelia was “Terribly eager for her girl to get ahead. And very interested in someone [Davison] who worked for the Harvard University Press.”

Jon K. Rosenthal, one of Sylvia’s dates: Aurelia was “a very attractive woman at that time. Almost statuesque.”

Elizabeth Compton Sigmund, describing Aurelia visiting Devon in the summer of 1962: “And Mrs. Plath – ‘These are my grandchildren. You come to Grammy – Grammy will read it to you – Grammy will do it—’” 

Nancy Hunter Steiner, Sylvia’s college roommate: Aurelia was “sweet and well-meaning and very intimidated by Sylvia.”

Susan Weller Burch, Sylvia’s Smith classmate: Aurelia “just seemed to slip into the shadows.”. . . “gone at work most of the time. Grandparents in residence.”

Wilbury Crockett, Sylvia’s high-school English teacher: “Mrs. Plath was very much in control. I always had the feeling that she was very much aware of Sylvia’s gifts and considered Sylvia a precocious child. I think she was driven by the thought that Sylvia and Warren might not get all that they ought to have. Financial security was a very real factor.”

A Birthday Present for Aurelia

It's Aurelia Plath's 115th birthday (born April 26, 1906). Happy birthday, Sylvia's mom, and here is a present for you.

Hoping to write Sylvia Plath's biography, researcher Harriet Rosenstein on June 16, 1970, interviewed Sylvia's psychiatrist Dr. Ruth Barnhouse Beuscher, who treated Sylvia at McLean Hospital in 1953 and later. Among the first topics Rosenstein and Beuscher discussed was The Bell Jar as autobiography. Rosenstein took extensive notes, now in the Rosenstein Papers at Emory University. (How do I know what's in those papers? I went there in March 2020.)

Beuscher told Rosenstein The Bell Jar is factual, that what happened to its narrator Esther Greenwood happened to Sylvia, but some events were moved or altered. Fourth on the list:

"Esther's easy admission that she hated her mother [is] inaccurate. She [Sylvia] had spent at least the first month in the hospital asserting that she loved her mother. Beuscher says that she had to work hate admission out of Sylvia."

Aurelia, when Rosenstein interviewed you a few weeks later, in July, you blamed psychiatry for making Sylvia hate you. For the rest of your life you kept saying and writing that. Now we have Beuscher's word for what happened.

Beuscher by 1970 had become a Christian theologian like her father but was also deeply interested in the occult. She pursued a personal friendship with Rosenstein and entrusted to her the desperate letters Sylvia wrote to Beuscher in 1962 and 1963.