Aurelia Plath Is Still a Bad Mother

They're called secondary sources for a reason.

Look into Sylvia Plath’s tie with her mother and you will often find little intimations of murder. That’s a very serious charge. Lacking proof we say Aurelia Plath killed her daughter psychologically. In Marianne Egeland’s Claiming Sylvia Plath: The Poet as Exemplary Figure (2013) the chapter "Psychologists" shows how we were fed our certainty that Aurelia wrecked her daughter's life and caused her suicide.

I am quoting at some length the book’s page 191 to entertain you. Plus a bonus. Egeland writes:

". . . to appease [Sylvia’s] sibling jealousy when Mrs. Plath was caring for her baby son, Mrs. Plath encouraged Sylvia to read the newspaper. What the busy mother with her hands full perhaps just devised as a way to redirect attention in specific situations, [psychoanalyst Benigna] Gerish invokes as: 

 

"a desymbolizing and resymbolizing process in Plath’s inner world in which the emotionally loaded experience (jealousy and anger) is inadequately redirected into a world of symbolic speech, which binds and masks the emotion only enabling its distorted expression. (739) [1]* 

 

"[Gerish adds that] the eczema Sylvia Plath supposedly suffered from as a child was very likely a consequence of her mother’s profound ambivalence towards her. At the same time, the alleged eczema is not an issue addressed in any of the biographies, and Gerish gives no sources to confirm either its importance or its existence.** Aurelia Plath describes her daughter as “a healthy, merry child -- the center of attention most of her waking time” (Letters Home, 13)."***

 

"[A study by Lisa Firestone and Joyce Catlett proposes that their] "Voice Therapy" would have made Plath “able to feel the death wishes that her mother must have felt toward her (on an unconscious level) throughout her childhood” (1998, 687). Firestone and Catlett write that Aurelia Plath and Ted Hughes “both claimed to love her, while criticizing and attempting to control her life.”* They further maintain that Plath’s hostile attitudes to herself, to others, and to life in general were more representative of her mother’s views than her own (673).* No sources are stated in support of their pronouncements on either Mrs. Plath or Hughes.**

 

"[In the hypothetical Voice Therapy session] . . . “S.P.” gratefully confides to her therapist that the negative voice which has told her so many times how worthless and what a no-good writer she is, actually came from her mother, together with “the final command” to kill herself."* [2]

 

Bonus:

"Sylvia Plath’s rage at her abandoning husband and at her late beloved father was partly a displacement of anger toward her loving but smothering mother.* Her schizoid pathology resulting from the symbiosis (along with her bipolarity) helped prompt her suicide.* . . . In Ariel Plath attempted and succeeded in turning herself into a tragic, mythic heroine, eventually drowning herself in a gas oven as she would have in the ocean -- a key metaphor for her mother."*

 

[1] Gerish, Benigna. "This is Not Death, It Is Something Safer:" A Psychodynamic Approach to Sylvia Plath, Death Studies, 22 (7), 1998, 667-692.

[2] Firestone, L. & Catlett, J. (1998). The treatment of Sylvia Plath. Death Studies, 22 (7), 1998, 667-692.

[3] Fierstein, F. A Psychoanalytic Study of Sylvia Plath. Psychoanalytic Review, February 2016, 103-26.

 

*But that's true, that's fact, I just know it!

**How rude to suggest that scholars cite sources.

***That's a barefaced lie!

Who Am I? Your Host Tells All

Paying my respects at the William S. Burroughs centennial, St. Louis.

I am Catherine Rankovic, living in Missouri USA within driving distance of the Lilly Library Plath archives and easy flying distance from Emory. In my twenties I lived in Boston, Massachusetts, wrote for newspapers and magazines, drank and vomited in Kenmore Square (a crowd was cheering me! That’s Boston!) and haunted Harvard Square bookstores. A friend and I, radical feminists, saw John Updike in Harvard Square and yelled after him, “We hate your books!”

 

How did you get interested in Sylvia Plath?

 

My high-school friend pinched her mother’s copy of The Bell Jar. I read that flirty Lois Ames endnote about Plath’s poetry and suicide. My Ariel paperback I inscribed with the date “6-10-74.”

 

That was a long time ago.

 

Back when typewriters made noise and telephones rang I read Plath books as they were published and watched Plath fandom and scholarship unfold. I published my first Plath article in 1982; where were you? But time and only time equipped me for the honor of doing Plath studies a service. Many thanks to those who crowd-funded the first days, in 2013, of my Aurelia Plath shorthand transcription project, encouraging my further inquiries and the creation of this online Aurelia biome.

 

What are your academic credentials?

 

B.A. Journalism, Marquette University; M.A. English Literature, Syracuse University; M.F.A. poetry, Washington University in St. Louis. I left Boston, age 29, for graduate studies that cost me nothing; both schools paid my way. Syracuse was stringent: huge reading loads and criticism about criticism and transcribing medieval manuscripts. Washington University paid my train ticket to visit the campus. My host Eric Pankey and I were in the department hallway when Howard Nemerov shuffled up, in blue felt bedroom slippers, saying, “Did you hear? Did you hear?” He had just been named U.S. Poet Laureate. I could drop you names galore. Derek Walcott quit needling me after I called him a tyrant. Diane Wood Middlebrook talked to me for three hours about her Anne Sexton biography. I studied with and interviewed for print all types of poets, fiction writers, and biographers. Thirteen interviews are collected in my (fourth) book, Meet Me: Writers in St. Louis. Sylvia’s favorites T.S. Eliot, Marianne Moore, and Sara Teasdale were all born in St. Louis. You can see here also Kate Chopin’s house and the Tennessee Williams Glass Menagerie Apartments.

 

How can we trust someone with no Ivy League ties or Ph.D.?

 

Assuming that one must be so certified, so tinselled, must belong to that club to write about Plath, who was kinda-sorta a member of that club although she decided it sucked, has left gaps and enormous blind spots in Plath scholarship. [1] Aurelia is one of those blind spots. It would still be that way were I not here.

 

What are your languages?

 

German, helpful with Plath studies if I keep it up. Rusty Russian but enough to tell a rare-books library that their manuscripts were not Marina Tsvetayeva’s. Gregg shorthand. My mother’s parents were Poles from Belarus. A clerk-typist, Mom had me trained as a secretary. Neither of my parents was college educated. Dad was Serbian. A blacksmith’s apprentice, he went to war and was a prisoner in Germany from 1941 to 1945. He arrived at Ellis Island in 1950 and worked in a foundry with other displaced persons, who became family friends. Dad was proud that his kids, all U.S.-born, got “real high educated.” But it was crucial that Mom was an American and employed outside the home.

Serbian refugees enjoying life in America, studio photograph. The drinks and food are studio props. My stepfather, top row, fourth from left.

 

Why do you focus on Aurelia Plath?

 

Aurelia has a place in Plath studies. I’m not sure of its magnitude; it will take more than one scholar to assess that. I understand that Sylvia is a career but Aurelia is not, so in the past 40 years there had been no incentive to probe: What did Aurelia do? Where did she study? Do Sylvia’s letters prove that theirs was a sick relationship? Did Aurelia really “never have much of a life”? Compared to whose? Why is it, when viewing a photo of Sylvia and her brother, that scholars see only Sylvia? What are the facts? Primary materials engage me most.

 

Do you love Aurelia?

 

No. She did her job. While admiring Sylvia’s writing and striving I also see she had every advantage available. I value objectivity. The unnoticed and unsaid intrigue me. Aurelia was the first to notice Sylvia’s talent and nurture it. Sylvia was Otto’s mini-me, a difficult daughter for Aurelia to raise. Yet theirs was an alliance, the most durable Sylvia had, and it worked.

 

Why don’t you emote more? Like, describe your deep feelings or how Sylvia’s handwriting looks like brass knuckles or how intensely you identify with Sylvia or dream about her?

 

Don’t I emote? I once dreamed I received a Sylvia Plath kit. All it contained was a pair of ears and a pair of eyes.

 

[1] No study has yet addressed Plath's anti-academic stance, as expressed in her letters of 1/29/57, 3/12/57, 11/5/57, and 11/28/57, for starters.