"Aurelia Plath Had No Self"

From Salon.com, 2000, in an article called "The Real Sylvia Plath," by novelist Kate Moses:

"Aurelia Plath had no self; she lived for and through her children. From Sylvia Plath’s infancy, her primary parent’s selflessness gave Plath no model for a self that could maintain its autonomy or exist beyond meeting other people’s needs. What Plath had instead was one big boundariless, free-floating ego, a self utterly dependent on the inflation by the selfless parent, and all psychic roads, ultimately, led right back to Sylvia. Plath spent her entire adult life trying to trace the ego boundaries for herself that her mother neglected to impose."

Moses is a novelist, not a journalist. The novelist deals in fiction, the journalist in facts. Salon.com, as a journalistic venue, should have asked if Moses could prove her assertions that:

• Aurelia had no self?
• although Aurelia worked part-time from January 1941 to 1942, and full-time from 1942 to 1970, she lived for and through her children?
• she "gave Sylvia no model for a self that could maintain its autonomy or exist beyond meeting other people's needs"? (How can anyone ever know what what Aurelia didn't give?)
• Sylvia "spent her entire adult life trying to trace her ego boundaries"? That's obvious exaggeration. And when, precisely, did Sylvia's adulthood begin?

Aurelia and also Sylvia ('like an empty vessel") are treated in this article and others as if they were fictional characters who can be outfitted with motives and judged without facts. I call this "emo-scholarship." Hugh Kenner, contributor to Modern Critical Views: Sylvia Plath (1989), calls it "parlor psychiatry" (page 68).