"I Am the Same, Identical Woman" (or Am I?)

Sylvia's paternal grandmother

Courtesy of a descendant, here is Ernestine Kottke Plath (1853-1919), Otto Plath's mother and Sylvia's grandmother. Inscribed on the reverse, "Earnestine Kottke," suggesting this photo was taken before she married in March 1882, when she was 28. It might have been cut from a group photo or her wedding photo. The photo's owner has other vintage family photos all inscribed with the names of those pictured.

The Gibson-girl hairdo suggests the photo was taken after 1880: It's typical to fix one's hair stylishly when sitting for a photo. Where the photo was taken is not known.

I can barely reconcile this image with a known image of Ernestine, age 62, taken at Oregon State Hospital (formerly "for the Insane") in 1916. Another descendant shown the "young" photo had never seen it, could not confirm it was Ernestine Kottke although it was so labeled. What do you think? The older Ernestine seems to be toothless. Here is information about how aging alters one's nose.

There exists a third photo of Ernestine Plath posed with her husband, taken in Oregon between 1911 and 1916, showing features their son Otto inherited.

Theodor and Ernestine Plath had seven children: the first died in infancy, and Otto was born next, in 1885. Ernestine was first hospitalized for depression, sleeplessness, and "persecution" in 1905, three years after moving with her family from Prussia to North Dakota. In Oregon her diagnosis was dementia. Just another "sad Plath woman"? I don't think so. In both photos I see spirit.

Ernestine Plath's Extreme Mental Illness

Sylvia Plath's mentally ill grandmother, Ernestine Plath, was much sicker than we ever knew, a mental hospital veteran when her husband signed her into the Oregon State Hospital in autumn 1916 (see her photo in last week's post). Ernestine was then 62, diagnosed with senile dementia, and died in the hospital in 1919, and I have a copy of her hospital files including the chilling photo with the black eye.

Ready to post this week about domestic violence, I took time to consult other sources and learned:

1)  That photo probably wasn't from the day of intake. Although it's undated I'd assumed that, and thought Ernestine's husband or sons had beaten her. Hospital historian Jessica Cole told me a photographer came to the hospital every few months, and the staff lined up new patients for mugshots one after another: efficient. The black eye -- terrible in any case -- then might have come from anywhere.

2) Ernestine had lived in North Dakota from 1902 to 1905 when she was admitted to the state insane asylum at Jamestown, N.D., staying until 1910. I wanted proof of a five-year stay. I found it in the 1910 federal census listing the inmates of the Jamestown women's ward. All inmates gave their first and last names while Ernestine gave the name "Mrs. Antonio Plath." That's why she hadn't shown up in searches of that census. There was no Antonio Plath in the family. Yet Ernestine's surname and demographics matched her husband's answers to the Oregon hospital's questionnaire:

Patient ever insane before? "Yes, one time five year in Jamestown N. Dakota." First symptoms: "1905, head-ache, sleep and appetite loss, and anxious an [sic] persecution."

The Oregon state hospital could not get Ernestine's Jamestown records, and we don't have them, so we've had the illusion that Ernestine's second, documented, hospitalization was the first one, the only one, or the really big one, and that her illness was mostly from aging when it was cyclic and chronic.

Although Sylvia wasn't told about her paternal grandmother's illness, she was terrified of becoming chronically mentally ill and a charity case in state mental hospitals.

Ernestine Plath, Sylvia's Grandmother, Oregon State Hospital

Sylvia Plath's paternal grandmother Ernestine Plath, photograph c. 1916 from her file at the Oregon State Hospital (formerly "Insane Asylum"). Read about her fate here.

This is the second known photo of Ernestine Plath. The first known photo, c. 1907, I found and published in 2022.

Aurelia's M.A. Thesis: All You Need to Know

It's bilingual, but its first half is mostly in English, and reading Aurelia's thesis online I liked best its sympathetic portrait of Swiss physician and surgeon Paracelsus, "the Luther of medicine," bold enough to replace the ancient texts of Galen with medical science -- in the 1500s -- and denounced by enemies and posterity as "the demon doctor." In fact Paracelsus shocked the physicians of his day by saying they should be like Jesus, living humbly and healing the poor for free.

Aurelia Schober first studied Goethe's Faust in German, as an undergraduate, and in her thesis framed the life of Paracelsus as one of the sources feeding into Goethe's multi-faceted poetic drama, written around 1800, and into two related literary works, one in German and one in English (Robert Browning's Paracelsus). "The Paracelsus of History and Literature," 101 pages, capped Aurelia's master's degree in English and German, earned in less than one year, granted in 1930. Here's an excerpt:

Paracelsus told [students] that neither degrees nor books made physicians, only much toil in acquiring the knowledge of things themselves, in studying actual sicknesses, their causes, symptoms, remedies. He, their teacher, was willing to share all his experience, would take his advanced students with him when he visited the sick so that they might watch his diagnosis, learn from his treatment. He would lead them into Nature's apothecary shops -- the fields and forests, and there teach them herbal science.

"I wish you to learn," he would urge, "so that if your neighbor requires your help you will know how to give it, not to stop up your nose, like the scribe, the priest, and Levite, from whom there was not help to be got, but to be like the good Samaritan, who was the man experienced in nature, with whom lay knowledge and help. There is no one from whom greater love is sought than from the doctor."

How true that last sentence was for Sylvia Plath.

Aurelia Schober's table of contents. Sylvia Plath read Faust in a dual German-English translation.

 

 

Sylvia Plath's Mad Grandmother's Ashes

One of 3500 cans of ashes. Photo by "Kim" at Findagrave.com.

Sylvia Plath's paternal grandmother Ernestine Kottke Plath died at the Oregon State Hospital (formerly "Insane Asylum") in 1919, and her ashes in a canister sat in the hospital's basement for a hundred years with 3500 other such canisters holding the ashes of state-hospital patients. This forgotten "Library of Dust" was the subject of a 2011 documentary film of that name, and the subject of a Pulitzer-Prize-winning newspaper editorial published in Oregon in 2005.

When patients' death certificates became available, an Oregon-based contributor to the site Findagrave.com volunteered to locate living relatives willing to receive the ashes. One of the certificates was for Ernestine Kottke Plath. The researcher, Phyllis Porter Zegers, learned that Ernestine's granddaughter Sylvia Plath became a poet and killed herself, but Zegers focused on finding Ernestine's living descendants.

A family member claimed Ernestine's ashes, finally, in September 2020. It's like Lady Lazarus risen.

[View Ernestine Plath's hospital photo, taken c. 1916, discovered in 2024.]

Sylvia Plath's father Otto Plath was Ernestine's eldest child. While his mother lived, Otto made himself scarce, leaving home for the U.S. at age 15 and then, when his parents and siblings came to the U.S., attending schools far away from them. Aurelia Plath later wrote that Otto stayed bitter about Ernestine's bad mothering. Ernestine's husband Theodor Plath committed Ernestine to the asylum in Salem, Oregon, in 1916. Zeger wrote that according to hospital records Ernestine was admitted suffering from overwork and a leg ulcer, had two "attacks" of something, and dementia. After three years in the crowded mental hospital, Ernestine died there of tuberculosis.

Sylvia Plath knew little or nothing about Ernestine. Aurelia kept secret from Sylvia her Aunt Frieda's information about Ernestine's mental illness. But we carry our ancestors' imprint always, in ways we might not know.