How Did Aurelia Plath Control and Manipulate Sylvia?

Aurelia Plath is called a “manipulative, controlling mother.” I wanted to identify what Aurelia manipulated and controlled.

 

I mean what Aurelia said or did hoping to alter her daughter Sylvia’s choices and behavior to match Aurelia’s own desires, and succeeding in altering them.

 

Sylvia was not easily manipulated or controlled. She resisted Aurelia’s “suggestions” to

• learn shorthand
• make a “secure” marriage
• maintain chastity

• 

  Aurelia Plath in 1971

  
  

  rest
• continue teaching at Smith College
• learn stenotyping to support a jobless mate
• have Frieda treated medically so she would not grow “too” tall
• write about “decent courageous people”
• move with her children back to the United States. 

 

About the larger things, at life’s turning points, Sylvia made her own choices.

 

Aurelia did try. She urged her young daughter to write cursive and practice the piano and inscribed her gift of a new diary with "Not to be written in after 8 p.m." College-aged Sylvia when depressed volunteered in a hospital as her mother advised. That soon ended. On record is one parental threat from June 1954, when Sylvia told her psychiatrist Dr. Beuscher that her mother said something like, “If you have sexual affairs I will stop funding your schooling.” This was an empty threat, because Sylvia did as she liked that summer and her mother continued to pay.

 

Adult Sylvia typically did the opposite of what her mother wanted. You've "heard" that while visiting in 1962, during the week of July 9, Aurelia urged Sylvia to throw her husband Ted out of the house, but the fact is that while he was in London, Sylvia ordered her houseguest Aurelia to move out by Friday when Ted was returning for the weekend. Unable to find a hotel room, Aurelia moved in with Winifred Davies. (Aurelia portrayed the move as her own idea, but it wasn’t.) Ted left for good on 11 October 1962, Sylvia ejecting him on the advice not of her mother but of Dr. Beuscher, whom she trusted more. “I keep your letters like the Bible,” Sylvia wrote Beuscher, and actually carried those letters around. Rather than taking pleasure in the breakup, Aurelia pleaded with Sylvia not to leave her children without a father.

 

"Feeling" manipulated into overachievement, or that her mother demanded of her happy letters and “dividends of joy” – well, Sylvia could have quit or modified her achieving and letter writing at any time. She didn't.

 

Sylvia noticed her mother’s passive-aggressive smiling through pain, calling anger “hurt,” wearing dowdy secondhand clothes to advertise her sacrifices, quoting books and sayings instead of speaking her mind, worrying, identifying too closely with her. But as attempts to control or manipulate Sylvia, these all failed.

 

We do not see here gaslighting, deception, stalking, monitoring, abuse, coercion, trickery, isolating, stonewalling and other tactics controllers and manipulators use.

Sylvia Plath's Only Gregg Shorthand, Transcribed

Sylvia Plath wrote some Gregg shorthand after all! Her July 5, 1945 letter to Aurelia Plath, written from Camp Helen Storrow, includes three shorthand characters indicated but not transcribed in the Letters vol.1. Curious, I had a look at the original letter in the Lilly Library's Plath mss. II.

Twelve-year-old Sylvia had written to her mother, “Can you tell me what-these signs in shorthand mean?” and drew three shorthand characters. The first two are linked by “and,” and the final character is in parentheses, followed by a period. Why these shorthand characters and not others? Sylvia was asking what they said, so did not know. But she copied them from a grid of 154 Gregg shorthand characters pre-printed on the back cover of the steno notebook she was using as her 1945 summer camp diary.

Sylvia, using her thick black ink, made four checkmarks on this grid. They mark two pairs of symbols that look near-identical. Sylvia chose one of each pair to copy into her letter. The third symbol Sylvia asked about, the one in parentheses, is the same as the second. The first character means both “far” and “favor.” Which of those two would depend on their context. Sylvia's second shorthand character says “got.” The third says “got” in parentheses. So go fill in the blanks in your copy of Letters vol. 1, page 24.

Ergo: “Can you tell me what these signs in shorthand mean? Far/favor and got (got)."

The other two checkmarked characters in the grid that look so similar:

In Aurelia’s lighter ink and elegant hand, on this notebook’s back cover, up top, two Gregg shorthand characters say “medical texts.” Aurelia had been hired in 1942 to teach a Medical Secretarial Procedures course at Boston University’s College of Practical Arts and Letters (Letters Home, 28-29).

These characters are from the Anniversary Edition of Gregg, taught from 1930 to 1949. I await permission to show on this blog a photo of the notebook's back cover.

Bless us, now we know three more words Sylvia wrote.

Images of the shorthand are from gregg.angelfishy.net. The diary’s official location at the Lilly: Plath mss. II, Series: Diaries and Calendars 1944-1957, Box 7, Folder 2, “Daily Journal at Camp Helen Storrow, July 1-14, 1945."

Dick Norton Knew Shorthand

Sylvia’s boyfriend from 1951 to 1953, Dick Norton, in a July 1953 letter asked Sylvia how her shorthand lessons were going. (Aurelia later wrote in Letters Home that they didn't go well.) Norton himself knew shorthand—a now-forgotten form called Thomas Natural Shorthand.

Before Dick and Sylvia began dating, Norton wrote in an October 5, 1950 letter to Smith College student Jane Anderson that in addition to a full course load at Yale he had enrolled in a course in Thomas shorthand at a local commercial high school. He included in the letter a sample sentence he had learned to write at the first lesson.

Charles A. Thomas (1900-1982), introduced the Thomas shorthand method in 1935. Kentucky-born Thomas was a gifted chemist and MIT graduate later hired to isolate polonium for the Manhattan Project. In 1960 he became president of the Monsanto Company, contributing to the development of new products, and was accomplished and admired as both a chemist and businessman.

Thomas textbooks were published and reprinted by Prentice-Hall throughout the 1940s, indicating some degree of market traction, but not after 1949. At Sylvia’s request, or so he wrote, Dick Norton included a one-line sample of Thomas shorthand in a March 1, 1951 letter, on Yale stationery, to “Aunt Aurelia,” and transcribed it for her as “Best wishes from New Haven.”

Thomas Shorthand was a simplified form of Gregg shorthand and its foundational principle--symbols stand in for letters of the alphabet--inspired Teeline, a shorthand system introduced in 1968 and used in England by print journalists, who still take Teeline exams for certification. Norton’s Oct. 5, 1950 letter is in the Jane Anderson Papers, Box 1, Folder 10, at the Mortimer Rare Book Room, Smith College Libraries. Thanks to Karen Kukil for locating it and providing a copy.

What The Bell Jar Says About Shorthand

I am taking an online refresher course in Gregg shorthand to prepare for my week in the Sylvia Plath archive, seeking and transcribing Aurelia Plath's shorthand notations on Sylvia's books and correspondence. I did Lesson 2 today. Gregg shorthand is a unique and graceful written language, with parallels to, and a learning curve similar to, cursive writing. But it'd be hard to convince two generations of Plath scholars that shorthand has any value, because Sylvia, in her autobiographical novel The Bell Jar, wrote dismissively about it. Her stand-in character Esther Greenwood, age 19, decides against learning shorthand from her mother, a business-college teacher, during the lowest point of her young life, the summer of 1953.

For the record, The Bell Jar's mentions of shorthand are quoted here. Page numbers correspond to the Bantam paperback edition, published in the U.S. in 1972:

My mother had taught shorthand and typing to support us ever since my father died. . . .She was always on to me to learn shorthand after college, so I'd have a practical skill as well as a college degree. [32]


I started adding up all the things I couldn't do.

I began with cooking. . . .

I didn't know shorthand either.

This meant I couldn't get a good job after college. My mother kept telling me nobody wanted a plain English major. But an English major who knew shorthand was something else again. Everybody would want her. She would be in demand among all the up-and-coming young men and she would transcribe letter after thrilling letter.

The trouble was, I hated the idea of serving men in any way. I wanted to dictate my own thrilling letters. Besides, those little shorthand symbols in the book my mother showed me seemed just as bad as let t equal time and let s equal the total distance. [61-62]


My mother was teaching shorthand and typing to a lot of city college girls and wouldn't be home till the middle of the afternoon. [94]


By the end of supper my mother had convinced me I should study shorthand in the evenings. Then I would be killing two birds with one stone, writing a novel and learning something practical as well. I would also be saving a whole lot of money.

That same evening, my mother unearthed an old blackboard from the cellar and set it up on the breezeway. Then she stood at the blackboard and scribbled little curlicues in white chalk while I sat in a chair and watched.

At first I felt hopeful.

I thought I might learn shorthand in no time, and when the freckled lady in the Scholarships office asked me why I hadn't worked to earn money in July and August, the way you were supposed to if you were a scholarship girl, I could tell her I had taken a free shorthand course instead, so I could support myself right after college.

The only thing was, when I tried to picture myself in some job, briskly jotting down line after line of shorthand, my mind went blank. There wasn't one job I felt like doing where you used shorthand. And, as I sat there and watched, the white chalk curlicues blurred into senselessness.

I told my mother I had a terrible headache, and went to bed.

An hour later the door inched open, and as she crept into the room I heard the whisper of her clothes as she undressed. She climbed into bed. Then her breathing grew slow and regular.

In the dim light of the streetlamp that filtered through the drawn blinds, I could see the pin curls on her head glittering like a row of little bayonets.

I decided I would put off the novel until I had gone to Europe and had a lover, and that I would never learn a word of shorthand. If I never learned shorthand I would never have to use it. [99-100].


I thought I'd better go to work for a year and think things over. Maybe I could study the eighteenth century in secret.

But I didn't know shorthand, so what could I do?

I could be a waitress or a typist.

But I couldn't stand the idea of being either one. [103]