Contusions: What Purple Means in Sylvia Plath

Medical Illustration by Dr. Ciléin Kearns (Artibiotics)

How a bruise works: an impact breaks the capillaries. Gradually the pooled blood breaks down into its components, as illustrated. Can't think of another writer besides Plath so taken with bruises. The crown jewel of the lot is her poem "Contusion," written February 4, 1963, Plath's third-to-last poem. The poem's speaker watches a bruise develop. The speaker doesn't say it's theirs. This bruise is somehow decisive: a minor injury elevated by its formal, medical name, it portends a death.

 

Sylvia Plath’s works include far more bruising than most writers describe by age 30. In The Bell Jar, a male escort’s grip on Esther Greenwood’s arm leaves purple fingerprints. Esther describes her injured face as “purple and bulged out in a shapeless way, shading to green along the edges, and then to a sallow yellow.” The writer knows bruises, has studied them. Plath's journal says her first night with Ted Hughes gave her a "battered face smeared with a purple bruise" (26 March 1956). Over time, the bruises in Plath's work increase and so does her artfulness in describing them:

O adding machine--

Is it impossible for you to let something go and have it go whole?

Must you stamp each piece in purple,

 

Must you kill what you can? ("A Birthday Present")

 

In October 1962 a jealous Plath wrote in the “The Swarm,” the most nebulous of Ariel’s bee poems, these heated and personal lines, like nothing else in the poem:

 

Jealousy can open the blood,

It can make black roses.

 

Admired for her evocative use of the colors red, black, and white, even yellow, the color purple in Sylvia Plath’s writings ranges from "wormy purple" in "Poem for a Birthday" to "The Ravaged Face" ("Grievously purpled, mouth skewered on a groan") to The Bell Jar's decorously sick Miss Norris who wears only purple. Emily Dickinson used the adjective "purple" more than 50 times, connoting, as it had for thousands of years, "priestly" or "princely," or like violets, which Dickinson loved. The first synthetic purple dye was patented in 1856: after that, anyone could wear it. I think Plath, who grew up without priests or princes, redefined the "royal color" as morbid or livid: Cadavers are purple-black. Berries bleed purple. "Fat purple figs" shrivel and rot.

In a draft of Plath's poem "Fever 103,º" purple did signify authority, the priestly type:

 

O auto-da-fe! 

The purple men, gold crusted, thick with spleen, 

Sit with their hooks and crooks and stoke the light.

 

Plath deleted that stanza after recording the poem for the BBC.

 

In Plath's view (then and now widely shared) purples render commoners worse than common. Esther Greenwood's mother wore "a dress with purple cartwheels," and "looked awful." Esther's boss Jay Cee in a lavender suit, hat, and gloves "looked terrible, but very wise." (39) "Irwin's" friend "Olga," a professor's wife, wears purple slacks when she calls on Irwin, who has Esther as his guest instead. (227) Esther more authentically wears the color on her flesh, "bruised purple and green and blue" from insulin injections. (191) Purple, once so exclusively for royals that non-royals were killed for wearing it, Esther wears on her butt.

 

Plath's purples are fleshly and literal. In other Ariel poems one finds a purple tongue and a surgeon's description of the "purple wilderness" exposed during surgery. Plath made the color corporeal. And linked it with women's injuries.

I'm hoping someone will enrich the world with deeper thinking so I don't have to read Jonathan Bate (Ted Hughes: The Unauthorized Life) or his kind saying or quoting, "For Plath, desire was a purple bruise; for Hughes, poetry was the healing of a wound," when Plath's purples communicate something else. [1]

[1] Martin Rubin, review of Ted Hughes: The Unauthorised Life, SFGate, 19 November 2015.

"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.

The Light of the Mind

"Darkness is not empty. It is information at rest." -Teju Cole

Usually I'm in some archive or library thrilled to be hunting out Plath material and am rarely photographed in such places. Here I am at the Merseyside Maritime Museum in Liverpool, England, viewing old photos of the R.M.S. Lake Ontario, a boat first designed to carry mail. Measuring 400 feet by 45 feet, it was re-fitted to carry 600 steerage passengers, among them Sylvia Plath's grandmother Ernestine and five of her children, who crossed from Liverpool to Canada in 1901.

The R.M.S. Lake Ontario was an old banger built in 1887, twice damaged in collisions, and scrapped in 1905.

Nine million European emigrants passed through Liverpool. Those who began their journey at the port of Hamburg usually first landed at Hull, near London. From there they were packed into trains that delivered them directly to Liverpool.

Bones to Pick With Dick Norton

Sylvia Plath and Dick Norton

Found among Aurelia Plath's papers: a handwritten list of graceless/boneheaded comments aired by Sylvia's boyfriend Dick Norton, comments first made to Sylvia, who seethed and told her mother. Aurelia overheard at least one. Aurelia wrote down and numbered each and titled the list "Bones to Pick with Dick N.", that title in Gregg shorthand so we know Aurelia was its author.

1. "A poem is an infinitesimal speck of dust."

2.  "Anybody who can read can major by himself in English. Waste of time!"

3.  On Sylvia's arrival at Raybrook (where she was hoping to catch up on work and put on paper a story that was fermenting within her) -- "Well, you haven't grown any shorter!"

4. "A zircon looks like a diamond from a little distance. A large one would be impressive."

5.  "I suppose your grandfather looks forward to a visit with his cronies." [Aurelia continued:] That settled dad's visiting with the N.s in the living room after dinner. Of course poor Grammy had to plead weariness and retire upstairs, too! (I was blamed for snobbishness.) 

Document, black ink on a half-sheet of white paper, date unknown.

Sylvia's Grandmother's Mental Hospital, Jamestown, North Dakota

Sylvia Plath's grandmother Ernestine Plath spent five years in this North Dakota mental hospital: 1905 to 1910. The print says, "Main Bldg, N.D. Hospital for the Insane, Jamestown, N. Dak." Somebody printed picture postcards of the North Dakota state insane asylum? Hey, it was handsome and modern. Few or no locked rooms, chains, or cages: The hospital's director, a progressive, instead of confining patients gave them jobs. While Ernestine was here, the hospital was Jamestown's largest employer. 

Crowded with more than 600 patients, the Hospital for the Insane in 1904 stopped admitting females except for the sickest. Ernestine Plath was one of them. "Jamestown" was the first of two mental hospitals in which Ernestine spent a total of eight years.

Sylvia Plath's Black Relatives: Atlantic City Waiter

Century Association, 7 West 43rd St., New York

Sylvia Plath's black great-uncle Christopher Nicholson once worked in an exclusive arts-and-letters men's club, the Century Association in Manhattan, a palazzo with a Gilded-Age interior stuffed with books. Members ate and drank there, could stay there, tended by a staff that today numbers 42: cooks, "food runners," housekeepers, bookkeepers. 

From 1896 to 1934 "Negro" Elijah Hicks was the club's "hallman" and greeter, so highly esteemed that The New York Times published a tribute and seven "Centurions," all white, went to Harlem for his funeral.

Century Association renovation, 2000s

Christopher Nicholson claimed to be working at the Century in 1942 (hiring date and position unknown). Its members and guests, some famous, weren't always white: Ralph Ellison liked the club's martinis. I hope Nicholson borrowed and read books. In 1904, age 21, Nicholson had worked as a hallboy at -- believe it -- the Brookline, Massachusetts country club where Sylvia's grandfather Frank Schober was maitre d' in the 1940s and '50s.

It is little remarked that writer Sylvia Plath sprang from professional waiters and deli owners and deli workers, her own father having sold groceries in New York and lopped sausages in San Francisco. Did Sylvia know about her great-uncle Christopher? He was uncle to Sylvia's mother Aurelia. We don't know if Aurelia met him, but from the 1920s on Aurelia showed mild yet definite affinities for integrated YWCA camps and the brotherhood of man. By contrast, Sylvia in The Bell Jar described a black server so insolent that Esther Greenwood just had to kick him.

After Brookline, Nicholson worked his way up to waiting tables at Boston's elegant Hotel Touraine. Meanwhile Boston hotels were replacing black waiters with Europeans, such as Plath relatives the Schobers (Frank and Henry) and a Greenwood (Ernest), all Austrians and waiters at the Hotel Thorndike nearby.

In 1906 Nicholson married Austrian-born Anna Greenwood, a domestic. This gave her parents, her six siblings, and the Schobers a black in-law and his own family a white one. The Nicholsons soon left Boston for Philadelphia. After the 1910 strike and race riot the Nicholsons, now with children, moved to Atlantic City. Its tourists liked seeing black waiters and service workers, it made them feel good, so the work was steady.

Yet the jobs had their tensions. Poet Countee Cullen worked summers as a busboy in Atlantic City and in his first book (Color, 1925), published:

Of his busboy work Cullen wrote that it was "just a job, but it gives me time to study some of the vermin of the race, and since three-fourths of every race is vermin, I am in with the masses."

Multiplying the Nicholsons' difficulties was their legal but uncommon interracial marriage. Outside of New England their marriage was a crime. Confusion and conflict pervade the public records: Their son's November 1907 birth record calls both parents "mulatto." The 1910 federal census, taken at a black-owned boarding house, says the Nicholsons and their children are white. The 1915 New Jersey census says Anna is white and Christopher and their four kids are black.

The deaths, from influenza, of all four Nicholson children in October 1918 must have further strained the marriage. Shock, mourning, or going on strike with fellow African-Americans in 1919 cost Nicholson his waiter job. His brother Sylvester then joined the household and in 1920 both worked at Atlantic City's gasworks.

In 1925 Christopher was once again an Atlantic City waiter. It's my guess that around then Anna began an affair with a white British ironworker. It was serious enough that Christopher packed up and moved, most likely to New York. Anna stayed in Atlantic City, cleaning houses, until 1929, when the ironworker got U.S. citizenship, and they married in Manhattan in 1932.

Anna on her second-marriage document gives her maiden name, Greenwood, and her birthplace not as Austria but as Scranton, Pennsylvania. The couple moved to England. Christopher Nicholson's job at the Century did not last; Association archivist Brynn White found a list of staff dated 1946 and Nicholson isn't on it. Nicholson roomed in Harlem and never remarried because it seems he and Anna never divorced. City records indicate that Nicholson died in Manhattan in October 1956. [1] He was 73.

[1] New York, New York, U.S., Death Index, 1949-1965, p. 266.

If Sylvia Plath Were Elly Higginbottom

Imagine that Sylvia Plath was orphaned at birth and grew up in a Boston orphanage, a public charge with no relatives. She is just as talented and furious as we know her to be.

Sylvia Plath, without any family:

Never becomes interested in bees

Never lives in Winthrop or Wellesley

Has no grandparents

Never meets Mr. Crockett

Is not expected to attend college

Receives no encouragement to pursue the arts

Is on her own at age 18 

(Her choice then is either a job or marriage. Let's guess she chooses independence and gets a job as a waitress or a typist.)

Has no one and no place to count on as a "safety net"

Can't borrow a car

Writes very few letters and no one keeps them

If granted a scholarship to Smith College cannot earn enough to cover expenses so does not graduate

Has no family doctor

Can't afford psychiatric treatment

Dies in a basement at age 20

Or if by chance she survives, resides in a state mental hospital and no one visits

The advantage of being Elly: People would love orphan Elly for "her sweet, quiet nature. They wouldn't be after me to read books and write long papers on the twins in James Joyce." Plus everything bad that ever happened to Elly can be blamed on the awful lady at the orphanage. (The Bell Jar, 134)