Otto Plath Was A Pacifist -- Not

The only known photo of Aurelia Plath with Otto, July 1933.

Sylvia’s Plath’s poem “Daddy,” written in 1962, implies that her Prussian immigrant father was a Nazi. He was not. But it is time to stop saying “Otto was a pacifist.” His widow Aurelia Plath promoted that view, idealizing her late husband before undercutting him by telling much more. Her preface to Letters Home (1975) says Otto Plath emigrated from Prussia to the U.S. to escape compulsory military service and told her he would never bear arms. As an entomologist Otto had such reverence for life that he grieved when he stepped on ants, and forbade his wife and children to kill any bugs except mosquitoes and houseflies. [1]

Thus defined, pacifism is principled opposition to war but also a way of life. Nothing in the record of Otto’s life demonstrates a principled commitment to peace or peacemaking. Millions of men have dreaded, and still dread, conscription and the hardships of army life. Otto’s Prussia drafted all men at age 20 for three years of service and five in the reserves. In Russia it was six years of service and nine in the reserves. You didn’t have to be a pacifist to hate this. Europeans in a great wave fled to the U.S. and Canada, Otto Plath in 1900, age 15. [2] Frenchman Emile Arnaud coined the word “pacifist” and it first appears in print in French and English in 1901. It means “peacemaker.”

When the FBI grilled German citizen Otto in 1918 as to his opinion of the war, he did not say he was a pacifist. Otto and Aurelia began dating in 1930 when he was 45, too old for military service, so any claims to pacifism then were for show. As a husband Otto made anything but peace. Aurelia testified to this at length in her preface to Letters Home and briefly in private letters. In public an estimable, even jovial professor, Otto at home was jealous, possessive, hectoring, and wrathful. He commandeered their household and forbade socializing. One year into their marriage, when “talking things out and reasoning” (Aurelia doesn’t admit to arguing) had failed, the formerly spirited young woman, a new mother, became submissive—because she wanted a peaceful home. (LH 13) Esther Greenwood, narrator of Sylvia’s novel The Bell Jar, says her mother learned she’d been baited-and-switched before her honeymoon began, “and from that day on my mother never had a minute’s peace.” (TBJ 69) 

Sylvia was four when they moved to a larger house. Otto the bug-lover was so volatile and irritable that when he was home Aurelia kept the children upstairs, confined and quiet. “Barely daring to breathe or whisper,” Sylvia wrote when drafting “Daddy”—and revised it to “barely daring to breathe or Achoo,” a word choice that plants the scene in her childhood.

In Letters Home Aurelia describes trying to pacify her Herr des Hauses. Aurelia had secret dinner guests, had her parents move into their 750-square-foot apartment for the first and second summers after her marriage: human shields. Letters Home reviewers did not recognize the marriage as abusive. Instead they jeered Aurelia as a "martyr," called Otto a “self-punishing” presence. [3] Aurelia made excuses: He was 21 years older than she, his mother had been terrible, his work was important, he had long lived alone, uncontrolled diabetes fueled his mood swings. But somehow Otto got tyrannical only at home. Not always, of course. Jekyll-and-Hyde types can be dear and loving when they choose, will even buy you a pearl necklace and fur (!) stole. But they will make you wear the fur on a July day just to show that you have it [pictured].

Sylvia Plath witnessed all this for her first eight years. Later she despised her mother for not standing up to and leaving the man Sylvia, never Aurelia, called an “ogre.” After Otto died Aurelia became a peace enforcer. Our “proofs” of Sylvia’s pacifism are mostly juvenilia created under the influence of her mother and peers (“Almost all my classmates are against all war,” [4]), such as her early poem “Bitter Strawberries,” and a self-portrait of schoolgirl Sylvia envisioning a battlefield and seeming to weep.  Adult Sylvia had opinions but never registered to vote and only watched for an hour a passing peace march in London in 1960.

When Sylvia in her journal remarks that Otto—waning in health and strength—“heiled Hitler in his own home,” it doesn’t mean he was a Nazi. Otto left Europe twenty years before the Nazi party existed. It means Otto was at that moment (at home) identifying with a dictator. Sylvia wrote in her story “Among the Bumblebees” about hearing through the walls, at night from her parents’ room, her father raising his voice “like thunder.” It wasn’t Sylvia he was yelling at. “Daddy”’s notorious “boot in the face” I hope is an invention. As of now, there is no record of physical assault in the Plaths’ marriage—only in Sylvia’s.

Sylvia identified with her father and came to revel in bullying first her brother Warren and then a Jewish neighbor boy, and she outdid her father in possessiveness. She chose to marry a “violent Adam,” policed his every move and jealously accused him. Letters Home excerpted her letter to Warren mentioning “every so often” marital fighting: sprained thumbs, missing earlobes. (LH, 344) Unlike her mother, Sylvia was not a submissive wife. She wrote in her journal: “I do not hit often. Once or twice.” Her unabridged journals (2000) gave startling details. [5] In 2018 some newly released Plath letters included her accusations of domestic violence. These were received by the press and by fans as if they were the first anyone had heard of violence in the marriage.

Sylvia’s parents had modeled for her a marriage so dysfunctional Sylvia expressed it in her art as the coupling of Nazi and Jew. “In the[ir] daughter the two strains marry and paralyze each other,” she said, introducing the poem “Daddy” on a BBC program. The daughter “has to act out the awful little allegory once over until she is free of it.” The poem draws a parallel not only between the worst traits of Sylvia’s father and her husband, but between the worst traits of Sylvia’s parents’ marriage and her own.

[1] ASP to MSC, May 1, 1972.

[2] Escaping conscription was a common reason for emigration. Donald Trump's Bavarian grandfather fled to the U.S. in 1885, age 16. When he returned to Germany for a visit, the German Empire convicted him of evading military service.

[3] New York Times Book Review, December 14, 1975, page 1.

[4] The Letters of Sylvia Plath, volume 1, page 140.

[5] Journals, June 11, 1958.

N.B. Celebrated pacifists who privately abused their spouses, children, or students/followers include Gandhi, Bertrand Russell, Albert Einstein, Robert Lowell, John Lennon, and John Howard Yoder.

Leaving 26 Elmwood Road

In 1983, six years after selling Sylvia’s letters and juvenilia, Aurelia Plath at 26 Elmwood Road in Wellesley still had “oceans of papers, out-of-print magazines, clippings of reviews, letters”; “dozens of boxes of family pictures; my notebooks (travel, journals)”; “four three-drawer filing cabinets, three desks, an eight-drawer bureau of papers.” While paging through these, she uncovered yet more. [1]

Age 77, after 40 years in that house Aurelia had to sell it and move to an apartment. She wanted the papers by and about Sylvia to go to the Sylvia Plath archive at Smith College’s library—donated, to get a tax break. Yet the prospect of sorting them was overwhelming.

That summer she told this to Wellesley neighbor and friend Dr. Richard Larschan, who volunteered his help. I asked Dr. Larschan where in the house Aurelia had kept all the papers and memorabilia so vital to Plath studies now.

“I only know that when we were sorting, Aurelia kept it in two walk-in closets in the room where her parents had slept,” he remembered. Self-described “pack rat” Aurelia “kept everything she touched in meticulous order—hundreds of letters neatly organized according to correspondent, and tied with ribbons.”

A U-Mass. professor of English (now Emeritus), Larschan was the right helper for sifting the goods systematically. He said they met “thrice-weekly [for] two- or three-hour sessions, during which Aurelia and I would evaluate the accumulation of 60-plus years, including things from Sylvia’s childhood like the letter opener she had carved, Sylvia’s Girl Scout uniform, Otto’s doctoral certificate, multiple copies of every newspaper clipping and magazine article Sylvia ever published, hundreds and hundreds of letters from readers of Letters Home, et cetera. I would type a list of things Aurelia would either discard, give to me, or donate to Smith and Indiana University after being evaluated by a rare-book expert.”

This task drained Aurelia emotionally. She wrote a friend, “Have to part with most reminders of my past—it hurts, as you know. (Eyestrain slows me down.)” Not only did her eyes hurt, but “Discarding thousands of pages of correspondence tugs at the heart. So many good people have given of themselves!” She means they threw away the fan letters. On the good side, Larschan and Aurelia developed a bond. Like Sylvia, he had had been a Fulbright fellow. At Exeter University in 1962-63 he had lived only fifteen miles from Ted and Sylvia’s Court Green, although they never met. Larschan admired Aurelia’s independence (“a burden to nobody”) while acknowledging her sometimes cloying sentimentality, rather like his own mother’s.

Sentimentality is of course repellent, but the next time you marvel over the rich resources in Plath archives, thank Sylvia’s sentimental mother.

Smith College received the donation in December 1983. Still, not every notable piece of paper went there. “In 1984,” Larschan said, “Aurelia gave me her correspondence with Olwyn Hughes about publishing (or NOT publishing!) The Bell Jar, which I sold to Smith College. She also gave me duplicate copies of Sylvia’s various publications that I sold privately and are now housed at Emory—along with [Sylvia’s] downstairs neighbor Trevor Thomas’s [self-published memoir] Last Encounters, inscribed to me when I lived in England."

Also withheld from the archives were Aurelia's own notebooks and journals, and photos of family members besides Otto or Sylvia: maybe of sister Dottie or son Warren, and so on. Asked if he saw any packets of Aurelia’s letters to Sylvia, Larschan said he did not.

So the task was completed. “When we were through cataloging and evaluating the materials Aurelia donated to Smith, in 1984 [Smith College] President Jill Ker Conway invited Aurelia and me for lunch, and so I drove us to Northampton,” Larschan said. [2] That lunch was their thank-you.

 

[1] ASP to Mary Ann Montgomery, letters of April 1980 and September 6, 1983, Lilly. ASP to Rose Leiman Goldemberg, postcards June and October 1983, Rose Goldemberg Papers, *T-Mss 2016-003, box 8, folder 1, Billy Rose Theatre Division, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts.

[2] Emails, Richard Larschan to the author, December 2 and 4, 2021.

Before Sylvia Was Famous: A Review From 1962

Sylvia Plath's first collection of poems, The Colossus, was published in England in 1960 and in the U.S. in May 1962. The Oakland [California] Tribune ran this review on July 29, 1962. I thought it was a refreshing read, without all the biographical baggage Plath's poems carry today.

Book-review editors get literally tons of new books and can review in print only a select few. The reviewer, Jack Anderson (b. 1935) had the good taste to review The Colossus. In 1959 he had quit UC-Berkeley to work for the Oakland Tribune. Anderson became a New York Times dance critic and a pioneering dance historian as well as a poet.

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Sylvia Plath's Sacred Baboon

Here's the "sacred baboon" Sylvia Plath found on the beach in Winthrop when she was two and a half years old, and described in her memoir "Ocean 1212-W":

According to "Ocean 1212-W," Sylvia found this "simian Thinker" washed up on the seashore the day her brother was born. She was jealous because she would no longer be her parents' only child. But finding the baboon sculpture on the beach that day was a sign that she was special.

The fact is that Sylvia did not find this sculpture. Her neighbor and playmate David Freeman found it, he said, between the ages of 8 and 14 (before 1946). It had drifted in covered with tar. David's father "figured it belonged to some sailor" and cleaned it. [1] The photograph is courtesy of David's sister Ruth Freeman, via Dr. Richard Larschan.

The ancient Egyptians honored Hamadryas baboons as one of the incarnations of their god of wisdom.  They portrayed these sacred baboons in art and made mummies of them. This particular sculpture was more recent, a remnant of a then-new Western fascination with hominid intelligence and behavior. In the 1920s, U.S. psychobiologist Robert Yerkes adopted chimpanzees, published a book about them titled Almost Human, and founded the first primatology laboratory, at Yale (it's now at Emory). Popular interest, plus the influence of Egyptian art on modern sculpture, culminated in the Baboon Fountain featured at the 1939 New York World's Fair. The photo below shows two of the fountain's five godlike baboon figures, with the fair's iconic Pylon in the background.

[1] Harriet Rosenstein's notes from her interview with David Freeman on 17 July 1974, Emory.

Sylvia Plath's Poem "Daddy" in 2022

Here are four things to know when the topic of your essay or lesson plan in 2022 will be Plath’s poem “Daddy”: 

1. 

My Friend, My Friend

(for M.W.K., who hesitates each time she sees a young girl wearing The Cross)

Who will forgive me for the things I do?
With no special legend of God to refer to,
With my calm white pedigree, my yankee kin,
I think it would be better to be a Jew.

I forgive you for what you did not do,
I am impossibly guilty. Unlike you,
My friend, I can not blame my origin
With no special legend or God to refer to.

They wear The Crucifix as they are meant to do.
Why do their little crosses trouble you?
The effigies that I have made are genuine
(I think it would be better to be a Jew).

Watching my mother slowly die I knew
My first release. I wish some ancient bugaboo
Followed me. But my sin is always my sin.
With no special legend or God to refer to.

Who will forgive me for the things I do?
To have your reasonable hurt to belong to
Might ease my trouble like liquor or aspirin.
I think it would be better to be a Jew.

And if I lie, I lie because I love you,
Because I am bothered by the things I do,
Because your hurt invades my calm white skin:
With no special legend or God to refer to,
I think it would be better to be a Jew.

-Anne Sexton wrote this poem, first published in Antioch Review in 1959. Sylvia Plath probably saw one of its earlier drafts in the poetry-writing seminar Plath and Sexton attended in 1959, or maybe Plath read it in the Antioch Review, in which Plath published a poem in 1961. Sexton did not include this poem in any of her books, so it is not in Sexton’s The Complete Poems volume (1981), but is in Selected Poems of Anne Sexton (1988). “M.W.K.” is Sexton’s poet friend Maxine Kumin, who was Jewish.

 2.

“In Russia I was often asked why Plath had taken her own life, and I outlined all I knew—the adultery, the two children, the freezing cold, her history of depression—and was met with incredulity. Against these Russians’ desperate history of slaughtered millions, her misery seemed almost childish, and they had no belief in Freudian theory. They were missing, as perhaps Plath intended that they should, the pain that went to the very center of her fragmented self.”

 

-Elaine Feinstein (1930-2019), British poet, novelist, translator and biographer of the Russian poet Marina Tsvetayeva. The above is the concluding paragraph of “A Close Reading of ‘Daddy’,” an essay available in full here on the British Library website.

 

3. 

Plath’s friend Clarissa Roche wrote in a memoir, “Sylvia Plath: Vignettes from England,” published in Sylvia Plath: The Woman and the Work (1977) that on a visit to Sylvia in November 1962, Sylvia read her a new poem, “Daddy,” and both women laughed and laughed.

4.

Consider how a neo-Nazi might respond to “Daddy,” neo-Nazis being fairly common now, as they were not when the poem was written 60 years ago.

 https://keepcalms.com/product/facemask/happy-60th-birthday-daddy-2/

Was Aurelia A Virgin Bride?

When Aurelia Schober married Otto Plath, January 4, 1932, she was 25 and he 46. Because Aurelia said nothing about whether she was a virgin at marriage, I will marshal what evidence I have to show why I think its answer is no.

 

Before she met Otto Plath, Aurelia, barely 20, started a two-year relationship with an Austrian engineer and MIT professor in his 40s. [1] Dashing, divorced Dr. Karl Terzaghi, pursued by Boston society ladies married and single, had one-nighters when out of town on business. His diary—kept meticulously all his life—mentions in August 1926 hiring “Miss A. Schober” as his secretary and German-to-English translator. A college junior with Austrian parents, the intelligent and warm-hearted girl (his words) eased Karl’s loneliness, and he hers. They went to museums, saw plays, conversed about art and poetry. By November they were kissing in the park, in the dark. This was Aurelia’s first romance, and she fell crazy in love, as did Karl.

Aurelia’s parents met Karl, and between Christmas and New Year’s her mother told her to quit seeing him. Karl (born in 1883), said her mother, was too old for her to marry, a mere three years younger than Aurelia’s father, so we know the issue of marriage had come up.

 

Heartsick and stuck at home during winter break, Aurelia on December 29, 1926, bought poet Sara Teasdale’s most recent book, Dark of the Moon, and retreated into its wistful love lyrics. She checkmarked and bracketed lines that moved her, and—in Gregg shorthand, which she had learned in college and her family couldn’t read—processed her feelings:

 

I wonder if this is true about Karl. (page 45)

 

This I have said in my heart when with Karl, “At least we two have had today.” (67)

 

This is something that I must not do. Yet I am afraid that I may. What is better—to do what one’s heart dictates or what one’s conscience tells you is right? I only hope this day will not come to me eventually. (79)

 

If I said good-bye to Karl I would be afraid to feel this too. Therefore I will not say “good-bye.” (79) [2]

 

Karl by then was calling Aurelia “Lilly,” the German nickname for a dream girl, and his diary refers to her also as “L.” (This confused Karl’s biographer, who thought “L.” was someone else.) [3] Aurelia turned 21 in April 1927 and apparently that made Karl okay. He stayed overnight at the family home in Winthrop after Aurelia’s junior prom. In May a colleague invited Karl and Aurelia on a camping trip. The colleague’s wife made Karl phone and reassure Aurelia’s mother. He also heard his girl war-whooping in the background. Sylvia Plath in her bathing suit is famous, but Karl’s diary gives Aurelia her own “bathing-beauty” moment: “Enjoyed seeing Lilly in bathing suit, well built and very pretty.”

 

Aurelia worked at a YWCA camp in Maine during summer 1927. Karl was a guest there for a week in July, and the couple spent evenings rowing on the lake, swimming in coves, and were for the first time “alone-alone” with a blanket. Karl wrote:

 

Before midnight . . .  on a lonesome clearing at the lake shore, experiencing again the delight of perfect and unrestricted communion with my girl, listening to the sounds of the woods and the low, tender, musical voice.

 

That’s as explicit as Karl’s diary gets. He returned to Boston so much in love he wondered what to do. At Christmas 1927, he gave Aurelia mementos of the idyll at Camp Maqua: an eight-by-ten photo of himself in a gauzy shirt and another of Aurelia in a meadow in her middy dress.

 

But by April his diary said he’d decided against marriage, citing her family. He was traveling more often to muddy and godforsaken sites to design hydroelectric dams. If they married, what would Aurelia do with herself but write him letters? He left on a four-month business trip only days before her June graduation. An anguished Aurelia hoped it wasn’t over, but it was. On their final date in December she huffed to Karl that she did not want to be an “episode,” but for him, she was. “Almost a wife,” his biography calls her. But Karl married someone else.

 

In the 1970s Aurelia wrote to her granddaughter Frieda about her lost love, never naming him, saying her heartache persisted until Sylvia was born. [4] In other words, Otto Plath was not a substitute for Karl, whose photo she kept all her life. When Otto came calling, this time Aurelia’s mother didn’t object to a suitor twenty years older; in 1932 the median age for women at marriage was 21, and Aurelia was 25 going on 26, approaching the spinster zone.

Steady or engaged couples in the Depression era tended to delay marriage and children, yet about one-third had sex before marriage, and the older they were, the higher the percentage. The 1920s had normalized premarital sex and contraception. Recalling his first wife’s distaste for sex, Otto probably asked Aurelia about her past, or for a road test, so maybe Otto, if not Karl, was her first. Aurelia said or did something, such as let slip a word about her ex, because after their honeymoon Otto the so-called pacifist shocked her with jealous rages, and we can gauge what they were like by comparing them with Sylvia’s marital rages.

 

Aurelia wrote on a draft of her Letters Home preface that regarding sex she “felt that my daughter should be better informed than I had been.” [5] So we know she had personal regrets, and she also gave Sylvia an article titled “The Case for Chastity,” to cajole Sylvia into remaining a virgin until marriage. Aurelia’s paragraphs describing the sex education she gave her children were deleted from the preface, and the published version turns the tables and shows Sylvia educating herself by reading and underlining passages in a book.

 

There’s one more clue to the answer to the question I have no right to ask unless it grants Aurelia the heart and humanity printed pages have denied her. Plath scholar Tracy Brain noticed a significant deletion from an earlier draft of The Bell Jar. Its narrator Esther, wanting to lose her virginity and seeking the right man for the job, shares, “Then, since my mother had hinted of the thralldom a woman undergoes in the hands of her first lover, to be on the safe side, I wanted somebody I didn’t know.” Plath deleted the italicized clause that reveals Esther’s mother as both her sex educator and the voice of experience. [6]

 

 

[1] See “Aurelia Plath’s First Love,” blog post May 9, 2019.

[2] Rankovic, “Aurelia Plath Shorthand Transcriptions,” https://epublications.marquette.edu/aureliaplath/4/

[3] Goodman, Karl Terzaghi: The Engineer as Artist, p. 111.

[4] Andrew Wilson’s Plath biography quotes a letter dated April 21, 1978, from the Cruickshank Archive, not available to the public.

[5] “IX. Aurelia Plath,” Box 30, folder 57, Sylvia Plath collection, Smith College. See also “Aurelia Plath and the Case for Chastity,” blog post December 21, 2021. 

[6] The Other Sylvia Plath, p. 154.

Aurelia Plath and "The Case for Chastity"

Aurelia Plath gave Sylvia Plath a Reader’s Digest article titled “The Case for Chastity,” written by a married mother of four, cautioning young women against premarital sex. Sylvia bristled, and later trounced this article in her journal and in The Bell Jar, where it’s renamed “In Defense of Chastity.” 

But for that article, Sylvia might have wished to model herself after its author, Margaret Culkin Banning [pictured]. Banning’s New York Times obituary says she published 40 books, and 400 stories in the slick high-paying magazines Sylvia ached to write for. [1] Yet this bestselling novelist—Vassar graduate, a lawyer, pro-women’s rights—might have been forgotten without Plath’s reference to the chastity article, Exhibit A among Sylvia’s reasons Sylvia (and we) should hate her mother.

 

Reader’s Digest published “The Case for Chastity” in August 1937. It was so popular that in September, Harper (Margaret Banning’s publisher) printed it as a pamphlet. Tightly argued and exhaustive, it explains to would-be female sexual rebels and those putting off marriage the many ways unchastity can ruin their lives: diseases, babies, abortions, regrets, and, a new twist, psychological breakdowns. The article quotes statistics and experts. Read it for yourself, here.

 

Pamphlets were rife in the 1930s when folks were too poor to buy books. Aurelia Plath was into pamphlets. Her shorthand annotation on Sylvia’s letter of December 19, 1961, notes the Chicago address for a free pamphlet titled Adventures in Conversation. She hoped to forward this to Sylvia for little Frieda’s edification. Frieda was then 20 months old.

 

Exactly where Aurelia got “The Case for Chastity” and when she gave it to Sylvia is not known. [2] In autumn 1937, Sylvia was age four going on five, so not then. The pamphlet in its time was truly and insanely topical. In December 1936 the most reliable known birth control device, the pessary or diaphragm, became legal in the U.S.—if prescribed by a medical doctor for health reasons. This landmark case is called United States vs. One Package of Japanese Pessaries, and Margaret Sanger engineered it all. [3] Sylvia Plath in her “platinum summer” of 1954 had an illegal diaphragm; Massachusetts did not legalize birth control for singles until 1972. Yet diaphragms could be obtained from sympathetic doctors, or by stealth, or from overseas, or if you borrowed a wedding ring. In January 1954 Mary McCarthy published in Partisan Review a story opening with the shocking words “Get yourself a pessary,” later Chapter 3 in her novel The Group (1963). 

 

Aurelia Plath’s original preface to Letters Home (1975) included five paragraphs about how she provided her children with a liberal sex education. When they were school age she gave them a book called Growing Up. Aurelia wrote that she read and discussed frankly with Sylvia numerous edgy books and plays. Here is part of the preface that Aurelia’s editor cut:

 

. . .  In The Bell Jar an article from the Reader’s Digest, titled “The Case for Chastity,” is handed the heroine as a manual to be followed. Our shared reading, however, went far afield of this and went on intermittently throughout high school years and the first three years of college . . . We discussed the work and writings of Margaret Sanger, the unfairness of the double standard . . . I did tell my children that I hoped they would wait until they had completed their undergraduate education before involving themselves in what I considered a serious commitment with another life . . . The decision, however, had to be theirs. (47-48) [4]

 

“The Case for Chastity” as represented in The Bell Jar was a thorn in Aurelia’s side, belittling her years of conscientious mothering; and the cuts to her Letters Home preface erased her noble efforts utterly. However, the Rosenstein papers, opened in 2020, record that in 1953 Aurelia told Dr. Ruth Beuscher that Sylvia knew the facts of intercourse by age 15. Later additional mother-daughter discussions made Sylvia “extremely avid for the most minute detail about sex, and this caused [her] mother some embarrassment. But she answered all questions.” [5]

 

Also in the cut paragraphs, Aurelia tried to establish that she was not a prude. In New York in 1929 she saw a play banned in Boston, and in 1933 she delivered to the Boston University faculty wives’ book club a report about Brave New World—so full of drugs and sex the book is banned in some places today.

 

Aurelia’s status when at age 25 she married Otto Plath, 46, who was married the whole time they dated, is nobody’s business and no one should care. Yet the answer to “Was Aurelia a virgin?” could illuminate Aurelia’s character, the battleground Sylvia Plath tragically died on, dreading a life like her mother’s and seeing in her more bad than good. Whether yes or no, the culture is rigged so Aurelia cannot win. Had she been a man this would not be an issue.

[1] New York Times, January 6, 1982.

[2] Probably the pamphlet was mailed to Sylvia at college in 1954 when Aurelia was most worried about Sylvia’s chastity. Aurelia wrote biographer Linda Wagner-Martin in 1987 that along with the chastity article she gave Sylvia an article with an opposing viewpoint. (ASP to Wagner-Martin, October 29, 1987, p. 2.) I believe that is false.

[3] United States v. One Package of Japanese Pessaries, 86 F.2d 737. Read the decision here at Justia.com.

[4] Plath mss. II, Box 9, folder 3, Lilly Library.

[5] “McLean Hospital Record,” Collection 1489, Box 3, Folder 10, Rose Library – Emory University Archives.