Aurelia Plath Is Still a Bad Mother

They're called secondary sources for a reason.

Look into Sylvia Plath’s tie with her mother and you will often find little intimations of murder. That’s a very serious charge. Lacking proof we say Aurelia Plath killed her daughter psychologically. In Marianne Egeland’s Claiming Sylvia Plath: The Poet as Exemplary Figure (2013) the chapter "Psychologists" shows how we were fed our certainty that Aurelia wrecked her daughter's life and caused her suicide.

I am quoting at some length the book’s page 191 to entertain you. Plus a bonus. Egeland writes:

". . . to appease [Sylvia’s] sibling jealousy when Mrs. Plath was caring for her baby son, Mrs. Plath encouraged Sylvia to read the newspaper. What the busy mother with her hands full perhaps just devised as a way to redirect attention in specific situations, [psychoanalyst Benigna] Gerish invokes as: 

 

"a desymbolizing and resymbolizing process in Plath’s inner world in which the emotionally loaded experience (jealousy and anger) is inadequately redirected into a world of symbolic speech, which binds and masks the emotion only enabling its distorted expression. (739) [1]* 

 

"[Gerish adds that] the eczema Sylvia Plath supposedly suffered from as a child was very likely a consequence of her mother’s profound ambivalence towards her. At the same time, the alleged eczema is not an issue addressed in any of the biographies, and Gerish gives no sources to confirm either its importance or its existence.** Aurelia Plath describes her daughter as “a healthy, merry child -- the center of attention most of her waking time” (Letters Home, 13)."***

 

"[A study by Lisa Firestone and Joyce Catlett proposes that their] "Voice Therapy" would have made Plath “able to feel the death wishes that her mother must have felt toward her (on an unconscious level) throughout her childhood” (1998, 687). Firestone and Catlett write that Aurelia Plath and Ted Hughes “both claimed to love her, while criticizing and attempting to control her life.”* They further maintain that Plath’s hostile attitudes to herself, to others, and to life in general were more representative of her mother’s views than her own (673).* No sources are stated in support of their pronouncements on either Mrs. Plath or Hughes.**

 

"[In the hypothetical Voice Therapy session] . . . “S.P.” gratefully confides to her therapist that the negative voice which has told her so many times how worthless and what a no-good writer she is, actually came from her mother, together with “the final command” to kill herself."* [2]

 

Bonus:

"Sylvia Plath’s rage at her abandoning husband and at her late beloved father was partly a displacement of anger toward her loving but smothering mother.* Her schizoid pathology resulting from the symbiosis (along with her bipolarity) helped prompt her suicide.* . . . In Ariel Plath attempted and succeeded in turning herself into a tragic, mythic heroine, eventually drowning herself in a gas oven as she would have in the ocean -- a key metaphor for her mother."*

 

[1] Gerish, Benigna. "This is Not Death, It Is Something Safer:" A Psychodynamic Approach to Sylvia Plath, Death Studies, 22 (7), 1998, 667-692.

[2] Firestone, L. & Catlett, J. (1998). The treatment of Sylvia Plath. Death Studies, 22 (7), 1998, 667-692.

[3] Fierstein, F. A Psychoanalytic Study of Sylvia Plath. Psychoanalytic Review, February 2016, 103-26.

 

*But that's true, that's fact, I just know it!

**How rude to suggest that scholars cite sources.

***That's a barefaced lie!

Who?

Meet Sylvia Plath's grandfather Theodor, master-blacksmith/inventor, and his wife Ernestine, grandmother who died in the Oregon State Hospital for the Insane. These are Otto Plath's parents, from Budsin, Prussia (today, Poland). Otto got to America the year before they did.

The props of fancy chair plus classical column mean the portrait was taken in the U.S.A. where bad taste reigns in such things. I mean, our four-year-olds get studio-photographed holding golden plastic "4"s. Already approaching age 50 when Mr. and Mrs. Plath arrived in 1901, they are likely closer to 60 in this photo. The narrow necktie suggests it's after 1905. The occasion might have been their 25th wedding anniversary in 1907. Celebrating that anniversary, calling it "silver," and the 50th anniversary the "gold," is a German tradition that Sylvia references in her poem "The Applicant."

Embossed in the corner is the photographer's name, hard to read. If it says "Hale" it was Herbert A. Hale, longtime Portland, Oregon photographer, turn of the century to 1917. Enlargement reveals beneath the logo small roman letters that look like "ego" or "eco" and might say "Oregon." City directories show Theodor worked as a blacksmith in Portland in 1907 and 1908.

I think there is something of Otto Plath in the looks and stance of both parents. The photo, scanned into a public family-tree gallery, is the first I've seen of either parent. Ernestine died in Salem, the tin of her ashes finally claimed by a descendant in 2020; Theodor, buried in Oregon City, had a pauper's grave with no stone. But, very good news: In 2021 a seeker located and marked his grave.

Plaths in Steerage

In picturing young Otto Plath wretchedly alone in steerage to the U.S. I was wrong. The ship’s manifest shows that 20-year-old Louis Schulz of Fall Creek, Wisconsin, went to Hamburg to bring Otto, 15, to New York. They landed September 9, 1900. Otto’s grandparents in Fall Creek paid Otto’s passage on S.S. Auguste Victoria, and maybe Louis’s, too. They ensured their special grandson’s safe arrival. And this is how Sylvia Plath’s father came to the U.S.A.

Deck plan, steerage class, S.S. Auguste Victoria. Single men bunked in the bow, single women in the stern, and families in between.

Steerage class was cheap and crowded. Passengers packed two or three to a berth at bow and stern [pictured]. Capacity 580 people. Boilers and coal burners and the ship’s three funnels occupied most of the space. There was no privacy. Meals were ladled out at wooden tables. Toilets were on the deck above. 

Yet whoever chose this ship for Otto’s crossing chose well. The Auguste Victoria express steamer could cross the Atlantic in eight or seven days. The vomit and pee might not get too deep. Photos show the first-class passengers on this liner (named for Germany’s empress) enjoying Gilded-Age luxury. Hamburg America Line had it christened Augusta Victoria, then learned the empress spelled her name with an e.

But the company sold the ship away, ordering bigger ones because Zwischendeck (steerage) passengers were profitable. The S.S. Pennsylvania held 2,382 travelers in steerage, ten times the capacity of its first- and second-class cabins, four times the steerage limit of Auguste Victoria. 

Only steerage passengers were processed at Ellis Island or other licensed ports such as New Orleans or Halifax. Theodor Plath, Otto’s father, traveled steerage class Hamburg to New York on the S.S. Batavia March 3-19, 1901.

Otto’s mother Ernestine Plath, with his five siblings, ages 3 to 15, left Hamburg and at Liverpool boarded the packet boat R.M.S. Lake Ontario operated by Canada’s Beaver Line. At sea December 14-27, 1901, they landed at Halifax. Records show them among 671 passengers. [1] On December 29 officials processed the Plaths at St. John, New Brunswick, where their condition was as listed as good.

[1] Canada, Incoming Passenger List 1865-1935, St. John N.B. 1901 December, p. 46.

"Black Velvet Toreador Pants"

Sylvia Plath wrote to her mother Aurelia Plath on December 8, 1957, “I am sitting so cosily in my lovely black velvet toreador pants which I think are my favorite garment, my knee socks under them, and my little leopard slippers on, very warm and informal.” Sylvia’s velvet pants were leisure wear, a new post-war category of clothing a step up from pajamas. They might, if one was daring, be worn before guests and friends.

A most adaptable 1950s women’s leisure style, the toreador pant vanquished 1940s pleated trousers and struck Bermuda shorts dumb. Wearing skirts in public and at home as girls and women had to, Sylvia wore jeans when camping and in the countryside and as a housewife in London. Jeans then were work wear, or for roughing it. The fit was boxy and hems often worn rolled. The fitted toreador pant in finer fabric was for fun and the sass of showing off a figure.

Sylvia in jeans, Wyoming, 1959

On December 21, 1962, after goosey old ladies sent Sylvia money to buy new clothes, Sylvia wrote her mother from London that she bought along with new skirts and tops “black fake-fur toreador pants.” Certainly those were for leisure, the “fur” a bit exotic like the “tiger pants” that in Sylvia’s poem “Lesbos” were garb for a cheap adulteress.

Only five days later, December 26, Sylvia wanted still more toreador pants, this time a set, surely hoping a guest or guests might see and admire her in it. “Dear [Aunt] Dottie sent a $20 bill,” she wrote her mother, “& I shall treat myself to a green velvet set of Oriental toreador pants & top . . .”

Rather than imagine Sylvia’s toreador pants (I know of no photos), I sought photographic examples. 

 

In 1953, when the look was new, what made Marilyn Monroe’s velvet pants “toreador” was a high waist, close fit, flat front, and tapered leg. The sash too is “toreador.”

Monroe with designer William Travilla, 1953

Toreadors cropped at the ankle, called “cigarette pants,” were popular U.S. 1950s and 1960s casual wear, revived every few decades ever since. In this illustration they are worn as originally intended with bullfighters’ espadrilles. (photo from Etsy.com):

Choice of 12 colors, $64 made to order: https://tinyurl.com/msccn456

“Toreador” came to allude to length as well as fit. Below, see a black velvet calf-length “toreador” pant ensemble, not formal but made cocktail-party respectable with pearls, on a 1957 limited-edition Madame Alexander doll. “Evening pants” were then a new concept, limited to early-evening hours.

 

Here is a 1960s fake-fur for anyone inclined to sit on a rock off Cornwall and comb their hair:

Tiger pants plus!

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 an English translation.

 

 

Four Generations of Rebel Weddings

I read somewhere that Sylvia Plath really stuck it to her mother by announcing, the day Aurelia got off the boat, that she and Ted Hughes (who was there) were getting married in three days: as if triumphantly quashing her mother's dream of a tame and crew-cut son-in-law. Didn't agree then, thinking Sylvia might have been too ecstatic to be mean, but I agree now because I found a pattern of defiant little weddings in her family. Four generations:

• Sylvia's "Grammy" and "Grampy," Aurelia Greenwood and Frank Schober, defying her father, got their marriage license July 3, 1905, the day the bride turned 18 and did not need parental permission. They wed as soon as legally possible: Monday, July 10 at Boston's Basilica of Our Lady of Perpetual Help.
  
• Otto Plath in a Nevada courthouse really stuck it to his estranged and hated first wife with a quick-and-dirty divorce-mill divorce and by marrying Aurelia Schober on the spot the same day: January 4, 1932.
  
• Aurelia's daughter Sylvia Plath with Ted Hughes told her mother, arrived in London for a visit on June 13, 1956, that they were marrying June 16. Aurelia puked up her dinner that night. She was the couple's only guest at St. George the Martyr church in London. (Glimpse its inside, in the church's promotional video.)
  
• Fast-forward to 1979, when Sylvia's daughter Frieda Hughes, "now 'engaged,' will be 19 on April 1," Aurelia Plath wrote a penpal, as if "engaged" was her granddaughter's teenage daydream, and maybe forgetting her own mother married at 18. But Frieda at 19 married a farmhand. It was a rebellious marriage and short. Ted moaned in a letter to a friend that his daughter was divorced at 23.

Translation of Sylvia Plath's German Essay

Sylvia Plath wrote this essay for her Smith College course "Deutsche 12," and the typescript carbon, in German, titled "Wie Ich Einmal Kleinen Bruder Neckte" is in the Lilly Library's Plath mss. II, Box 8, folder 19, "Prose-fiction." I would call it nonfiction. Because I have never seen a translation or even a discussion of this essay, here it is in English:

How I Once Teased Little Brother

 

It was in 1938. Autumn had come and the sky was blue and clear, the sun glowed like a diamond, and the little leaves were very colorful. Afternoons I hopped joyfully on my way home. I thought the whole world was a wonder, in my first year of elementary school.

 

My little brother, who was too young to attend elementary school, was very jealous. Every day I bragged that I could read and write, and my father and my mother were very proud of me.

 

My little brother stayed silent. Finally he said, in a clear, loud voice: “I don’t go to school; I do something better! I live every night on the other side of the moon. . .”

 

My father and my mother now listened to the inventive story my little brother told. Now I was the silent and jealous one. He was too smart for me.

Plath enrolled in this intermediate-level German course in her senior year, spring 1955, then dropped it to better prepare for her comprehensive exams (letter to Aurelia Plath, 25 April 1955). Aurelia Plath mentions in her preface to Letters Home young Warren ("little brother") Plath's "Other Side of the Moon" adventure tales, spun when he was two and a half years old.