"I Love Her Work, I Hate Her Mom"

Looking for the root of the general contempt for Aurelia Plath, I thought some popular article or influential essay, some Ur-takedown, must have seeded it. Whether Aurelia deserves contempt is not the issue here. Contempt is in place before Sylvia's abridged Journals (1982) reveal Sylvia's now-canonical "hate her hate her" entry. It precedes the Letters Home backlash (1975). It precedes "Mrs. Greenwood's" appearance in The Bell Jar (U.S., 1971), "her face a perpetual accusation," the review in the New Yorker  said, although the novel does not say that.

Critical contempt was in place by 1970, when researcher Harriet Rosenstein, planning a Plath biography, interviewed Aurelia in Wellesley. Previous interviewees briefed Rosenstein on the whole tragic Plath story, and Rosenstein's interview notes show frustration at what Aurelia did not say (Aurelia never said "suicide") and judged what lay beneath what Aurelia did say: bitterness, resignation--nothing good. No other interviewee, of about sixty in all (and we are very grateful for these interviews), gets treated as if they failed a test of character. Rosenstein later reminded herself that her book's purpose was not to nail Aurelia to the wall but to explain the Ariel poems.

The Bell Jar in German, 1968

Rosenstein's biography was never published. In her early twenties, a feminist and up on the trends, she had read The Bell Jar in its U.K. edition and learned Esther hated her mother. Rosenstein located a short German review (1968) of the German translation of The Bell Jar. It said, "the mother smiles, suffering and forgiving and being a little too sweet." That scrap of a critique must have been reassuring, since U.K. reviews of The Bell Jar (1963) and subsequent essays, even one titled "An American Girlhood," do not mention a mother. At all! Instead they spotlight Buddy Willard, or Esther Greenwood's frequent references to babies. 

By 2003, Mrs. Greenwood looms very large:

In the novel The Bell Jar, Sylvia depicted her mother as a dominating, soul-destroying woman responsible for a good deal of the psychological pain that eventually led to Sylvia's suicide at the age of 30. [1]

The novel's text does not support such a reading. Re-reading shows Mrs. Greenwood's role in the novel is quite small.

Reviews and essays about Ariel's debut (1965, 1966) focus mostly on suicide and the poem "Daddy." Mom was such a bit player in this father-daughter drama that she is absent from the decade's Anglophone lit-crit except as a nameless factor in Sylvia's Electra complex. Critics didn't even know her name. M.L. Rosenthal in 1967 read The Colossus and wrote about the poem "The Disquieting Muses" as if it were about Sylvia's muses! In 2016 even the best of us firmly believed the same poem is "a fateful family romance" making it "easy to see what is wrong with Aurelia." [2]

My best efforts did not locate any "root." I saw instead faddish pop psychology expanding precisely alongside of Sylvia Plath's rise to fame. Sylvia in the 1950s knew Freudian theory was insubstantial but when troubled she returned to it, as to a faith, and in the 1960s put it in her novel. That fellow poets of the era wrote about their mental health problems and treatments made Sylvia Plath an ideal case study. Armchair analysis boils down to blaming mothers for whatever on the globe is wrong. Plath scholar Jacqueline Rose protested exactly this in her 2018 book Mothers (for example, governments blame mothers for having "too many children" or "not enough"). Yet Rose still manages to blame Aurelia Plath for quoting from Plath's "Three Women" lines other than the ones Rose thinks she should have.

The difference pop psychology has made between the 1960s and today is the difference between early Plath critics' dismay at the poem "Daddy"'s appropriation of the Holocaust and today's readers saying, "Sylvia's husband cheated on her and left her, and that was her personal holocaust. And her mother actually being there only made the breakup worse. Probably even caused it."

[1] Anita Gales, "What's My Motivation, Mom? Oh, It Must Be My Anger at You." New York Times, 7 September 2003, p. AR69.

[2] Pollack,Vivian. Our Emily Dickinsons. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016.

Sylvia Plath's Harvard Summer School Rejection: The Teacher's Reason

Here is how and why author Frank O'Connor rejected Sylvia's application to his summer 1953 short-story writing course. O'Connor had first taught the course in summer 1952. He viewed Richard T. Gill as his top student that summer, and chose Gill as his assistant in summer 1953. I quote from the biography Voices: A Life of Frank O'Connor, by James Matthews (Atheneum, 1983):

"At the time O'Connor arrived [at Harvard], Gill had already narrowed down the applicants, among whom was a young woman named Sylvia Plath. O'Connor read her story and rejected her application at once. Gill was curious about the abrupt finality of this judgement and pressed the matter until O'Connor reminded him of the fellow whose madness had nearly fractured the class the year before. To his mind, Sylvia Plath's story suggested a similarly deranged mind. Later that summer his intuitions were confirmed by her breakdown [which was a local and national news story], in which, ironically, he had played some part." [289] . . . .

"Toward the end of the summer [O'Connor] was talking one evening with Dick and Betty [Gill and his wife] about Sylvia Plath's breakdown. Speculating that O'Connor might be harboring some guilt about the incident, Dick broached the subject of neurosis. O'Connor said that he avoided disturbed people because he could not deal with madness. Art to him was discipline . . . "[290]

Sylvia had submitted as her writing sample a typescript of "Sunday at the Mintons,'" published in Mademoiselle in August 1952.

Richard T. Gill (1927-2010) published some short stories, and became a Harvard professor of economics and an opera singer. See Gill's New York Times obituary here. Gill also gave biographer Matthews a detailed account of O'Connor's summer 1952 class (pp. 281-282). [1] Sylvia had met Richard Gill at a party (Journals, Dec. 16, 1958), and didn't like him.

Harvard's rejection letter, never located in any archives, might have told Sylvia she was "too advanced for the class." But schools and writing workshops even today use "you are too advanced" to deny admission to applicants egotistical enough to believe that. In a previous post I addressed the allegation, published in 2013, that Sylvia's mother Aurelia Plath secretly destroyed or hid Harvard's "acceptance letter" to keep Sylvia home that awful summer. Richard Gill's is a first-hand witness's account that has been ignored.

[1] Gill published a very detailed essay about O'Connor's Harvard Summer School courses in Michael/Frank: Studies on Frank O'Connor, ed. Maurice Sheehy (Knopf, 1969). That essay does not mention Plath.

This Famous Plath Happy-Family Photo

I finally read Otto Plath’s book Bumblebees and Their Ways (1934), by a bee geek who spent the 1920s digging up and micromanaging 225 colonies of bees, observing their eating, breeding, and warring and compiling his discoveries. The first 131 pages are prose; the other 70, taxonomy. Otto got stung enough to put him into bed. His introduction says, “It is my ambition and hope to continue the investigations of the past thirteen summers by devoting at least three months each year to the study of bumblebees in various parts of the world.”

Three months per year? One wonders: with or minus the new wife and baby acquired in 1932? Finishing the manuscript – a dissertation he and Aurelia rewrote for lay readers -- got Otto promoted to full professor of biology. Aurelia Plath later wrote about the book: “Won my husband recognition and lost him money.” But before the book was published they hoped it might make them rich.

So the family celebrated in July 1933, taking the only known photo of Sylvia Plath with both her parents and the only one of Aurelia with Otto. They’re on a hillside in the Arnold Arboretum, the park where Otto spent the Jazz Age observing bees and was still not over it. (His book says observations continued until October 1933.) I wonder if Otto’s dream deferred, for lack of funds or excess of human baggage, ultimately made his life seem not worth living.

On this clearly sunny and hot day in Boston, Aurelia is wearing a fur piece over her shoulder. A wintertime photo shows her with a fur scarf – fur was fashionable – but this more substantial piece resembles a wrap or collar. Puzzling over fur in July I have imagined it was Otto’s thank-you for the year and a half he browbeat Aurelia and yelled while they edited the book that ate their marriage (“My, how he lit into me” when she used too many adjectives, she said). Aurelia called this “too academic an atmosphere” for infant Sylvia and brought in her own parents to supply love and laughter [Letters Home, 13]. The other photo from that day shows Aurelia looking much happier posed with her mother and Sylvia, with no fur unless it’s beneath Aurelia’s hat. I don’t want to read too much into Sylvia’s expressions.

Aurelia Schober, Sylvia Plath, Aurelia Plath

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!