Next Tuesday: "Diary of an Aurelia Plath Researcher"

Ever wonder what a Plath-minded independent scholar does? I experiment! Next week I will post a part of my recent Plath research diary that I think might interest you. I do this, exposing missteps and honest thoughts, because I am at no risk of losing my job. The post includes new research and, of course, endnotes.

Gender-Swapper Aurelia Plath

Researching Aurelia Plath's life means seeking unconventional sources, and more than once I've hit the jackpot on eBay whence came the above press photo from a dealer unaware that it pictures Sylvia Plath's mother. Then college sophomore Aurelia Schober is kneeling in a scene from the German-language play Das Ganschen von Buchenau ("The Little Goose of Buchenau").

College German Clubs liked to perform Ganschen, which in 1926 -- when Aurelia starred in her college's production -- was a two-act chestnut everybody loved. Harvard performed it in 1893.  Radcliffe's program [pictured] from 1904 includes the following synopsis:

"Fink has been sent by his uncle to woo Agnes, but having been told by Silberling that she is coarse and stupid, "ein Ganschen," he behaves in the rudest manner possible, hoping to have his suit rejected. Agnes's grandmother, disgusted by Fink's boorishness, urges her to accept Silberling, a dandy of the town. In spite of all this, Agnes falls in love with Fink. He soon learns how he has been deceived as to her, but not before her hand has been promised to Silberling, who wishes to marry her for her dowry. Agnes discovers how matters stand, and in order to make Silberling free her, pretends to be not only brainless and awkward, but poor as well. Her ruse succeeds. Silberling's true character is exposed; Agnes bestows her hand on Fink, with the full approval of her grandparents."

Aurelia played von Fink. You didn't need to know German to like what I hope was a broadly acted farce and big fun.

Aurelia was the leading "young man" in three annual Boston University College of Practical Arts and Letters German Club plays, Ganschen the first. In 1927 she was lovesick poet Strubel in Die Ferne Prinzessin ("The Faraway Princess"); then Prince Goldlande in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs in 1928, years before the Disney movie. 

Tall and big-boned ("statuesque") Aurelia also had a resonant voice comparable to Sylvia's BBC-recorded voice; at least two people who know have said so. Publicity photos exist for Ganschen and Die Ferne with Aurelia and her leading lady in much the same pose. Notice how if Aurelia had stood up she would have towered over her Ganschen co-star, Selma Orlov.

Their college's German Club was no slouch about publicity and distributed press releases and professional photos to newspapers -- which published them, including a headshot of Aurelia Schober as herself, headlined "Star in B.U. Play," and a headshot of Aurelia as mustachioed von Fink. The von Fink headshot, identified as "Miss Aurelia Schober," appeared in Florida and Oklahoma small-town newspapers, evidently for the entertainment value cross-dressing could provide. Aurelia never again looked so rakish in any photo I have seen. 

Aurelia wanted to become a writer, but her artistic talent was for acting, or the stage. That was attested by her peers not only at her college but at Brookline High School, where Aurelia performed as a female with other teachers in the modern comedy The Show-Off in 1930. A very sedate cast photo ran in the Boston Globe. Aurelia wrote that an agent in the audience told her she had talent and mentioned Broadway. Like several anecdotes showing Aurelia as a person who had any talent or success, that anecdote was cut from her preface to her selection from daughter Sylvia's letters, Letters Home (1975).

One of my Shakespeare professors made a career of spinning Shakespeare's cross-dressing characters into transgressive gender-benders (a male actor playing a girl playing a guy!). There might be a Ph.D. in studying Sylvia Plath's mother -- a single mother -- whom Aurelia and Sylvia said had the burden of being, in real life, both a woman and a man.

[Notes: Das Ganschen von Buchenau by Wilhelm Friedrich Reise, c. 1830; "Harvard performed it," Crimson, 3 March 1893; "In 1927," "German Club to Present Play at B.U. Tomorrow," Boston Post, 3 February 1927; "Star in B.U. Play" with photo, Boston Transcript, 12 January 1926; "appeared in Florida," this blog 10 September 2020; "Boston Globe," 8 December 1930 p. 22.]

Did Sylvia Plath Look Like Her Mother? You Decide

Only once have I heard "She looks like Aurelia," and the speaker sounded horrified. Never have I read or heard any more about the mother-daughter resemblance.

Aurelia was 19 in the photo above, and Sylvia Plath was 20. Sylvia hated the above image of herself, which she scissored from its context, but 1) it is not as horrid as she said and 2) it was the only comparable photo, showing Sylvia close in age, facing the camera, and unsmiling. In Aurelia's time there was no cultural mandate to smile for every photo.

Both women were four or five inches taller than average, with sturdy frames. They wore each other's clothes.

Looking Austrian and Polish as all getout.

So what do you say, did Sylvia look like her mother? In photos taken later, Sylvia's face a bit lived-in, I think so, except Sylvia had that "lemony" look indicating Eastern European blood: her father's. Worshipful authors tend to cleanse Sylvia of any but her father's German heritage (they don't like to say "Prussian" because they aren't sure what it is) and favor photos of her doing very white-American ritual activities: bridesmaid; tanning; Yellowstone; aboard a luxury liner. Bitter Fame, of course, tried to show Sylvia as unappealing.

Yes, Plath fans play politics with images. I am doing it by showing young Aurelia and young Sylvia side by side. Have you ever seen them this way? Those with stock in Sylvia Plath have created or emphasized distance between them -- as if the apple fell so far from the tree that it was the tree's fault, or the apple created itself. Mother and daughter were close. Both women said they were.

Happy birthday, Aurelia (April 26). On this page you are reunited with your girl.

Another Suicide in Sylvia Plath's Family

Sylvia's maternal grandmother, "Grammy" Greenwood Schober (b. 1887) had six siblings. All left Vienna, Austria, for the United States. Grammy's brothers Joseph Greenwood (b. 1876) and Otto Greenwood (b. 1877) lived in St. Louis, Missouri, and worked as waiters in hotels. In 1951 Otto Greenwood hanged himself. He was 74, married, and 15 years retired from his waiter job. The Missouri death certificate says "Suffocation by hanging in his house Dec. 28 1951 about 12 noon."

Otto Greenwood was Aurelia Plath's uncle and Sylvia Plath's great-uncle. There is no reference to him or his death in any known Plath documents. He had a wife, Angela, and two grown children. Like Aurelia Plath's waiter father Frank Schober, Otto Greenwood belonged to the International Geneva Association for hospitality workers. [1] Greenwood was cremated on Dec. 31, 1951.

The Gregg shorthand character preceding the coded designation "974X" under "How did injury occur?" says "respiration."

[1] St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 30 December 1951, p. 13.

Business Class: Aurelia's Final Years at Boston University

Boston University yearbook, 1967

Aurelia Plath’s teaching job at Boston University’s College of Business Administration began dissolving in 1959 when a new dean dismissed all secretarial-program faculty except for five aging tenured females. Aurelia was 52.

With 13 years left before BU retired her, Aurelia prepared to teach in a different department, taking a night course in German and then courses in teaching remedial reading. [1] She could have quit BU for a medical-secretarial job, her field of expertise, but even in her teens Aurelia wanted a teaching career, ideally in languages and literature. Her daughter Sylvia wrote that Aurelia secretly hated teaching typing and shorthand, yet 1) Aurelia taught more advanced courses than those, and 2) regardless of subject, Aurelia liked educating and advising young people. It was Sylvia who had secretly hated teaching.

 

Shocked in September 1962 by the new College of Business course catalog with none of her courses in it, Aurelia was not sure she was still employed. Sylvia in England was “appalled to hear your department is closing.” Secretarial studies as a college major was everywhere dying on the vine. Yet however marginalized, BU’s secretarial major persisted and so did Aurelia’s job. She was lucky; she needed the money a tenured associate professor could make. During 1962 she bought Sylvia a Bendix and lent her 500 English pounds to pay off Sylvia's house in Devon and paid her own way there and back; and Aurelia then offered a very troubled Sylvia, deserted by her husband, $50 a month.

 

BU’s yearbook for 1967 pictures 232 College of Business Administration graduates, 53 of them female. Of these, ten had secretarial degrees: nine “executive secretarial,” and a lone “medical secretarial.” One would think Aurelia sat around with no students. Yet 22 more of the 53 graduating females were Business Education majors. Taught secretarial and business skills and communications, they were also educated to teach those subjects in high schools or vocational programs where typing and shorthand were flourishing.

 

Business Education graduates thus bypassed secretarial jobs for teaching careers better respected and paid. Essentially they studied to become new Aurelias. Freshmen from Aurelia’s 1963-64 shorthand courses were in 1967 taking her course, limited to Bus Ed seniors, in how to teach shorthand. BU’s 1967 yearbook lists seven College of Business fields of concentration. Secretarial and Business Education were not among them. The end had come: the last secretarial students enrolled in 1968, and Bus Ed moved to the School of Education. [2]

 

Entitled to a leave of absence, Aurelia took it in fall 1970, six months before she turned 65, when BU would retire her. During her leave Aurelia quietly worked at her new job: teaching medical-secretarial at a community college eager to have her teach until she was 70.

[1] ASP to Miriam Baggett, 6 February 1960; Sylvia Plath to ASP, 17 March 1960.

[2] Thus the College of Business Administration (later, School of Business; later, School of Management) was purged of female faculty, as the 1973-74 Bulletin shows, and of a large percentage of its female students. For a time.

On Sylvia's Ugliest Clothes

New York City, June 1953

Sylvia Plath wore some very unflattering things, and besides photos of her in swimsuits, only the wool-coat-and-knee-socks photo taken by Jane Baltzell at Newnham College shows Sylvia wearing her clothes with panache. "Panache" originally meant "ornamental feathers on a helmet." It came to mean "with confidence," that one looks as good as one feels. And Sylvia's readers know Sylvia rarely felt good.

"Chic," meaning elegant or sophisticated, Sylvia never was. The "May Week" clothes Sylvia modeled while at Newnham don't suit her. They don't even fit. The suit and hat worn at Mademoiselle in June 1953 looks "put-together," but without "flair" (meaning "originality"). They are someone else's idea of put-together. Sylvia in her ugliest Mademoiselle photo, with the rose [above], was either about to cry her eyes out or had just finished doing so, The Bell Jar says, and the Peter Pan collar on the dress could not have helped.

Cape Cod, 1957

Eliminated from "ugliest clothes" consideration are things Sylvia did not choose for herself (such as in childhood) or expect to be photographed in (bathrobe, gym suit). Sylvia sported her coolie hat on her Aurelia-paid-for-it seven-week honeymoon on the Cape, where both Sylvia and husband Ted Hughes were miserable.

Smith College, Nov. 1954

Aurelia Plath wore some awful clothes too, but as signifiers her clothes operate differently. (An "Aurelia's Ugliest Clothes" post is forthcoming.) Sylvia's sense of style -- as well as her sense of how life should be lived -- came from glossy magazines, so never would she reach the perfection she longed for, because even name-brand clothing and following Look Books to the letter cannot render anyone stylish. Fashion is not style. Bermuda shorts with wool sweaters were the fashion for 1950s college girls. In no other outfit did Sylvia Plath look so two-dimensional. This was one of the happier times in her life.

Rome, April 1956

Sylvia was taller than average, and former classmates remember that Sylvia often slumped, as in the color photo taken in Rome. Her polka-dotted hairband recalls not Brigitte Bardot but Rosie the Riveter. She wore it in Venice to ride a gondola, clutching her brown handbag and hating her travel-mate Gordon Lameyer every minute of their trip.

When Sylvia and Ted married and Aurelia wanted "wedding" photos to show relatives and friends, for spite the couple sent spiritless studio photos with Sylvia wearing what I fear is the "pink knitted dress" she appropriated from Aurelia and had been married in. 

Emphatically not a wedding dress, in the photos its top appears stretched out and the worse for wear. Sylvia had described Aurelia's item as a "suit," so maybe the photo shows a mere sweater. In that case it means not only "buzz off, Mom" but "send money."

Some photos of Sylvia (1950, 1962) show oversized skirt suits she might have hoped to "grow into," vertically, horizontally, or otherwise. I had mercy and do not show them here. I think that like all new clothes, they signified expectations. When I buy clothes a size up, it means I want more power in my life. 

1956

As much as it's said "Sylvia loved clothes," it is our good fortune that she valued other things more highly.

Oh, Aurelia. Auschwitz? Really?

Sylvia Plath wrote on August 16, 1960, to her mother, Aurelia:

As you were reading your World War II book about Colditz

and Aurelia altered it in Letters Home to:

As you were reading your World War II book about Auschwitz

Colditz Castle was an ultra-high-security Nazi prison holding escapees from other prisons, especially American and British officers. Fifty-six prisoners escaped Colditz. I gather the Colditz book was more heartening reading than a book about Auschwitz might be. [1]

Aurelia's edit I think hoped to belie Sylvia's now-famous October 25, 1962 rebuke, "[Y]ou've always been afraid of reading or seeing the world's hardest things--like Hiroshima, the Inquisition or Belsen," a sentence Aurelia left out of Letters Home. She guessed that we'd believe Sylvia when we read it. But if Sylvia was correct in saying Aurelia "always" feared reading about incarceration and mass murder, why was Aurelia reading any book about World War II?

Most of Aurelia's edits in Letters Home were benign, not worth remarking. But to use Auschwitz not for art's sake, as poet Sylvia tried to, but to clap back at her dead daughter: That's not benign.

[1] Books about Auschwitz available in 1959-60 included Elie Wiesel's Night; Dr. Miklos Nyiszli's Auschwitz: A Doctor's Eyewitness Account, and Primo Levi's Survival in Auschwitz. The two most popular books about Colditz, by Pat Reid, were published as one volume in 1953.

In 1972-74, BBC-TV aired a weekly series about daring escapes from Colditz, inspiring the creation of the Parker Bros. board game [pictured].

Colditz board game, 1970s