Aurelia’s transition from professional to housewife was bittersweet. She may have thought life with Otto would be like the evenings she had once spent with a bachelor professor at MIT for whom she did German-English translation work during her junior year at Boston University. The two often dined together, and, she wrote, “It was during these meals that I listened, fascinated, to his accounts of travel and colorful adventures, fully realizing that I was in the presence of a true genius in both the arts and sciences. I came away with my notebook filled with reading lists that led me to Greek drama, Russian literature, the works of Herman Hesse, the poems of Rainer Maria Rilke, as well as the writings of great world philosophers.”121 She later confided to Sylvia’s daughter, Frieda, that this man had made her feel “transfigured, beautiful…I felt I spilled joy from every pore.” But in 1927 he left her to work abroad, and she never saw him again. Crushed, she felt her world diminish and her possibilities narrow. She told Frieda, “I don’t want to recall the hurt that remained in lessening degrees until your mother was born.”122 Otto courted her while she was nursing her broken heart.
Marriage, Aurelia soon learned, was not the endless dinner party she had once imagined. Indeed, Otto’s earlier life as an immigrant bachelor was poor preparation for the negotiations and compromises of married life. Aurelia explained:
Despite the fact that he was only sixteen when he arrived in the United States, the Germanic theory that the man should be der Herr des Hauses (head of the house) persisted, contrary to Otto’s earlier claims that the then modern aim of “fifty-fifty” appealed to him….The age difference between us (twenty-one years), Otto’s superior education, his long years of living in college dormitories or rooming by himself, our former student-teacher relationship, all made this sudden change to home and family difficult for him, and led to an attitude of “rightful” dominance on his part….At the end of my first year of marriage, I realized that if I wanted a peaceful home—and I did—I would simply have to become more submissive, although it was not in my nature to do so.123
After “Daddy,” Aurelia challenged the public perception of Otto Plath as a tyrannical husband. Yet she chafed under his patriarchal assumptions and could not quite bring herself to absolve him. She resented the fact that he commandeered the dining room table as his desk for a year while he was writing “Insect Societies,” not allowing anyone to move a single book or paper. On the rare evenings when he went out to teach an evening class at Harvard, Aurelia invited friends over for dinner. She drew a diagram of his papers’ arrangement and carefully placed everything back in its original position before he returned.124 Aurelia later told Dr. Beuscher she was “not happily married,” especially as Otto grew more ill and “emotionally unbalanced.”125 A Boston University colleague who met Aurelia a few times recalled a frostiness between husband and wife, though it was quite clear Otto “had deep affection for his little daughter.”126
Like her mother, Sylvia, as wife to a “genius” husband, masked what was smoldering inside with perfect deportment. She would embrace the role of housewife to her friends and correspondents, and then seethe in her journal about the injustices of that role. Her mother had paid the high price of personal autonomy to keep a “peaceful” household; even after Otto’s death, she remained faithful, promising Sylvia she would never marry again. But Sylvia had no wish to become a martyr. To her, alone with her children in those dark winter days of 1963, it seemed that for all her achievements she had simply become her mother.127 Plath’s 1948 poem “Recognition” nearly predicts this circular domestic fate. The speaker, trying to outrun her memories, moves into a new home—only to realize it is all too “familiar”:
And when I realized that the paint
Had camouflaged an ancient door,
And that beneath the smooth shellac
There lay a trampled hardwood floor,
I looked about through angry tears.
For that remodeled house was all
That I could ever own. And while
I gazed around the shadowed hall
My mouth curved in a bitter smile:
I knew I had lived there before.128
2
Do Not Mourn
Winthrop, 1932–1940
Nineteen thirty-two was hardly an auspicious year for a new baby. America was three years into the Great Depression, and a mood of pessimism had settled over the country. National unemployment had skyrocketed to an unprecedented 25 percent. Waves of migrants began their hopeless journeys from farm to city, where they found not jobs but squalid shantytowns. Hungry citizens sold apples from urban sidewalks and mobs began to loot supermarkets. That summer, J. P. Morgan decided to keep his yacht, the Corsair, in dry dock on the grounds that it was “wiser and kinder not to flaunt such luxuriant amusement.”1 The Ku Klux Klan enjoyed a resurgence, and ranchers from Oklahoma threatened revolution.2 President Hoover still insisted that Americans would pull themselves up by their bootstraps as they always had. Yet the nation was teetering on the brink of collapse. Apocalyptic scenes became common. One woman knew that everything had changed in 1931 the day she saw fifty men, all “American citizens,” fighting “like animals” for garbage scraps behind a restaurant.3 The New Deal and its modest measures of relief were still years away, but the need was desperate. An unemployed man expressed the situation succinctly when he wrote to the president, “Can you not find a quicker way of Executing us than to starve us to death.”4
Otto and Aurelia’s marriage was a gesture of optimism in the face of national calamity, but there were practical reasons to wed. Otto, at forty-seven, had a secure teaching position at a time when school enrollments were contracting and departments downsizing. Given the unemployment rate, Aurelia would have considered him a very eligible bachelor. And both, perhaps, found solace in their mutual Germanic heritage at a time when anti-German sentiment was on the rise. They knew that the American Dream could suddenly collapse around them as it had for so many others.
They conceived within a month of their wedding day on January 4, 1932. The couple had a progressive approach to child-rearing, and read works by Friedrich Fröbel and Maria Montessori. Otto had unpleasant recollections of his own mother’s rigid parenting and, Aurelia claimed, “believed in the natural unfolding of an infant’s development.”5 Both thought their baby should be fed on demand and picked up when crying—methods then frowned upon by pediatricians, who expected new mothers to follow strict feeding schedules. But Aurelia was reluctant to expose herself as a nonconformist: “I would never confess to it in front of my contemporaries.”6
Sylvia Plath was born on October 27, three weeks early, at 2:10 p.m. at Robinson Memorial Hospital in Boston’s South End. She weighed eight pounds, eleven ounces and was twenty-two inches long. The birth of a healthy baby girl, announced on a prim, pink-ribbon-trimmed card, brought Otto and Aurelia closer to their idyllic vision of bourgeois family life.7 Aurelia later said she and Otto chose the name Sylvia for its connotations of “the herb salvia and the poetic adjective sylvan.”8 The name married Otto and Aurelia’s interests—botany and poetry—and bestowed a beneficent blessing on their daughter.9
They brought their baby home to the ground-floor apartment at 24 Prince Street in Jamaica Plain, a large arts-and-crafts-style house with an elegant front porch and an upstairs balcony. The new house was a step up from the shabby student dwellings of Otto’s past. Though the yard was tiny, their proximity to Harvard’s Arnold Arboretum and Jamaica Pond allowed the small family to spend much of their time outdoors in the warmer months. A photograph shows a happy outing at the arboretum in July 1933. The family poses in relaxed contentment: Aurelia, in pearls and a fur stole, holds her blond infant while Otto, shirtsleeves rolled up, reclines in the grass next to his daughter. Another early photograph of Sylvia, in March 1933, at five months old, shows her sitting happily on Aurelia’s lap. Mother holds daughter tenderly and smiles while
Sylvia, dressed in a matching crocheted dress and cap, returns her gaze. Yet another photograph shows Sylvia at nine months smiling brightly in the August sun. (In the margin, Aurelia wrote, “Sylvia is always merry!”) Aurelia would later become friendly with another young mother in the neighborhood named Helen Hennessy, whose infant daughter, the future Helen Hennessy Vendler, would eventually become the most influential poetry critic in America. As a toddler, Sylvia used to “dance around” the two mothers as they walked. Little did she know the baby in the carriage would become a renowned Harvard professor who would one day champion her poetry.10
Aurelia loved her daughter, but she resented giving up a professional career in teaching and education administration, itself a downsized ambition from her true goal of writing fiction. She was caught between two conflicting sets of ambitions—career and motherhood—which in 1932 were still poles apart. She had thought combining both might be possible when she married Otto, who had claimed to believe in equal parenting. Yet his progressive attitude dissolved when their first child was born. Aurelia, a college valedictorian with a master’s degree, had little choice but to sacrifice her own intellectual aspirations for the sake of domestic harmony. She poured her intelligence and ambition into the only outlet she could: her child.
At fifteen, Sylvia told Aurelia, “ ‘When I am a mother I want to bring up my children just as you have us.’ ”11 Aurelia later wrote that this was the remark she “treasured most” from her daughter. She was determined that Sylvia would have the scholarly and literary opportunities she did not; yet she wanted Sylvia, the daughter and granddaughter of Germanic immigrants on the eve of another war with Germany, to be a good American. This meant abiding by the sexist mores of the time and behaving like a lady. Aurelia’s own mother reaffirmed such values when, on the eve of Sylvia’s departure for Cambridge University in 1955, she said, “I don’t mind her understanding artists; I don’t mind her working like an artist, just so long as she doesn’t live like one!”12 Yet in her daughter, Aurelia saw a reflection of her own artistic ambition. Sylvia understood, and even sympathized. Later in life she encouraged Aurelia to write stories for women’s magazines, and offered to be her editor. But Sylvia, her mother’s double in so many ways, would long to separate herself from this hovering shadow of dreams deferred.
Aurelia sensed this desire for separation, and was sometimes embittered by it. Her memory of Sylvia’s disdain for her wardrobe suggests a charged mother-daughter dynamic:
In the eyes of my Smith girl my hair was not properly “styled”; my suits (bought at cooperative sales, some good Davidow suits, but, of course, not new) were too conservative, and my inevitable white blouses “did nothing for me.” I had expected it; I was amused, and refrained from uttering my thought, “I dress this way the better to provide for you, my dear.”13
Aurelia also remembered that when she revealed to her daughter that she had been asked to model in the spring of 1928 for the Boston Home Beautiful Exposition, Sylvia responded, “Standards must have been very different in your day.”14
When Aurelia was offered a position as dean of women at Northeastern University in 1947, Sylvia, age fifteen, yelled, “For your self-agrandizement [sic] you would make us complete orphans!” Aurelia turned down the position. “Later she reproached me for my negative decision, saying, ‘You didn’t have the guts to make the break!’ An element of truth was there, I suppose, or I wouldn’t have remembered it verbatim.”15 These stories, in the draft of Aurelia’s memoir, were eventually omitted from the published version. The public would not be privy to mother-daughter score settling. The roots of the painful, competitive relationship that would propel and repel Sylvia all her life might be traced back to the day Aurelia turned her back on her professional ambitions and embraced, instead, her newborn daughter.
* * *
AURELIA RECORDED every detail of her infant’s progress in her baby book.16 This remarkable square pink album provides a glimpse of her parenting style, which, depending on one’s perspective, was either hands-on or hovering. Aurelia was a playful and engaged mother in an era when well-behaved children were still generally seen and not heard. But her precise recordings betray an anxiety about whether her daughter’s growth and development conformed to normal patterns. A typical entry regarding Sylvia’s teething activity in 1933, for example, reads: “July 10, upper left central incisor—small appetite; Oct. 5, upper left lateral incisor (restless at night); Dec. 11—upper right molar (No lower left teeth to match right side!).” Aurelia was concerned throughout Sylvia’s infancy that she was a “small eater.” From June 1933 on, she wrote down her daughter’s weekly weight. Her anxieties help explain Sylvia’s detailed reports about food in her letters from summer camps, which are filled with reassurances that she is gaining weight.
Sylvia’s baby gifts—silver spoons, silk bonnets, a gold locket—suggest a solidly middle-class social circle comprising university families. None of Otto’s relatives appears to have sent a gift; there was little communication between the two families apart from Aurelia’s correspondence with Otto’s sister, Frieda Plath Heinrichs, who lived in California. Sylvia would always remain intensely curious, in the manner of an orphan, about her lost Plath relatives. She would eventually name her daughter after her paternal aunt Frieda, whom she barely knew. Otto himself did not feature in Aurelia’s description of Sylvia’s first Christmas. She rarely mentions him at all in the baby book apart from a short note about Christmas 1933, when he gave Sylvia her favorite gift—a stuffed Pekinese dog that she “loved to death.”17
Sylvia was verbally precocious and spoke her first words at eight months. Aurelia’s list of her speech milestones provide an intimate glimpse of family life in the Plath and Schober homes during the early 1930s:
Eight months: Mama, dad, bye-bye, tick-tick (“bye bye” was spoken consciously, but the other words were accidents)
Sept. 1 Ragman passed calling “Rags” and Sylvia called “Ags!”
Oct. 1 “Ow gaw” (all gone!—means bottle is empty)
Oct. 20 “Birdie!”
Nov. 1 “I tee” (I see!) and “haw” (for hot), ba for bath and baw for ball
Dec. 19 Daddy! (said specially when someone shakes the furnace!) Sounds are made for the dog, the duck, the cow, horse, wind, sheep; she says “car” whenever she hears an auto pass. She has been making replies to such queries as: What does the sheep say? “Ba,” etc. for 2 months. She imitates grandpa’s puffing on his pipe to the query “What does grandpa do?”18
When Aurelia told Sylvia they were going to the arboretum, she would jump up and down, “squealing with glee. It’s a treat to take her out now, for she notices everything: birds, squirrels, chipmunks, horses, automobiles—and, best of all to her little mind, other babies. She wants to touch other babies, and stretches out her arms to them, shouting with excitement.” Even as a toddler, Sylvia was deeply stirred by her senses. “She gets excited about plants and flowers and wants to smell them immediately,” Aurelia wrote in February 1934. From about mid-May of 1933, Aurelia gave Sylvia sunbaths for an hour each morning and afternoon, which she felt was important for her baby’s health. Sunbathing would become Sylvia’s lifelong habit.
On September 14, 1933, Aurelia’s baby girl took her first steps, into Otto’s arms. By December she was walking unaided. Her first birthday was a small but “bright and festive” affair. Aurelia expressed disbelief that her infant was already a year old: “It is hard to imagine that my baby is emerging from her state of precious babyhood! She looks so grown-up in the knitted suit and beret which I recently bought her!…Well her daddy and I agree that the whole world doesn’t hold another one-year old so wonderful—and so sweet!—at least it doesn’t for us!” When it came time to blow out the candle on the sponge cake Grammy Schober had made, Aurelia wrote, “We wanted Sylvia to ‘poof’ out her candle but she eagerly reached toward the flame, becoming vocally indignant when
not allowed to grasp it!”
Aurelia soon taught Sylvia to hold out her hand in greeting and say, “How do you do?” But at fifteen months, Sylvia was testing her limits: “If Sylvia wants attention, she announces, ‘ga-ga’ (which means ‘nasty’ and ‘forbidden’). She may then go determinedly to the fireplace and lick the bricks with her tongue or pop some microscopic speck of thread or dust into her mouth. It is done in good humor, and the rush for the ‘ga-ga’ on the part of either parent is met by giggles from Sylvia. Her end is then achieved!”
Sylvia’s baby book suggests that Aurelia was a woman who cared about precision and control even as she extolled the virtues of freedom and play. Although she was sometimes critical of the status quo, she rarely veered from it; when she did, she kept her small rebellions to herself. Conformist values kept her moored in a world veering wildly off course, where families lost their homes and fortunes every day. The Plaths never went without food, clothing, or shelter during the Depression. Not all immigrant families were so lucky.
* * *
DURING THE FIRST YEAR of Sylvia’s life, Aurelia collaborated with Otto on “Insect Societies” while her parents helped mind the new baby. Aurelia’s parents lived with the young family in Jamaica Plain during the summers, when they rented out their Winthrop house for extra money. The living quarters were tight, but Aurelia appreciated her parents’ support, writing that their “humor, love, and laughter” lightened “what would otherwise have been too academic an atmosphere.”19 During this period Frank Schober would often take his granddaughter for walks to the arboretum while Aurelia and Otto worked. Over time, an especially tight bond formed between Sylvia and her grandfather. He swam with her in the summer and amused her with games indoors. Plath remembered, in her 1963 Winthrop memoir “Ocean 1212-W,” how one day, after a spanking, “grandfather extracted me from the domestic furies for a long beachcoming [sic] stroll over mountains of rattling and cranking purple stones.” When Aurelia was in the hospital giving birth to Warren, her grandfather’s “lyrical whistle beckoned me to adventure and forgetting.” Sylvia’s uncle Frank also distracted the children by taking them out on the water to fish for mackerel and cod in his new sailboat, which he built himself. He rigged up a beach swing that propelled them into the water at high tide. In the evenings the family feasted on Grammy Schober’s homemade seafood chowder, steamers, and lobster gathered from the Schobers’ own lobster pots. Sylvia always shielded her eyes when her grandmother threw the live lobsters into the boiling pot: “I felt the awful scald of the water too keenly on my skin.”20
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