The fairy’s act recalls Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, which the young Sylvia might have known. She was discovering her talent, learning that her ability to create art gave her imaginative access to other worlds.
In a 1943 letter to Aurelia, Sylvia described a book she had recently read, A Fairy to Stay (1929), by Margaret Beatrice Lodge. The book is about a motherless young girl raised by her two strict aunts while her father is away in East Africa. In Plath’s synopsis, she calls it “the nicest book I have ever read” and displays an emerging fascination with the themes of exile, revenge, rebellion, purity, and the supernatural. Her description is worth quoting, as it is the earliest surviving example of Plath’s literary criticism. She describes the plot of a girl who gets into trouble when her strict aunts find her reading a book about fairies. She cuts off her braids in protest:
When the aunts came in her room and found out they were horrified and told her to look in the mirror. Her hair was all straight and long on one side and short on the other for punishment she would have to go like that for one week. Sending her out in the garden they decided that disipline [sic] was the best thing they could do. Out side the little girl rubbed her eyes and looked about what did she see but a fairy! The fairy asked her what was the matter, Pamela (for that was her name) poured out her story. The fairy told her to shut her eyes and she would dry clean her, she touched Pamelas [sic] hair, it began to curl, she touched her dirty tear-stained face it grew pink and clean she touched her wrinkled dress, it grew clean and white….The whole book is about the fairy and the little girl trying (comicly [sic]) to disipline [sic] the aunts.19
The young heroine of A Fairy to Stay, like Sylvia, has lost a parent and is being raised by extended family members. Sylvia suggests that the book is a comic tale, yet her summary focuses on Pamela’s loneliness, her rebellious reading, and her shocking decision to chop off her hair in an effort to subvert her aunts’ authority. Embedded within this seemingly innocent children’s story is a blueprint for feminist rebellion that resonated with Plath.
Plath’s 1943 poem “Angelic Girls,” written when she was ten or eleven, also uses the image of disheveled hair to emphasize girls’ rebellious nature:
O we’re two little girls
We never comb our tangled curls,
We disobey our mothers
And tease our younger brothers,
O we’re angelic little girls.20
This is perhaps the earliest poetic example of Plath’s “other” voice: the seething, private, caustic voice—so at odds with idealized feminine decorousness—that would eventually draw millions of readers to The Bell Jar and the Ariel poems. In her real life, however, Sylvia was a dutiful and diligent daughter. In a January 1943 letter to Aurelia, written during one of her hospital stays, Sylvia reported that she had been “very good” with “no mishaps”: “In music I did the fingering just like you told me to. And I kept saying to myself, ‘This is what mother would want me to do’ so I got along very well.”21
In July 1943, Aurelia was again in the hospital because of another gastric hemorrhage. Though Sylvia was just ten, her mother felt she was ready for sleep-away camp, which would give Grammy Schober a break from full-time child care and distract Sylvia from her mother’s illness. Before Sylvia left for camp, she stayed with her aunt Dot and uncle Joe in nearby Weston for a few days. While there, she found thirty cents and bought herself paper doll books of Rita Hayworth and Hedy Lamarr, though she vowed to spend the rest “on a defense stamp.”22 She then traveled by train to Moultonville, New Hampshire, where she began the last leg to Camp Weetamoe on Lake Ossipee.
Camp Weetamoe was founded in 1934 as a Girl Scout camp that catered to middle- and upper-class girls from Cambridge and Boston.23 It operated in typical Girl Scout fashion—there were bugle calls in the morning, swimming, arts and crafts, hayrides, blueberry picking, hikes, and campfires after dinner. Sylvia was put into the “Oehda” unit, and was pleased to have a view of both Lake Ossipee and the mountains from her tent. Though she told her mother she was having fun, she did not quite understand what was happening: “Am I going to camp for a month?” she wrote home.24
In her letters, she stressed her happiness, and her appetite. “For breakfast I had 1 orange, a bowl of rice krispies, a cup of milk, and a cup of cocoa….For lunch I had two helpings of corn, ham and beans a glass of water and the biggest helping of raspberry jello….For supper I had 2 pieces of bread with chopped beef, salad, prunes and milk.”25 Sylvia’s long, descriptive menus, sent from summer camp from 1943 through 1946, suggest that she was trying hard to gain weight and to reassure an anxious mother in the midst of wartime rationing. (Betsy Powley Wallingford said Sylvia simply had an enormous appetite and “a fabulous metabolism.”)26 After the hardships of the 1930s and 1940s, curves were in. To look thin was to look like one of the “refugees” in Europe Sylvia sometimes spoke of in her diary; she longed to “fill out.” Five months into her seventh-grade year, for example, she made herself an apron at school with a wide girth and long belt. She showed it to her teacher, who said, “My dear! You’ll never grow that fat.” Sylvia drew a plump picture of herself on the page with the caption “How I’d love to be able to wear it.”27
Most of the girls at Camp Weetamoe came from more affluent families. Sylvia, whose grandfather waited tables at a country club, would have felt her own class difference keenly. In one postcard, she reported that the girls in her tent were, despite their relative privilege, “not well brought up….The new girls say ‘ain’t’ ‘youse’ kids, ‘guys’ ‘horsebackin.’ It just hurts my ears. I long for my familys [sic] soft, sweet talk.”28 Her snobbish remarks about her tentmates may have been her way of preempting whispers about her own background. She felt that Camp Weetamoe had matured her, as she told her mother: “When I come home you will see a great difference in my caracter [sic].”29
Sylvia began her sixth-grade year in September 1943. Her homeroom teacher, Miss Norris, recognized her intelligence early on; when Sylvia did not raise her hand to answer a difficult question, Miss Norris would gently chide her, for she knew she was “smart.”30 She read the Odyssey to the class and introduced them to the opera Aida. (This was not the only opera Sylvia heard that year: she received an introduction to Wagner when her mother gave her Der Ring des Nibelungen as an early birthday gift, and she also spent time listening to Carmen.)31 When Sylvia asked for more work, her teacher cheerfully obliged: “After arithmetic I went up to Miss Norris and said, ‘I’m going to make you give me a book report right this minute.’ So she did.”32
That Christmas, Sylvia’s uncle Frank, who was in the Army, came all the way from Spokane, Washington, with his wife Louise and his Army buddy Gibby Wyer. Sylvia found Wyer’s stories fascinating and wrote about them in her only diary entry from the week after Christmas 1943:
He was in the Medical Corp in Algeria and has traveled through Egypt, he was in Tripoli when it fell and was in the campaign to chase Rommel out of Africa. He was with Montgomery’s 8th army. They went from El-Almein to Tunis. He also brought many things that he found there such as a German bayonet, a German pistol, a German camera, a German belt, a German helmet, some German binoculars.33
Sylvia had an uncle in the forces and relatives in Germany and Poland. For her, the war was not a distant distraction. Sometimes, it landed on her doorstep.
Sylvia began 1944 with a “special resolution to be nice to everyone and make people think I am not stuck up.”34 Yet there is only one diary entry that year that hints at ostracization. In October 1944 at Sunday school, she reported, “The girls were an ordeal they were so rude but mother took care of them and put them in their place. After she went home I rode around on my bike and gave my knee a hard bang. I have had a hard day—tired.”35 In general, though, Sylvia’s diary does not give the impression of someone who suffered, as her biographer Anne Stevenson has written, from “social isolation” as a girl.
36 Quite the opposite: in the mid-1940s she had a solid set of girlfriends—Betsy Powley, Marcia Egan, Prissy Steele, and Barbara McKay—with whom she spent almost every afternoon.
Sylvia also became close to Perry Norton, who lived in nearby Wellesley Hills and has said that he and Sylvia “were like siblings without attendant rivalry.”37 He and his brother Dick would play formative roles in Sylvia’s life and art. There were three Norton boys in all: Perry, who was Sylvia’s age; Dick, two years older; and David, born in 1944.38 Sylvia attended several dances with Perry in junior high and high school, but she nearly married Dick, who inspired the character of Buddy Willard in The Bell Jar. Their mother, Mildred, had been a student in Otto’s German class before she graduated with a BA from Boston University in 1925. In 1927 she married William Norton, who completed a PhD in history at Yale while she finished her MA in English at Radcliffe. When William joined Boston University’s history department, Mildred and Aurelia got to know each other through the Faculty Wives’ Club; William recalled meeting Sylvia when she was two or three at a faculty Christmas party. The two families shared similar values centered on intellectual achievement and service to others rather than material wealth.39 William Norton called his an “incorrigibly ‘egghead’ and ‘square’ family” and said that his three boys were raised to “study hard and earn their way through college by scholarships and term-time and summer jobs, then go after some kind of graduate or professional degree.”40 (All three Norton boys obliged—Perry and Dick received MDs and David a PhD.) Both families attended the Unitarian church in Wellesley Hills, where Aurelia and William taught Sunday school. After Otto’s death, when Aurelia decided to relocate to Wellesley, it was partly because the Nortons lived there; she could depend on Mildred Norton—like her, an educated woman with a master’s degree in English—for support and friendship.
Mildred, who did not believe women should work outside the home, took charge of the domestic front.41 She could be more confrontational than her husband, who was quiet and reserved.42 Plath ridiculed Mrs. Norton’s conservatism in The Bell Jar, but in the 1940s she enjoyed spending time with her after school as she waited for Perry, who later speculated that Sylvia may have been attracted to the stability of his home because there was a mother present, which was not the case at 26 Elmwood Road.43 Over time, the Nortons and the Plaths grew so close that the children began to think of themselves as “cousins,” and they addressed each other’s mothers as “aunt.” Though Mildred Norton encouraged Sylvia to date Perry, she instead fell in love with Dick, a move that would have great consequences both for her art and for the Norton family.44
Perry, who eventually became a doctor and a practicing Quaker, was bright and intellectually curious. He remembered the first time he met Sylvia at her home in Wellesley, where they played a board game together and she complimented him on his winning strategy. “Right off the bat it cemented a mutual fondness,” he said. Sylvia attended dancing lessons with him and often stopped by his house after school to talk. “I was a little bit overawed by her,” he remembered, “so I didn’t fancy ever being somebody who would be her suitor.” He feigned “disgust” when others played kissing games at parties they attended, and Sylvia admired his haughty remove.45 In February 1946 he took her to a dance at the Unitarian church, where they deflected emotion with talk of “comets and planets.”46
Betsy Powley was Sylvia’s closest friend during most of her adolescence. “She lived half the time at my house and I lived half the time at her house,” said Betsy. “We built tree huts in the woods and wrote poetry together.”47 Betsy, who lived just a short walk from Elmwood Road, came from a more affluent family; her father worked for an oil company, and they vacationed at a country farmhouse in East Colrain, Massachusetts, near the Vermont border. But Sylvia never felt judged by the Powleys. Her extraordinary intelligence might have made her a target of envious teasing in the schoolyard, but her friendship with Betsy was free from competition; together they enjoyed all the regular adolescent rites—movies, snowball fights, Girl Scout camp, dances, Spin the Bottle, Truth or Dare. Sylvia was happiest with Betsy on winter days when they spent hours making snow forts and sledding. “Coasting” was pure exhilaration: “The hill rose shining, white and vacant. We flew down and the stinging wind brought tears to our eyes. It was glorious!!”48 She taught herself to ski at Betsy’s farm, where she often spent her February vacations. Skiing, with its possibilities of flight and fall, became an important metaphor in The Bell Jar, in which Esther feels “saintly and thin and essential as the blade of a knife” while she barrels down a ski slope before breaking her leg.49 Betsy helped make this feeling of transcendence possible, for she was connected to Sylvia’s love of nature, physical activity, humor, and mischief.
Betsy also encouraged Sylvia to indulge her innate but suppressed cynicism. (As Sylvia wrote one day after Girl Scouts, “I tried so hard to be serene, quiet, etc but, as usual, didn’t succeed.”)50 The two shared “convulsions of laughter” in church as they quietly mocked their pastor, and “laughed silently” behind their art teacher’s back.51 Sylvia was already developing the skepticism of institutional authority that later marked her work; she and Betsy read poems to each other “overexpressively and overgegesturingly” [sic] and decided that their favorite word was “fuzzbuttons.”52 (Nearly twenty years later, Plath described falling into fits of laughter with a female friend after reading her poem “Daddy” aloud.)
Sylvia thrived in one-on-one relationships with girls who appreciated, as her friend Pat O’Neil Pratson later put it, her “tremendous hunger and love for life” and her desire “to expand in everything.”53 Later, at Smith, Plath’s intense studying habits and competitive nature made it harder for her to cultivate close friendships, and she often put up a protective front. Her sense of inhabiting two selves—one interior, one exterior—would deepen there. Her old Wellesley friend Frank Irish recalled feeling disoriented on a date with Sylvia while she was at Smith: “she had become an urbane sophisticate that she was not when she was in high school.”54 Sylvia needed female confidantes like Betsy and Ruth who could bring her out of herself and, at the same time, allow her to be herself, insecurities and all. Without such a connection, her mental health would suffer. As she wrote to a Smith friend who transferred to a new college in January 1951, “I need so to love a person—be it girl or boy, friend or enemy. And without being able to, I sort of dry up.”55
Sylvia would at times feel pressure to neutralize her passionate personality to avoid alienating potential friends and dates. At Smith she was ridiculed for studying on Saturday nights, while at Cambridge she suspected that other girls gossiped about her academic intensity. Years later, in her radio play Three Women, she wrote in the voice of a mother speaking to her newborn: “I do not will him to be exceptional. / It is the exception that interests the devil.” Plath’s spectacular intelligence may have felt like a burden at times, especially for a young woman who wanted to fit in during an age that prized conformity. As America moved into the McCarthy era, the words “artist” and “communist” were not infrequently linked. By the mid-fifties, when Sylvia graduated from Smith, there was even less tolerance for subversive artistic expression—especially from women. The opening lines of The Bell Jar, which conjure up the specter of the Rosenbergs’ electrocution during the summer of 1953, leave little doubt as to Plath’s view of this suffocating time. Her search for artistic freedom would finally take her away from America altogether, to England, where she found a husband who was deeply contemptuous of American materialism and “normality.”
* * *
SYLVIA’S FORMULAIC DIARY ENTRIES for 1944, her sixth-grade year, bear almost no resemblance to the vivid, literary entries of her 1950s journals. She thrived on her routines and was unhappy when she was sick and had to stay home from school.56 (On her first day back at school after the Christmas holiday she admitted, “I really like it more than vacation sometimes.”)57 She often recounted her after-s
chool activities, usually Girl Scouts or outdoor play with her friends: “In the afternoon I went over to Marcia’s with Betsy to cut out cartoons for our red cross badge in Scouts.”58
“Playing Army” was a frequent pastime, as snowballs could serve as grenades. When it was too cold to play outside, she read in bed or played cards and dolls with her girlfriends. In the warmer weather she rode her bike, walked through the woods, and swam at Morses Pond and Winthrop beaches. There were large family dinners, shopping trips with her mother and aunts, outings to the Arnold Arboretum, the Museum of Natural History, and the movies. But what dominates Sylvia’s 1944 diary is her record of academic achievement. A student at Boston University’s School of Education administered the Stanford-Binet IQ test to students at Plath’s school during her sixth-grade year and remembered that Sylvia received a score of “about 160,” which she classified as “genius” range.59
Sylvia enjoyed taking the test, and she probably learned of her high IQ. She was eager to earn the small black-and-white certificates awarded by the Massachusetts Department of Education for reading five books at a time; her goal was to earn the coveted Honor Certificate given only to those who had read twenty-four books in a year—a goal she achieved easily.60 She read, on average, three books a week, most of them from the Wellesley Public Library. Reading for pleasure in her bedroom, on her porch, or up in the apple tree was a form of meditation akin to her languorous afternoons in the sun. In her 1944 poem “Enchantment,” written in the language of biblical redemption, books provide a gateway to a rarefied life:
No wall will bar this land of joy;
No sign will keep the poor away.
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