Sylvia made a few new friends, such as Ann Bowker and June Smith, and felt that she had conquered the popular camp clique; she was so well liked, she proudly reported, that her friends threw her a going-away party before her departure. In her high school scrapbook she later wrote that this time was “the beginning of my new found self.”92 But to Aurelia she wrote that her new friends fell short—“I inwardly find fault with a lot of them”—and complained that there was no one like Betsy or Ruth to share her confidences. Though she chastised herself for being critical about other campers, she acknowledged that writing down her feelings served a practical purpose: “at least when I write it down in here I can get it off my chest and act alot [sic] nicer that way!”93 She was beginning to realize that her diary could serve as both a sounding board for her writing and a private channel for letting off steam. It may have been the only place she could do so. On Visiting Day, she and the other girls were “very quiet and demure, and resting on our beds and reading etc. to show the visitors that we were really quite ladylike.”94 The girls and their parents seemed to prefer the illusion of passive femininity to the reality of shin-bruising dinghy sails and twenty-mile bike rides.
Sylvia had a strong reaction to the movie Cynthia, which she saw with Aurelia during her first weekend home that July. She made a cryptic yet important remark about Cynthia in her diary: it “solved many of my own problems, and I loved every minute of it.”95 The movie, which starred a fifteen-year-old Elizabeth Taylor, begins as Cynthia’s ambitious, career-minded parents fall in love. The couple wants to leave the United States for Vienna, where Cynthia’s mother aspires to become a concert pianist and her father hopes to work in medicine. But when their daughter is born frail and sickly, they abandon their dreams and move to a small town where Cynthia’s uncle, a doctor, can monitor her health. Cynthia’s mother becomes a housewife while her father takes a demeaning job in a shop. Over the years, Cynthia’s parents shadow her every move and prevent her from experiencing a normal life for fear that any strain will exhaust her. Everyone is unhappy—Cynthia’s parents are bitter about their fate while Cynthia resents their hovering. By the movie’s end, Cynthia finally breaks free of their overprotective ways and finds love through the use of her musical talent.
Sylvia may have begun to feel that her own mother was sheltering her from “real living” in order to shield her from more tragedy. She may also have begun to suspect that Aurelia was, as she would later claim in her journal, living vicariously through her achievements. The movie “solved her problem” by presenting art as a path to autonomy. However, she was grateful that Aurelia took her to an elegant French restaurant in Boston after the movie. “Mother knew just what I wanted, or rather needed…in the quiet, antiquated atmosphere we could almost fancy ourselves to be dining in a foreign courtyard.”96 The deep symbiotic nature of Sylvia’s relationship with her mother is clear in her Cynthia diary entry. She longs to break free of Aurelia’s influence (her “problem”), yet she reveals her dependency (Aurelia knows just what she needs). Later that summer she complained that Aurelia wouldn’t let her see Gone with the Wind in Boston alone—“I guess she thinks that something would crawl out of the sewer and ‘get me’ ”—but then admitted that she was “really glad” Aurelia accompanied her “after all.”97
Aurelia frequently indulged her daughter by taking her out to plays, movies, museums, department stores, and restaurants. But such outings sometimes led to frayed nerves for both. Shortly after seeing Cynthia, while shopping for a new dress in Filene’s, Sylvia lashed out at Aurelia in her “Obbish” code language when her mother refused to buy her an expensive green and black plaid dress. “She was the one who picked it out, but when she saw how I looked in it she wouldn’t let me get it—the horrid stinker! How I hate her! I won’t be happy until I get it. I hate her I hate her she’s a damn cuss’d old thing.” This was the angriest language Sylvia had ever used against her mother, and she immediately apologized. “I really don’t mean all that—really, but I feel better to have gotten it out of my system.”98 Years later Aurelia would explain the outbursts of anger in Plath’s fiction in similar terms at a public lecture in Wellesley: only by writing down her negative feelings could her daughter exorcise them.99
Sylvia admitted that the dress had to be specially washed and wasn’t “much of a bargain”—perhaps the real reason Aurelia changed her mind.100 The incident speaks as much to Plath’s frustration over her family’s financial circumstances as it does to anger toward her mother. Though Sylvia and her grandmother enjoyed Sunday dinner at the Brookline Country Club the following weekend—waited on by Grampy Schober—she was mature enough to realize that the “airy” table, the “crisp white cloth,” views of the “rolling green golf course,” and sumptuous four-course meal were illusions of affluence.101 The Powleys had an Irish maid, but Sylvia’s grandfather was the help.
* * *
—
During Sylvia’s fourteenth summer, men began to take notice of her. She was elated, she wrote, when truck drivers or men in passing cars whistled at her, which now happened frequently. Sometimes these encounters were fraught with danger: twice when she was riding her bicycle along a deserted country road, men driving in the opposite direction turned around to pursue her. In both cases, she pulled up to a house or store and laughed off the incident as the men passed slowly by. On the bus ride back to Wellesley after seeing Cynthia, a boy pulled her hair out the window and called her “Blondie,” a gesture that provoked not anger but excitement from both mother and daughter. Sylvia was happy that a boy had paid attention to her, while Aurelia remarked, “She has bloomed into beauty.”102 So sexist was the society in which they lived that male harassment was met with pride.
Sylvia fell in love, briefly, with the son of a family friend named Redmond, who tried to grope her during outings to the Boston Common. She claimed that she was eager for the attention. She became more confident about her appearance and declared that her hair was her “crowning glory” with its “gleaming blonde and copper lights.”103 She even tried smoking once with her friend Ruth Geisel—only “pretending to inhale”—in order to impress a group of boys, but felt “very cheap and ashamed” afterward. Despite the recurring motifs of violence, madness, and risk taking in her later poetry, Sylvia was not a particularly rebellious teenager, and she judged others for bowing to peer pressure. After the smoking incident, for example, Ruth was forever tainted. “I said that of course it didn’t make any difference, but way deep down inside of course it did!”104
In September 1947, Plath entered Wellesley’s Gamaliel Bradford Senior High School as a sophomore. She decided not to run for student council again because she did not want to open herself up to “malicious attacks” that might threaten her popularity. But the decision was not an easy one for the ambitious teenager; she called the day a “queer” one for her “spirit.” Still, she felt it was the right choice given her stressful schedule the year before: “It was good to sit on the sidelines for once.”105 Within a month, however, she had joined the features staff of the school newspaper, The Bradford.
Sylvia, now almost fifteen, reflected in her scrapbook that she had lost her junior high bid for secretary because it was “popularity that counted” rather than “good marks”: “Perhaps I was doomed always to be on the outside.”106 She may have felt that her ambiguous class position, or perhaps her studious nature, prevented her from climbing to the top of the social ladder. Sylvia’s closest friends from this time do not remember her this way; Betsy spoke of her as “not a loner at all,” as someone full of energy and enthusiasm “with a zest for life.”107 Her self-identification as an “outsider” did not ring true to Perry, either, who said “she didn’t seem to suffer any disapproval because of her grades…everybody seemed to like her.” This was quite a feat since even in honors classes, Perry remembered, students tended not to “shine too much because you had to fit in with the crowd.” He called Sylvia “sta
tuesque” and “very wholesome” in an all-American way. He saw no hint during high school of her future battles with depression: “Just a very normal kid, very brilliant, very popular.”108 Betsy agreed; she described Sylvia as “happy, wholesome, and healthy,” though she remembered Aurelia once told Mrs. Powley that Sylvia wished she were as popular as Betsy.109
Plath’s diary entries from this period do not suggest that she suffered from “strangeness” or “strange behavior,” as at least two biographers have suggested.110 Aurelia, however, noted that Sylvia did not menstruate until she was sixteen; she “worried about being different from other girls” and was “teased about this by her playmates.”111 Yet Sylvia was never at a loss for male and female friends with whom to spend weekends at football games and rec room parties (the “light, breezy” Arden Tapley was again part of her close circle).112 When she was not out riding her bike, she was “roaring” around in cars with boys: “How we got to Arden’s house in one piece, I don’t know, but we did.”113 She looked down on those, like Margot Loungway, who shunned school social events and football games—true loners who did not show enough “school spirit.” She grew more confident of her beauty, calling herself “resplendent” in her burgundy coat and black velvet skirt that November, and “really glamorous” after dressing up for a Christmas dance.114
Sylvia was maturing, but she still relied heavily on Aurelia despite her efforts to become more independent. While Aurelia was in the hospital in September, Sylvia sent her a poem titled “Missing Mother” and told her, “I must have someone understanding to talk to.”115 But not everything could be shared with Aurelia. Sylvia spent afternoons in her girlfriends’ rooms recounting the minutiae of school dances and flirtations, and reading “spicy parts” of “nasty books” out loud.116 Sylvia was somewhat embarrassed by her new “sad” preoccupation, as she called it, and admitted that she became bored reading over past diary entries about boys she no longer liked. Her crushes changed every few weeks, but Tommy Duggin (“handsome, magnificent, drooly, superb, wonderful”), John Hall (a “handsome athlete”), Perry Norton, and John Stenberg shuffled through the top of her list.117 Around this time she started lying to Aurelia about her after-school whereabouts and continued joyriding with Arden and boys who drove too fast. One afternoon they all crashed into a snowbank as the driver played a harmonica. None of it bothered Sylvia, who enjoyed watching the scenery speed by and listening to the boys’ “nasty” comments from the back seat.118
Despite the brief, glancing attentions of several boys in her class, it was Perry Norton, the safe choice, to whom she was most attached. Running into him one night unexpectedly during the spring of 1948, she reflected on the value of their friendship:
He is so pure and wonderful. It just seems unnecessary to talk when we’re together because our thoughts run along the same lines. I feel so natural and perfect when I’m with him….I can be happy as long as Perry is alive, I guess, because I know there’s one person in the world [in] whom I can confide and be sure of confidence in return.119
Perry would continue to play this role as they grew older. He remembered Sylvia’s “proprietary” suspicion when he brought his future wife, Shirley, to meet her when she was home from Smith. Shirley told him later, “I had the feeling that I was being observed and critiqued, like she felt possessive of you and that she wanted to make sure that I was the right person for you.” Shirley passed the test, and, Perry remembered, “They got along fine.”120 Although the two lost touch after Sylvia left for England, he would remain her ideal example of a pure male-female friendship, the first of several “psychic brothers.”
Aurelia said that she had been forthright with her children about sex from the time they were young. When Sylvia was eleven, Aurelia gave her the book Growing Up by Karl De Schweinitz. “She knew the full facts about sexual intercourse by fifteen, when she began to date.” Plath asked her mother many questions about sex and homosexuality, which Aurelia, somewhat embarrassed, did her best to answer. Aurelia explained that, regretfully, a double standard existed when it came to men’s and women’s sexuality, and that Sylvia “should not be shocked on hearing boys of her acquaintance having had experience.” Like most mothers in the 1950s, Aurelia advised her teenage daughter to abstain from sex until marriage.121
As Sylvia began to date other boys, she became increasingly aware of those double standards. On a bus ride that October she gushed over a handsome young stranger who smiled at her as he exited. “Sometimes things like that make me wonder why couldn’t I have just said to him ‘I like you’ and let him know? I know he wanted to meet me, but of course it wouldn’t be ‘proper’ to pick up a ‘chance acquaintance’ like that, no matter how nice it would seem to be—convention or something.”122 That same month she again expressed doubt in the prevailing conventions as she began to feel estranged from all that was familiar to her:
I don’t know what it is, but my thoughts seem to be very hazy. I can usually be comfortable in building up my little life with natural hopes and fears of what goes on about me, but lately I have acquired the discomforting habit of questioning those truths which my life has been based upon—such as religion, human nature, and other laws.123
For the first time in her life—as for many teens—the specter of doubt had begun to infiltrate her thinking. But doubt was not compatible with the person she was expected to become, so she silenced herself. The repression of doubt could sometimes morph into the desire for self-sabotage: “Part of me is urging on ahead to better grades, and another shabby little part (that knows it’s in the wrong) wants to hold me back and make me get only mediocre ‘B’ marks,” she wrote in her diary that fall.124
Mother and daughter celebrated Sylvia’s fifteenth birthday with an afternoon of shopping in Boston, where Sylvia found “THE DRESS” in Chandler’s department store. A circle of salesladies cooed over her as she tried it on. “What a dear child!” one remarked. Sylvia scoffed at the label now that she was fifteen and hoped instead that “some tall dark MAN” might find her attractive in the dress.125 Later that afternoon, she flirted with the elevator boy near the shoe department, and even Aurelia got in on the fun. “Don’t tell me you’re getting signals,” she whispered to her daughter. Sylvia took the elevator down before her mother had time to pay for the shoes, so she could be alone with the boy. It was a bold move, and she was embarrassed when the elevator opened and she rushed out the wrong door. Aurelia found the episode amusing and joked with her daughter about it over chowder later that afternoon.
Sylvia went on her “first real date” that December with John Pollard, a tall and wealthy classmate. They joined another couple at a local dance hall; “what luxury—what class,” she exclaimed. But John tried to grope her on the dance floor, and by the end of the night she found him “nauseating.” In order to avoid “parking,” she told him she needed to be home before midnight. Still, she regarded the date as a minor success, for it allowed her to meet other boys and let “everyone know how fun I am.”126 Being asked out by a boy—any boy—was a mark of popularity. But her lack of power to change or control the situation made her miserable. “There are so few people that I don’t like at all! I would have one of them ask me out! Oh, well! He’ll probably never ask me again; and tell all the boys that I’m prissy and unresponsive—He’ll never realize it’s just with him. I’m probably the dope, but I don’t care—too much.”127 She dramatized her predicament in notes for a short story, “Party Girl,” from this time. At a co-ed party, a teenage girl “suddenly realizes how horrible and nightmarish the whole thing is….Cries upstairs in the bathroom, but her hostess comforts her—telling her that the only thing to do is play the role—flirt with other boys. She’ll get used to it—They all do.”128
In this way, Sylvia’s early dates were another rude encounter with “convention,” a concept she would question in the years ahead. A visit to a Boston jail with a Unitarian minister that December made a deeper
impression than her dates with John. There, she saw petty thieves and “Negro” prostitutes who regarded her disdainfully. She felt a sexual charge as she passed “the handsomest tall boy in a white sweatshirt (jailed for [a] holdup with a car and a gun) looking at me,” and described the arms of a burglar as “admirably tattooed.”129 This was her first real encounter with sin and vice. But fascination quickly turned to fright when the warden “playfully” shut her up in solitary confinement. “It was awful! Pitch black—no windows no benches, just floor, and a slot to put bread and water through. The warden told us proudly that a certain gang was planning to knock out the guards…and stage a break, but each had been locked up in ‘solitary’ and had come out a day later—meek and submissive—promising to be ‘good boys.’ ”130 Plath suspected that the warden had simplified a more disturbing truth—one she would attempt to reveal in her own work after she, too, veered from the prescribed course.
5
The Voice Within
Wellesley, 1947–1948
By the start of her tenth-grade year in 1947, Sylvia had begun to aim a more skeptical eye at jingoistic nationalism. Her interest in politics—particularly the politics of pacifism—was growing. Despite Americans’ deep desire to avoid another world war, pacifism was an unpopular ideology in the late 1940s. In 1948, the Soviets had installed a communist government in Czechoslovakia and begun annexing East Berlin. In 1949 they would detonate their first atomic bomb, and Mao Tse-tung’s communist government would take over China. The Truman Doctrine, which stated that the United States would “support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities,” took effect in 1947. This was the same year Truman issued Executive Order 9835, which sought to protect “the United States against infiltration of disloyal persons into the ranks of its employees.” The Red Hunt was on, and between 1947 and 1952 more than six million people would be investigated.
Red Comet Page 16