An amateur Freudian could pick out the relevant details: Sylvia’s desire for another man besides Dick; her guilt at choosing the more dashing but dangerous date; and the silent reproach from Dick and her mother, who stand together. “My, but there is a moral to that nightmare, huh!” she wrote to Marcia.38 Sylvia vowed to stop flirting with Ivy League lifeguards at Swampscott beach parties. She did not want to contemplate the dream’s real “moral”: that perhaps she did not love Dick.
He came to see her in late August. They biked to Marblehead, but it rained, and she felt physically distressed by her pent-up desire after he left. She needed some “vicious activity” to quiet her nerves and decided to go swimming. It was night, but she did not care. The water was warm from the rain. “I splashed and kicked, and the foam was strangely white in the dark.” As she ran inside, still wet from the sea, the Mayos commented on the strangeness of her decision. She relished their disapproval with a new ambivalence: “What the heck do I care.”39 She counted down the last twelve days of her stay, and wrote bitter verse: “The acid gossip of the caustic wind, / The wry pucker of the lemon-colored moon…”40
Although Sylvia claimed that she had “led a vegetable existence” that summer, she was proud of herself for developing “a sense of capability and self-integrality never before felt.”41 At the summer’s start, she had not known how to scramble eggs; by the end, she was making her own lamb chops, date-nut bars, and applesauce. The children now obeyed and adored her. “Something maternal awakened, perhaps, by the physical contact with such lovely young babies?”42 she wrote in her journal.
However, the experience with the Mayos led her to again question the idea of marriage. She saw the way Mrs. Mayo waited on Mr. Mayo, and realized that even wealthy women were still responsible for managing the care of home and children. In her journal Plath acknowledged that many of her insecurities about her own future “come again to the fact that it is a man’s world.” She wondered why women should “be relegated to the position of custodian of emotions, watcher of the infants, feeder of soul, body and pride of man? Being born a woman is my awful tragedy.” She longed to “mingle with road crews, sailors and soldiers, bar room regulars….I want to be able to sleep in an open field, to travel west, to walk freely at night.”43 She sensed this was a part of her—this longing for male privilege—that Dick would not accept; she worried she might have to spend her life “cooking scrambled eggs for a man…hearing about life at second hand, feeding my body and letting my powers of perception and subsequent articulation grow fat and lethargic with disuse.”44 Over and over, she confided her fears of wifely subservience to her journal and guessed that Dick would expect a Mrs. Mayo, with her shantung silks and moneyed laugh. Eddie Cohen agreed:
We “radicals” believe that a wife should share her husband’s life and experiences, but for most of the world a woman has a definite social role in marriage which will not permit the existence which I am inclined to feel you want before you start on the home and kiddies and dinner-every-night stuff….the nice clean boys of your acquaintance (you know, the ones who want the mother of their kids to be a virgin, etc.) would probably faint dead away at the thought of their wife living in the jungles of Mexico or on the left bank in Paris.
A man who was conventionally moral would lead a life of “conventional morality,” Eddie warned, and expect his wife to do the same. He doubted that Sylvia could have a career and a family “within the framework of the social structure in which you now live.”45 She began to doubt it, too.
After she left Swampscott, she visited Dick on the Cape. She had “misgivings” before the trip, probably because she was going with Aurelia and Mr. and Mrs. Norton—hardly relaxing company. On the drive down, Mr. Norton lectured her about Pilgrim history and made a detour to Plymouth Rock, where he wanted her to bow her head “at the shrine.” Skeptical about American mythmaking, she saw only “commercialized patriotism” and congratulated herself for not bursting out in laughter.46
The Nortons had rented a cottage in Brewster, where Sylvia spent days at the beach with the three adults, Dick, and Perry. Dick was standoffish. “Something was definitely tense,” she wrote Marcia. It was Perry, surprisingly tanned and handsome, who drew her attention. One afternoon she ran down the beach with him, out of the others’ earshot. While “caressing” her, he made the kinds of “honest and healing remarks” that she had been “starving for all summer.” She began to wonder if she had chosen the wrong brother—perhaps she could fall in love with Perry after all. That night the two of them took a long walk together “under the queer light of the stars.” They kissed “a few times,” but both “felt instant mental doubts.” They talked about Dick, as well as Perry’s girlfriend, and swore that they would be “lifelong comrades and confidants.” Sylvia realized it was an “odd relationship” but felt no guilt.47 She had always been closer to Perry than to Dick. Their physical intimacy allowed Sylvia to escape some of the tension she felt with Dick, though it underscores the claustrophobic dynamic between the two families.
Dick, perhaps sensing Sylvia’s renewed interest in Perry, remained aloof. For three days they barely spoke. Finally she found him alone on the beach. He made small talk while she fumed. “I would like to level your skull with this book; maybe you’d then say something,” she declared. Dick apologized, and the two agreed to have a “truth talk” later that night. After dinner they headed to an open field, where they sat back to back under “a million stars, all falling or shooting.” Dick had misinterpreted the tone of her last letter and assumed she was no longer interested in him. Sylvia immediately understood the reason for his “miffed attitude,” and a “Great scene of reconciliation” ensued. He called her “Darling” again, and told her he wanted to marry her.48 It was not an official proposal, she wrote Ann, “just a ‘let’s wait and keep our fingers crossed deal.’ ”49
Sylvia downplayed Dick’s proposal in letters to friends that summer, but she was panicked.
Am I excited, blubbering, unable to eat? Hell, no….I wonder very calmly and calculatingly—Do I love him? I know him and his family too well to experience the young romantic exhilaration that I did when I first dated him last spring. But I am afraid that if I eventually did settle down to be a Doctor’s wife, I would be sinking deeper into the track I was born in, leaving the world untried, as it were….I’m just not the type who wants a home and children of her own more than anything else in the world. I’m too selfish, maybe, to subordinate myself to one man’s career.
Yet she worried, too, about the penalty for not marrying while she was young and attractive. She thought she would “kick herself” for not settling down when it was no longer an option.50 One of her friends, Betsy Whittemore, was already engaged and would marry in June. “I was just amazed,” Sylvia wrote home. “She’s my age!”51
The pressure to marry would only increase in the coming years. Dick, she told Ann, was “a rather absorbing problem” that had consequences for the rest of her life.52 To Marcia she voiced similar concerns. “I’m not sure yet that he is the temperamental mate for me. I wonder if I don’t need someone a little less managing and positive.”53 Sylvia was also bothered by what she called, in a letter to Eddie, Dick’s “physical reticence.”54 She did not understand why he was so timid; she longed for that bruising kiss. Her mind was awhirl on the way back to Wellesley as she sat in the front seat next to Mr. Norton. While Aurelia and Mrs. Norton talked in the back, he confided to Sylvia that he would “love dearly” to have her as a daughter-in-law. He was trying to reassure her in more ways than one: the Nortons were wealthier than the Plaths, and Dick would be marrying down.55 His remark made Sylvia “feel a little like crying.” She knew, as she told Marcia, that “if it works out, a lot of people will be happy.”56 But would she?
* * *
“ROOMS,” PLATH WROTE in her journal. “Every room a world.”57 At the start of their 1951–52 sophomore year at Smith, Sylvia
and Marcia decorated their homey second-floor room with dark green bedspreads, white lampshades, bookcases, plants, and a large Georgia O’Keeffe print. They hoped the print would tie the room together, with its cool shades of green, blue, and white. Sylvia was more secure at Haven House now, and her confidence showed in her breezy, enthusiastic letters. As always, she began the year with fierce ambition. She was taking five yearlong courses: 19th- and 20th-Century Literature with Professors Randall and Drew; Introduction to Politics; Visual Expression; Introduction to Religion; Practical Writing, with Evelyn Page; and Physical Education (dance and sports). She hoped to join the Press Board and write her first story on the local mental hospital. As for money, she had a respectable $130 in the bank and planned to sell stockings on commission—a ridiculous job, she admitted, but one that might help her earn “a few dollars.” The best thing about sophomore year was “NO SATURDAY CLASSES.”58 Now she could spend more time writing and trying to publish in magazines. She had close friends in Pat, Louise, Enid, and, most of all, Marcia. Before classes began, Sylvia and Marcia “took a long walk across that beautiful countryside in the autumn afternoon, lay in the grass in the sun, listening to the cows mooing, and staring in a blissful collegiate stupor at the Holyoke range of hills.”59
Dick wrote dutifully from Harvard Medical School. His letters were full of anatomical drawings, details of cadaver and X-ray clinics, and lectures given by professors who embodied the “intense, gray suited, Man of Medicine.”60 He assumed that Sylvia was interested in his diagrams of the pectoralis minor and the serratus anterior, and invited her to a Saturday pathology lecture. He wanted her to know his world, to be as excited by medicine as he was. In theory, Plath wanted to learn more about science, a lifeline to her dead father. Yet Dick’s letters may have sent another “chilly whisper” up her spine. Over time, she would grow to distrust the paternalism of male physicians—a major theme in The Bell Jar.
Dick reassured Sylvia that he declined to participate in high-jinks with nursing students, but she felt no such compunction to ignore male attention. His talk of marriage on the Cape had unnerved her, and she was determined to meet other men before she made up her mind. She had a feeling there was a more reckless, artistic soul waiting for her. Over the next few months, she gushed to her mother about other men the way she had once gushed about Dick.
The turning point, for Sylvia, was Maureen Buckley’s coming-out party. All the women at Haven House had been invited, along with well-connected men from Amherst, Yale, and Princeton. The Buckleys were a wealthy Irish Catholic family with ten children and a mystique not unlike the Kennedys, to whom they were often compared—though they were Republicans. Like Joe Kennedy, Frank Buckley, a Texas oil baron, had serious political aspirations for his children. William Buckley Jr., Maureen’s older brother, had just published God and Man at Yale that year; he would have a profound impact on the American conservative movement as the founder of the National Review. His brother James would become a U.S. senator for New York. Sylvia called the family “terribly versatile & intellectual.”61
She described the party in lavish detail to Aurelia in a fourteen-page letter—among the longest she ever wrote to her mother. She was entranced by the spectacle when she arrived under the “white colonial columns” of Great Elm, which she thought put the Mayo mansion to shame. She had attended proms at Andover and Yale, but nothing had prepared her for this level of wealth, not even her cruise on the Mistral. “Girls in beautiful gowns clustered by the stair. Everywhere there were swishes of taffeta, satin, silk. I looked at Marcia, lovely in a lilac moiré, and we winked at each other.” They strode out onto the lawn, where waiters served champagne underneath a grand white marquee. On nights like these, Plath could assume she was on an upward trajectory, rising always higher, away from the cramped, shared rooms of her youth. To Aurelia she wrote, “Balloons, japanese [sic] lanterns, tables covered with white linen, leaves, covered ceiling and walls….I stood open mouthed, giddy, bubbling, wanting so much to show you. I am sure you would have been supremely happy if you had seen me. I know I looked beautiful. Even daughters of millionaires complimented my dress.”
That night, she danced with the sons of privilege. Plato Skouras, whose father ran 20th Century Fox, brought her inside and compared her to a Botticelli Madonna. But the one who caught her heart was “a lovely grinning darkhaired boy” named Constantine Sidamon-Eristoff, an actual Georgian prince whose aristocratic family had settled in New York City in the nineteenth century. They danced under the marquee, then left the party and waltzed together on the lawn. Sylvia was overjoyed to find someone with whom she could “say what I meant, use big words, say intelligent things.” Constantine kissed her hand like the prince he was, and admired the smooth skin on her shoulders. He drove her back to Stone House, where she was staying, while they talked of his Georgian heritage, “love, childbirth, atomic energy,…and so much more.” Sylvia recited poetry for him as the church bells struck four. “Imagine! I told him teasingly not to suffocate in my long hair and he said, ‘What a divine way to die!’ ” Constantine even addressed her as “Milady” as he escorted her from her car. “ ‘Milord,’ I replied, fancying myself a woman from a period novel, entering my castle.” She fell into bed next to Marcia and dreamed “exquisite dreams all night, waking now and then to hear the wind wuthering outside the stone walls.”
Sylvia’s reference to Wuthering Heights, as well as other period fiction, suggests how her reading had influenced her sense of self. Such novels were often the sites of social transformation, where the penniless orphan becomes the rich mistress. They provided a framework, however dubious, for her fantasy: a scholarship girl could become a Russian princess. The next day, she noted, waiters brought brunch into the Buckley dining room in “great copper tureens.” As they uncovered the steaming dishes, her eyes alighted on a feast of eggs, bacon, sausage, rolls, and fancy preserves. “Lord, what luxury!” she exclaimed. She may have already fancied herself Cathy Earnshaw, soon to trade Wuthering Heights for Thrushcross Grange.
The fantasy ended when she arrived back at Smith and exited the Buckleys’ chauffeured Cadillac. The anticlimax was crushing. “Back here. I can’t face the dead reality. I still lift and twirl with Eric, Plato, and my wholly lovely Constantine under Japanese lanterns.” She wondered if she would ever see Constantine again, and feared “he was a dream.” She sent Aurelia a love poem about “a bronze boy” statue she now identified with him.62 She hoped to hear from him but assumed he would simply “melt away with the champagne.”63
The Buckley party forced Sylvia to face her ambivalent feelings about Dick, yet she could not bring herself to end things with him—not yet. He came to Smith five days after her magical night at Great Elm. Together they went canoeing on Paradise Pond, dined at the Yankee Pedlar, then ended the night with pizza and beer at Joe’s. “You were your own incomparable self, sweet and generous, understanding and thoughtful,” he wrote her back at Harvard, but she began to lay out her reasons for breaking up with him.64 To Eddie, she wrote that she could never live up to Dick’s standards and did not want to spend her life emulating perfection. Eddie, with his usual perceptiveness, felt that it was easier for her to blame Dick than to acknowledge that Dick did not “measure up” to her standards.65 She was becoming increasingly open with Eddie, too, about her frustration over the relationship’s lack of physical progress. He felt that the situation was somewhat absurd and knew Dick was not right for her. He urged her to find someone who would fulfill her “physically and emotionally…not financially.”66
Sylvia fell ill that October with a sinus infection and canceled an upcoming weekend with Dick. She was in the infirmary for a week, protected from academic and romantic responsibility as she sank into the soporific half sleep of convalescence. Though she was only a month into the semester, she already needed a break—her courses were “twice as hard as those last year,” she wrote to Aurelia. She was reading the Romantic poets in her En
glish class but felt she “had no real grasp of the subject.”67 (She again asked her mother to help her study.) Yet she was able to write creatively for English, which lightened her burden. Already she had sent a short story written for class off to Seventeen. She even received a fan letter for “Den of Lions” from a young woman in Hong Kong.
When she opened a letter from Constantine inviting her to visit him at Princeton in November, she let out a “loud scream” and fell to the floor. He had not forgotten her. She had so much work to catch up on, and the trip would be long and expensive, but she could justify it: “I have spent no money on social life. A prospect like Constantine is a potential. A trip like that is an experience, an emancipation, a new world.” She told Aurelia that Constantine was the only boy she had met “A. D.” (After Dick) with whom she could imagine spending her “future life.” She signed off “your elated sivvy.”68 But Sylvia ended up canceling the trip on account of her heavy workload. “Everybody has read Constantine’s letter and is urging me to go—maybe I’ll marry into Russian society, etc. But wisdom has won the day.”69
Having given up on her dreams of Constantine, Sylvia spent a late-October weekend with Dick at Harvard Medical School. She attended lectures, served as his “assistant at the microscope,” and visited patients.70 Dick felt the call to medicine as a call to service that reverberated into other areas of his life: he was now teaching Sunday school at the Unitarian church in Wellesley, and he wrote to Sylvia about his discussions of peace programs and Quaker philosophy. He planned to spend a weekend with his parents visiting veterans at the VA hospital in Framingham. He may have assumed that Sylvia shared his commitment to serving others. That fall, he wrote to her, “Syl, I am sometimes just so glad that you exist. The existences of those who know you is enriched—beyond the telling.”71 But she was an individualist, and wary of volunteering for causes that infringed on her writing time. When Mrs. Freeman sent her a box of cookies that December with a note that read, “The home is woman’s paradise,” Sylvia wrote to Aurelia, “No doubt she considers herself a missionary, converting the wayward.”72 Plath would always fight against the collective pressure to sublimate her creative identity.
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