He went on to say that Elizabeth Bowen was possibly the greatest living novelist, while Virginia Woolf and George Eliot were two of the best novelists who had ever written.
Gordon thought his comment about women writers had exacerbated Sylvia’s sense of despair that summer. He may have been right. Sylvia had finally found a literary boyfriend with whom she could discuss Joyce for hours—and yet even he had dismissed her talent and ambition, just as Dick and Bob had. Gordon’s apology may have helped alleviate her sense of hopelessness.
As Sylvia’s mental health improved in late December, several of her “privileges” were restored—she was once again allowed to have visitors and go for drives and supervised walks. Although she could not leave her room unsupervised, she hoped that would soon change.130 She became more sociable, striking up a friendship with the McLean librarian, who was a Smith graduate. Before her shock treatments she had wandered aimlessly up and down the corridors; now she spent more time in the coffee shop, “a pine-paneled den of smoky sociability,” sketching for the McLean Gazette and writing letters.131 Mr. Crockett visited Sylvia once a week that December at Belknap and told Aurelia that he often found her playing bridge or talking with other patients in the living room.
Gordon had been sending her letters for weeks (“He is too good to be true,” she told Eddie), but she revealed more of herself to Eddie. She joked to him about her “little scandal,” yet she managed to convey, in four single-spaced pages, the “hell of sordid and meaningless existence” that had prompted her suicide attempt that summer. Still, she boasted about McLean’s country-clubbish features. Her peers, she told him, hailed from Vassar, Radcliffe, and Cornell; she often spent her days with “concert pianists” and “an atomic genius from MIT.” McLean’s reputation obviously meant a great deal to Plath. Even in “madness,” she still had a foothold in the upper class.132
Throughout December 1953 and January 1954, Sylvia continued her sessions with Dr. Beuscher, who wrote her a prescription for a diaphragm.133 In The Bell Jar, Dr. Nolan writes Esther a prescription for a diaphragm, which Esther considers her ticket to “freedom.” No longer will she have to worry about “marrying the wrong person, like Buddy Willard, just because of sex.”134
For Sylvia in early 1954, regaining her old vitality meant attracting men. Gordon was away at sea and would not return until May. Dick had stopped writing her altogether.135 After months of hospitalization, Dick was finally free of tuberculosis and due to leave the Ray Brook sanatorium for Europe. He and Sylvia had effectively traded places, and it seems he was no longer interested in marrying her—just as she had once predicted. She felt no bitterness toward him. Indeed, she understood the new dynamic perfectly, telling Eddie that Dick “certainly owes me nothing after the way I treated him last year when he was down and out.”136
With Gordon and Dick out of her life, Sylvia wrote to her Wellesley crush, Phil McCurdy, who invited her to visit him at Harvard in late December. (Plath could now leave McLean on weekends.) The two spent a day in Harvard Square, then danced that night at their old hangout, the Totem Pole. Phil drove her back to Wellesley, where they parked on a dead-end street and necked. Plath’s first biographer, Edward Butscher, claimed that Sylvia lost her virginity to Phil that night. The story has been reproduced in at least three other Plath biographies, yet Phil himself rejected this claim during our interview.137 “Let me be honest: I didn’t perform well,” he said. “There was not one ‘magic moment.’ ”138 After the close call in December, he and Sylvia had decided never to have sex for fear of ruining their friendship. She didn’t talk much to him about McLean. “It never became a big issue between the two of us. I tried once to pin her down about what happened. And she said, ‘I was working hard and I found my writing drying up, and the harder I worked, the less I achieved.’ ”139
Sylvia spent Christmas Day at home with her family in Wellesley, rereading all of Gordon’s letters and “pounding away” a reply on Warren’s “masculine” typewriter—an adjective that speaks to Plath’s own gendered assumptions about writing itself. To Gordon, she cheerfully claimed that she was “feeling 100% better now,” but her letter rehearsed the old, dangerous desire to excel and please. She thanked him for his Christmas gift—Edmund Wilson’s Axel’s Castle—which, she promised him, “will take me back to new depths in my dearly loved Yeats, Joyce and Eliot…and into new fields as well, serving as a springboard into Stein, Proust, etc. All of which will help me communicate more rewardingly with you in the future!”140
In January, though still a McLean patient, Sylvia began spending her weekends at home in Wellesley. On January 13, Sylvia’s doctors conferred and decided to let her return to Smith on February 1 for the spring semester, as long as she saw the Smith psychiatrist twice a week. She was also advised to take a less rigorous courseload. Dr. Beuscher told Sylvia she should give herself “several years” “to decide on vocation, husband, to make other important life decisions.” Sylvia was “immensely relieved” by this advice, and felt “the pressure is off.” They spoke “frankly” about sex, and Dr. Beuscher tried to answer all of Sylvia’s questions as best she could. She advised Sylvia not to get “too sexually involved” with anyone for the time being, as she was “not equipped to handle” the emotional complications. Sylvia would stay at McLean until “one or two days before returning” to college. “Her attitude is good,” Dr. Beuscher noted. “Insight good.”141
* * *
—
After Sylvia left McLean, Dr. Beuscher listed what she came to believe were Sylvia’s main “problems”: “1) Authority problem. 2) Difficulty with the feminine role. 3) Trouble with sense of identity. 4) Immaturity. 5) Sex. She [Sylvia] verbalized freely on all of these subjects.” Dr. Beuscher’s list is remarkably generic—such “problems” do not seem pathological, and might apply to many gifted young women of the era. To explain these problems the psychiatrist circles back, again and again, to what she called “the negative mother figure.” Indeed, Beuscher congratulated herself for having “made” Sylvia realize that she had encouraged her mother and other “strong-minded women” in her life (presumably Mrs. Prouty) to dominate her.142 Because of Otto’s age, Beuscher felt that Aurelia and Sylvia had been locked in a “sibling rivalry” for his affection.143 Dr. Beuscher went so far as to tell an interviewer that Esther Greenwood’s “easy admission” of hatred toward her mother in The Bell Jar was “inaccurate.” Beuscher said that “she [Plath] had spent the first month in the hospital asserting that she loved her mother.” Beuscher had to “work hate admission out of Sylvia.”144
Dr. Beuscher’s psychological biases were typical of the era, when mothers were often blamed for their children’s emotional problems. Psychiatry would not stop blaming mothers for their children’s mental illnesses until the 1970s. (This shift in perspective gained momentum in 1970 when a group of feminist psychotherapists distributed pamphlets to their American Psychiatric Association colleagues stating, “Mother is not public enemy number one. Start looking for the real enemy.”)145 Aurelia later wrote that several psychiatrists had questioned her about Sylvia’s potty training, as if her missteps in this area led to her daughter’s suicide attempt. Such accusations sound absurd now, but Freudian concepts regarding the childhood origins of neuroses still held great currency in the early 1950s before the advent of antidepressants. Philip Wylie’s misogynist attack on mothers in Generation of Vipers was popular at the time—Sylvia had read sections of the book out loud with Marcia—and Aurelia herself blamed Wylie’s “Momism” for turning her into a “scapegoat.”146 In light of these misogynistic medical and cultural biases, one might wonder how much hostility Sylvia truly expressed toward Aurelia and how much was suggested by her psychiatrist. A Plath biographer who spent six weeks interviewing Dr. Beuscher in 1970 noted that Beuscher “is clearly hostile to Mrs. Plath, Mrs. Prouty, all who might claim an equal share to Sylvia’s growth and affections.” She and Sylvia had “a mother-daugh
ter’s relationship.”147 Indeed, Dr. Beuscher was moved when, during their last session at McLean, Sylvia told her, “You have been like a mother, but without any of the disadvantages.” Dr. Beuscher wrote, with some triumph, “This was precisely the role which the therapist had tried to assume, and it was felt that this line of approach was very successful with this patient.”148
Sylvia’s relationship with her real mother was never the same after her suicide attempt and her stay at McLean. In 1958, Dr. Beuscher would give Sylvia “permission to hate” her mother. Dr. Beuscher’s notes suggest she was already nudging Plath in this direction in 1953. Aurelia, predictably, felt that Sylvia had been brainwashed by Dr. Beuscher and that the shock treatments had caused an irreparable personality change in her daughter. Janet Salter Rosenberg felt similarly; Sylvia seemed like a different person when she returned to Smith. Aurelia and Janet would each wonder if the shock treatment and the three days Sylvia spent unconscious in her Wellesley cellar had affected her brain in unknown ways.149
While there must have been times when Aurelia’s support morphed into pressure, she was responding to a daughter who exhibited an unusually high level of intelligence from a very early age. According to a friend and Wellesley neighbor, Ora Mae Orton, Aurelia was aware of the “problem” of “maintaining both high academic standards and moral values with as little stress on all the members of the family as possible.” Orton said she and Aurelia often spoke at great length “of our deep concern over this problem and our hopes that we would raise children free of emotional or mental problems.”150 Aurelia saw it as her maternal duty to encourage and cultivate her gifted daughter’s talents. She did not want Sylvia to sacrifice as she had, working her way through college by “typing dull form letters eight hours a day…from wax dictation cylinders—a grim experience I vowed no child of mine would ever have to endure.”151
While Aurelia’s concern about her daughter’s future career and marriage prospects probably exacerbated Sylvia’s own anxious tendencies, she cannot be blamed for Sylvia’s suicidal depression any more than Sylvia herself. Plath lived in an age when there was great shame associated with mental illness, especially for someone who valued success as much as she did. She did not know how to speak to her mother about depression. Aurelia was also at a loss; she tried to coax her daughter out of her black moods with reminders of her stellar achievements, which Sylvia interpreted as pressure to succeed. In 1953, neither woman had the language to speak honestly or openly about mental illness. Aurelia had endured her husband’s death, and now she had almost lost her daughter. Traumatized by grief and silenced by stigma, she fell back on platitudes.
Yet The Bell Jar, with its scathing portrait of Esther’s mother, seethes with daughterly resentment and blame. Plath claimed that she used this trope as camouflage: Ted Hughes remembered her telling him, shortly before her suicide in 1963, that Esther’s anger toward her generous and self-sacrificing mother was a symptom of her madness. In an unpublished manuscript he wrote:
Did you know
Who spoke in that book & what she said?
Or did you deceive yourself
Denying your blood issue. Christening
Esther Greenwood a fiction?
“Would I do such things? Would I ever
Say such things?
Against those who know how much I loved them?
All it proves is how mad my character is,
And how much unlike me.”152
In the novel, Mrs. Greenwood treats Esther’s mental illness as a case of weak will. Aurelia always denied that she had treated her own daughter this way, though shame and guilt would not have been unusual responses to a child’s mental illness in the 1950s within an aspirational Germanic immigrant family—as the fate of Sylvia’s paternal grandmother Ernestine suggests. In The Bell Jar, Plath writes, “My mother was the worst. She never scolded me, but kept begging me, with a sorrowful face, to tell her what she had done wrong.”153 Sylvia’s neighbor Peter Aldrich remembered the great sense of shame that seemed to weigh on mother and daughter after Sylvia’s suicide attempt. Hospitalization in an asylum brought shame not just to the family, he noted, but to an entire neighborhood. The stigma of mental illness at the time was so severe, he said, that those suffering from it were deemed almost “untouchable.”154
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IN A JANUARY 16 LETTER to Marion Freeman, Ruth’s mother, Sylvia wrote of seeing Captain’s Paradise with Aurelia and Mrs. Norton, and participating in a bridge tournament. Though Sylvia spoke pleasantly about these outings, they were not the kinds of pursuits she normally enjoyed. She disliked Dick’s mother, yet in the wake of her hospitalization, her desire to return to normalcy was strong. She wrote to Mrs. Freeman with modesty, decorum, and courage:
Perhaps mother has already chatted with you about the good news—my doctors have talked things over and decided that the best plan is for me to go back to Smith as a junior this second semester and take only 3 courses instead of 5, taking life very easy, with no pressure of a lot of studying or having to get a certain average of marks….So in two short weeks I will have made the transition into the “outside” world of responsibility and independence. I expect it will be difficult in many ways—adjusting to the faster pace of normal life and activity again, but I hope I shall be able to go at it with a much more philosophic and serene attitude!155
Sylvia would return to Smith in February 1954 as a special student for the second semester. Mrs. Prouty was furious, for McLean had assured her that Sylvia would be released to Silver Hill Hospital for a “re-education” period, which she had been willing to finance. She had spent $4,000 on Plath’s treatment since September, and felt betrayed. She did not believe Sylvia was well enough to return to her regular academic routine less than six months after her suicide attempt.156
Dr. de Marneffe said that because Plath was at McLean voluntarily, the impetus to leave could have come, initially, from her rather than her doctors. “What happened was that twice a week the staff would meet in the basement [in] a case conference chaired by Dr. Howard….Often the patient would be asked to come down, and would be interviewed by Howard as a way of both finding out how the patient felt about what was going on, but also for the purpose of demonstrating to us green residents the interviewing technique, how Howard elicited information in a nice, kind way. It could very well have been that she came down, and Howard interviewed her, and the conclusion was that you could leave.”157 Plath, maximizing the dramatic potential in her novel, wrote the corresponding scene as if Esther had been deemed “cured” by the entire staff—as if, Plath wrote in her Smith scrapbook, she had “graduated.”158
At the end of The Bell Jar, Esther is poised to reenter the outside world with the full approval of her doctors, just as Stephen Dedalus stands poised on the brink of a new life away from Ireland in the final pages of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Indeed, in an outline Plath wrote for The Bell Jar, she included the phrase “going to Europe—voyage out”—a plot line she abandoned but that shows her Joycean (and Woolfian) impulse. Yet Plath leaves her readers with lingering questions. Of what has Esther been “cured,” exactly? She eventually becomes a wife and mother—exactly the roles her patriarchal society expects her to fulfill. Does she decide to abide by feminine norms under the threat of more shock treatment? Is she really “better,” or has she just been reprogrammed? The novel’s last few paragraphs, which eerily blend Gothic elements with science fiction—Esther stares out at the “pocked, cadaverous face of Miss Huey, and eyes I thought I had recognized over white masks”—offer no clear answer.159 And yet, the novel itself is proof that Esther has become a writer. She has managed to reconcile the parts of her identity that her doctors, and her society, did not believe could be reconciled. Plath’s college notes on Joyce’s Portrait suggest the scale of Esther’s, and her own, triumph: “New life created is the final work of art: the completed book.”160<
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13
The Lady or the Tiger
Smith College and Harvard Summer School, January–August 1954
Warren drove his sister back to Smith on the last weekend of January 1954. In Northampton, they hit a “thick swirling blizzard” and spun out as they attempted to drive up an unplowed hill near campus. Sylvia saw with “blinding clarity” that death was imminent, but it held no appeal for her now. “I remember the interminable seconds as we slid, utterly out of control, and I wondered if I really was living in a deterministic universe and had displeased the malicious gods by trying to assert my will and return to Smith,” she wrote to Jane Anderson, who was still at McLean. The prospect of annihilation, after all she had been through, now filled her with “horror.” She thought, “this can’t happen to us—we’re different.” Finally the car slowed and came to a stop. The experience made for a “fantastic” story, but her fear confirmed her newfound determination to live.1
Sylvia had returned to Wellesley from McLean in late January. At home, she played recordings of Edith Sitwell’s Façade and Dylan Thomas reading “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night” over and over. His voice made her weep.2 There was more talk of poetry at dinner with the Aldriches, where, after dessert, everyone listened to recordings of Thomas, T. S. Eliot, Ogden Nash, e. e. cummings, and Marianne Moore. Plath spent a long Sunday afternoon with the Crocketts listening to Robert Frost before a crackling fire. Only months before, she had sat stupefied with Crockett as he attempted to play word games with her. Now she spoke eloquently about Eliot and Frost.
Sylvia sounded optimistic about her recovery in letters to Gordon. She joked with him about her extra year at Smith, comparing her tenure there to “those ripe, long-maturing wines.”3 She spoke frankly, too, of the parts she had mastered: “the serious creator, the strong honest out-door type that scorns persiflage, the urbane and seductive partygoer; the eggs-and-bacon-and-coffee girl in a housecoat who can also exist somehow on olives, Roquefort and daiquiris while clad in black velvet, and make a switch to a tanned saltwater and sunworshipping pagan. and [sic] different situations open different doors—shall we release the lady? or the tiger?”4 At McLean, she had felt “unscholastic” as she spent her days exercising, watching movies, playing bridge, making ceramics, and “hashing out life in the coffee shop.”5 Now she was ready to immerse herself again in modern literature.
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