Jon had romantic hopes for the trip, though he booked separate rooms. At first, all went well. Plath wrote in her calendar on December 21 that she had a “magnificent 2 hour ski class on Toll House slopes…snow plow, turn and rope tow—victory & power.”75 She was pleased to have made a “comeback” on the slopes, and called it the “last bronc broken.” But Jon hurt his ankle during a late-afternoon run, and the injury dampened their moods. They left Stowe midmorning on the 22nd. Sylvia wrote in her calendar, “enormous feud with Jon—silent drive back through Grandma Moses Landscape.”76 Jon remembered some of the details: on the way back, Sylvia felt he was driving too fast and jumped into the back seat, where she curled up in silence for two hours—sleeping or thinking, he did not know. Eventually, he said, she jumped back into the front seat and kissed him. She explained that she had once been close to death and that she never wanted to get that close again; she felt she had a better chance of surviving an accident in the back seat.77 Sylvia then opened up to him about her suicide, explaining that “people had put her on a pedestal,” and she felt compelled to maintain her achievements, even though doing so had cut her off from “the nourishment that she needed.”78 None of this frank talk alarmed Jon, who felt Sylvia was simply less conformist than the other Smith girls he knew. She was “very out-front” about her feelings.79 He found this aspect of her personality refreshing. He would see her one more time in September 1955, and then never again.
Despite their recent quarrel, Sylvia saw Gordon frequently over her Christmas vacation. She saw Dr. Beuscher the day after Christmas, and may have discussed how to end her relationship with him: “long talk: impossibility of argument or logic—retirement in dignified silence—moral honesty—each situation judged in itself,” she wrote in her calendar.80 Her vacation was productive—she polished her thesis and revised “Mary Ventura and the Ninth Kingdom,” “The Day Mr. Prescott Died,” and “The Smoky Blue Piano,” a screwball comedy and jab at Nancy Hunter that she had written earlier in the term for Kazin. Sylvia told Enid Epstein the story had “ ‘plot’ (very unusual for me) and a frothy sense of humor (more unusual).”81 It concerns two summer school roommates who are both romantically interested in a mysterious neighbor, Lou (an amalgam of Sylvia’s real neighbor that summer, Lou Healy, and Edwin Akutowicz), who owns a blue piano. The narrator, based on Sylvia, assumes that Lou wants to date her beautiful and brilliant roommate, Lynn, based on Nancy. She imagines Lynn walking down the aisle with him while she plays maid of honor, despite the fact that Lynn already has a boyfriend. Yet at the story’s end we learn that Lou is really interested in the narrator, and simply using Lynn to get close to her. “I had a lovely vision of Lynn preceding me down the aisle in a peacock-green dress while somebody played the chorus from ‘Lohengrin’ on a smoky blue piano,” the narrator says.82 The story shows Plath exploring the theme of her thesis in her fiction. The narrator triumphs over her double, just as she would in The Bell Jar. Plath was thrilled when Ladies’ Home Journal returned “The Smoky Blue Piano” in mid-January 1955 with requests for changes. She immediately rewrote the story to their specifications (dropping the “diary” format) and sent it back, hoping for an $850 acceptance. Mel suggested that she had sold her “integrity down the river,” but Sylvia defended herself. “I just played up my sense of humor, that’s all. It’s much harder than being tragic and depressing, you know!”83 The revised story was rejected, but it shows how efficiently Plath functioned as a professional writer even before she had graduated from college.84
Plath’s other major story from January 1955, “Tongues of Stone,” was based on her experience at McLean. The writing is bleak and somber, entirely devoid of the black humor that marks the mental hospital scenes in The Bell Jar. The young protagonist describes her depression as Plath had in her journal:
she would drag out her nights and days chained to a wall in a dark solitary cell with dirt and spiders….she was caught in the nightmare of the body, without a mind, without anything, only the soulless flesh that got fatter with the insulin and yellower with the fading tan….She had gone on circling at the brink of the whirlpool, pretending to be clever and gay, and all the while these poisons were gathering in her body, ready to break out behind the bright, false bubbles of her eyes at any moment crying: Idiot! Imposter!
The young woman fantasizes about killing her mother—as Plath did in the days before her suicide attempt—and regrets that “They had raised her like Lazarus.” She attempts to hang herself with a cotton scarf she has hidden, but “her hands would slacken and let go.” She breaks a glass and hides the shards for future use, the sensation “voluptuous.”85
In the story’s first draft, Plath had left her protagonist languishing in depression in what she called “eternal night.” But Kazin was distressed by the story’s unrelenting hopelessness, and told her that “writing was invented to give more joy.” She decided to change the ending “from life to art,” to “a conclusion of dawn.”86 In the final draft, the protagonist has a reaction to the insulin. “I feel different,” she tells the nurse in a scene that she later rewrote in The Bell Jar. That night, she is filled with a new hope: “And in the dark the girl lay listening to the voice of dawn and felt flare through every fiber of her mind and body the everlasting rising of the sun.”87 Plath thought the story was “naked and depressing,” but “the best work of ‘art’ I’ve ever done…beautifully written.”88 She was right—the story, with its vivid depictions of mental hell, was her best since “Sunday at the Mintons.” “I have a feeling that I may be destined to be more successful in writing than I thought at first,” she wrote Aurelia.89
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Only five days after returning to campus after her Christmas break Sylvia checked herself in to the infirmary with a sore throat, cough, and cold. She used this time “off” productively, as was her habit: she wrote five new poems, which she promptly sent off to The New Yorker, and had a surprise visit from Peter Davison, an assistant editor at Harcourt, Brace.90 Peter was visiting Alfred Kazin, who had sent him over to cheer Sylvia up. She was impressed by Peter’s pedigree: a Harvard degree, a Fulbright to Cambridge, a British poet father, and a position at a major publisher. To her astonishment, Peter asked to see any novel she might write in the next few years. They would be dating by the spring.
By now Gordon had left for Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where he wrote Sylvia long letters about keeping America safe from Russia. She was secretly relieved. She assumed that she would confront a “deluge” of thesis revision in January, but George Gibian thought her manuscript was excellent, and, by the first week of January, she was ready to send her thesis to the typist, nearly a month early. She was delighted by the “professional results” when it came back, and cut classes to proofread all seventy pages. “I was so proud, it is an excellent thesis, I know it in my bones,” she wrote Aurelia. She had already heard rumors that Gibian had pronounced it a “masterpiece.”91 He later called Plath “a brilliant student…a wish fulfilment student….Before she was even in my course, everybody would talk Sylvia Plath, Sylvia Plath.”92
Titled “The Magic Mirror: A Study of the Double in Two of Dostoevsky’s Novels,” the thesis had the potential to be the pièce de résistance of Plath’s college experience. Yet there was more at stake. Her earlier attempt, the previous year, to begin a thesis on James Joyce’s Ulysses was partly to blame for her breakdown, suicide attempt, and subsequent hospitalization. In the wake of what she had endured, she sought a theme that resonated with her own experience, and would carry her through the long months of solitary reading and writing. In Ulysses, Joyce has much to say about Ireland, Catholicism, colonialism, literature, history, class, grief, love, and sex, but not much about mental illness and its attendant destructions and illuminations. For that, Plath turned to Dostoevsky.
She wrote about the connection between doubling and insanity. Plath dedicated the first half of her thesis to an analysis of Golyad
kin and his double, Golyadkin Jr., in The Double, an early work dating from 1846. She ended with a more sustained discussion of Ivan and Smerdyakov’s doubleness in The Brothers Karamazov. She wanted to show that the double was an integral component of Dostoevsky’s work as a whole. But she implies early on that Dostoevsky’s interest in the double was a function of his interest in mental illness: “Indeed, literary critics and psychoanalysts alike point out that Dostoevsky’s remarkable penetration into the depths of the human mind anticipated the discoveries of modern psychoanalysis.”93 Her own path toward recovery mirrored Dostoevsky’s increasingly complex understanding of the “schizophrenic personality,” as she described Golyadkin, from The Double to The Brothers Karamazov.
While Plath drew heavily on James Frazer in her discussion of the double’s literary and anthropological antecedents, Otto Rank’s and Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytical viewpoints interested her more. She promises her reader that she will not “diagnose mental maladies” but will instead “stress the intrinsic technique of the stories themselves.”94 Yet throughout her thesis, Plath continues to circle back to psychoanalytic readings. She compares Golyadkin’s “personality structure to that of a victim of acute schizophrenia” and discusses Freud’s idea that the Double is a “ ‘ghastly harbinger of death.’ ”
By creating a Double, the schizophrenic no longer needs to castigate himself or to feel guilty for harboring these corrupt urges; at last he can blame someone else for these transgressions which he once felt were his.
However, the advantages of this radical division involve danger as well as distinct relief. The double alleviation of tension, which frees the victim from responsibility for his repressed desires and yet satisfies those desires, is countered by a new fear of attack from the outside. The Double becomes an ever-present liability, for it increases the vulnerability of its creator; it may even betray or kill the very personality which gave it life.95
This was not simply literary criticism—Plath was also examining, from a safe, objective distance, her own experience with mental illness. Plath was not schizophrenic; she never hallucinated, never lost track of her identity or her location, and never fell into trances. But her mood swings, which she frequently acknowledged, may have caused her to believe that she shared certain symptoms with the schizophrenic. She had written in her journal of a similar “double”—a voice that wrecked and ridiculed her fragile self-confidence, “screaming, ‘Traitor, sinner, imposter.’ ”96 When Plath wrote, in her thesis, “The mystery of the second self becomes a menace; the inner duality becomes a duel to the death,” or when she described “the seductiveness of suicide as a release from prolonged torment,” she was writing as much about herself as about Dostoevsky.97
Plath’s scholarship on Lawrence, Emerson, Nietzsche, Dostoevsky, and others was intertwined with her search for a guiding life philosophy that would help her manage and mitigate the blunt blows of depression. Through the act of analyzing Russian literature, Plath had come upon a cure of sorts. As she wrote, “Dostoevsky implies that recognition of our various mirror images and reconciliation with them will save us from disintegration.”98 Like Dostoevsky himself, Plath would someday distance herself from her own menacing doubles by giving them voice on the page. Dostoevsky had suffered from epileptic fits (often associated with madness in the nineteenth century) and helped Plath understand that it was possible to converse with the devil and emerge unscathed, even enlightened: “Although, at the last, Ivan succumbs to insanity in court, Dimitri, Katarina, and Alyosha all affirm the strong likelihood of his recovery. ‘Ivan has a strong constitution,’ remarks Alyosha. ‘I, too, believe there’s every hope that he will get well.’ ”99
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SYLVIA FINISHED her exams on January 20 and returned to Wellesley for a brief interregnum between semesters. She lounged around the house in her pajamas, playing the piano “for hours soupily crooning in bad french [sic], and getting a hell of a kick out of it.” She had a “fun” “bull session” with Dr. Beuscher at her house, where they discussed, she told Gordon, “religion, philosophy, honesty, selfishness, and a lot of other potent, perhaps more intimate, topics.” She and Aurelia were “getting along much better,” though in a letter to Gordon, she hinted that she managed her anger toward her mother by imagining her dead.100 Aurelia had written to Sylvia about an “attack” she had experienced due to stress, and Sylvia was beginning to suspect that she may have inherited her own anxiety not from Otto (as Aurelia thought) but from her mother. “I don’t know whether it is an hereditary characteristic, but our little family is altogether too prone to lie awake at nights hating ourselves for stupidities.”101
Sylvia still had one more academic hurdle to overcome—the interview for a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship, which was held at Harvard on January 22. In her calendar, she wrote, “grueling—4 men: barrage of questions.”102 The “smug” all-male committee, headed by Harvard’s dean, had intimidated her, asking her if she would “give up teaching for marriage without a fuss, what about babies, would I marry a teacher…and on and on.”103 Plath had never experienced such blatant academic sexism. The men twisted her every remark “to their purposes, tossing it back, asking loaded questions, until I felt like a painted wooden toy at the rifle booth in the circus.”104 When she learned that she had been turned down for the fellowship a few days later, she struggled to understand what had gone wrong. To Aurelia she wrote, “this is the first time I have been really rejected after having all the chances, and I have been terribly sad all morning.”105 In her calendar, she wrote, “shock!”106
She now assumed that she would not get into Radcliffe, but the college assured her that the Wilson interview would not affect her chances for admission: “not at all,” Radcliffe’s friendly dean wrote to Plath, and told her, bluntly, that the Woodrow Wilson Fellowships were “given mostly for men who might otherwise go into business, law, medicine etc.”107 This shockingly sexist explanation made Sylvia feel better; she was relieved the rejection had nothing to do with her hospitalization or “character blots.”108
She consoled herself by writing, but her subject matter reflected her anxieties about whether she could—or should—achieve her professional goals. The fellowship interview had reminded her, once again, that American patriarchal society frowned on female trailblazers. At Smith, strong academic women like Mary Ellen Chase, Evelyn Page, and Elizabeth Drew had nurtured her; she was not used to defending her ambitions to a wall of stone-faced male professors. Sylvia saw herself through the men’s eyes—a woman and a former asylum patient—and was suddenly filled with doubt.
“Home Is Where the Heart Is,” which Plath wrote a few days after the interview, explores the consequences of self-repression. She described it as a story about a housewife “who comes to mental crisis, faced by a family who seems to be seeking life outside the home. She manages creatively to bring them all back together.”109 Plath was exploring her own future in the story, in which Mrs. Arnold, once the top English student and writer in her college, ruminates on her decision to sacrifice her career for housewifery and motherhood. Plath emphasizes the drudgery of Mrs. Arnold’s days—her life has been curtailed by dirty dishes, “mountains of laundry,” a howling baby, sullen teenagers, and a distracted husband. While Mrs. Arnold listens to the radio, she dreams about going to Paris, and begins to wonder what her life would have been like had she fulfilled her own ambitions rather than her lawyer husband’s. Yet that night, on cue, her children treat her respectfully and her husband is offered a higher-paying job. “Now I know what I was really meant for, Michael….That Arch of Triumph they talk about…coming up the walk this afternoon, I knew deep down inside all the while that it was really our own front door!”110 Plath wrote other versions of this story: “The Visitor” and, later, “Day of Success” were both variations on the theme of the martyred, triumphant housewife. These stories reflect not what Plath wanted but what she was expected to want. She told Aurelia t
hat “Home Is Where the Heart Is,” which she submitted to a Christian writing contest, was “tailored to specifications…very plotted, and noble, but not preaching.”111 Yet the story was written just a few days after she had faced a skeptical panel of male academics.112 She may have begun to wonder whether Mrs. Arnold’s life represented the more realistic course.
After the Woodrow Wilson interview Sylvia boarded a night flight to New York, where she rendezvoused with Sassoon. She felt that her Manhattan weekends were a winter “tonic” that helped her through her “periodic slackening times.”113 She and Sassoon dined decadently on caviar, pear tart, and vermouth cassis at Toffentetti’s, Le Gourmet, Le Veau d’Or, and Chez St. Denis, and saw performances that made a lasting impression—the “Russian-Jewish” “absorbing fantasy” The Dybbuk, and several foreign films, including the Japanese Gate of Hell, which she called a “color poem…not a superfluous gesture in the whole thing.”114 She and Sassoon spent an afternoon viewing the Picassos and Braques at the Museum of Modern Art, where she saw the silent French film The Temptation of St. Joan: “excruciatingly beautiful silent symbolic,” “the most shattering work I’ve ever endured.”115 She described it in detail to Mel:
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