Daily Book Excerpt: Memoirs:
Next book on the Memoir/Letters/Journals shelf is Letters Home: Correspondence 1950-1963
Here’s my opinion on what’s going on here. This correspondence, the letters Sylvia Plath wrote to her mother Aurelia Plath (sometimes up to 3 letters in one day) does not reveal what Mrs. Plath THINKS it reveals, nor does it reveal what some of the hopeful reviewers on Amazon think it reveals. It does not show the “happier” side of Sylvia Plath, her enthusiasm/cheerfulness/love of life. Instead, in my opinion, it shows the lengths to which Sylvia Plath went to either assuage her guilt at putting her mother through her original suicide attempt in 1953 (“see, Mummy? I’m happy now, I’m oh so happy!”), or to reassure her mother that she was, after all, a “normal” 1950s girl with “normal” 1950s values, something (if we can believe Sylvia) was very important to her mother. These are whitewashed letters. I don’t think there’s anything particularly unique about that. Most “normal” people set boundaries with their parents, and decide what it is okay for them to know, and what it is okay to leave out. Sylvia Plath was no different, and her boundaries with her mother were already very porous (she would offer up her poems to her mother, sending her drafts and fragments, letting her mother WAY too far into her work process, which eventually resulted in a devastating year’s-long bout of writer’s block). Plath gloried in the chance her Fulbright Scholarship gave her to go to England and get away from her mother. Again, this is normal, nothing particularly neurotic or pathological about a young woman wanting to find her own identity and get some distance between herself and childhood. But the bonds between mother and daughter were so tight, so fraught, that Plath eventually felt strangled by them.
Plath’s mother valued accomplishment and success, as well as “fitting in” with the normal mainstream life. Plath also valued accomplishment and success (every letter to her mother is peppered with what great thing happened to her that day – a poem accepted, a compliment given, a scholarship received), but fitting in with a normal mainstream life was one of the main problems of her psyche, especially in the conformist 1950s, and instead of feeling free to just tip off the edge into rampant bohemianism (Plath was far too uptight for that), she acquired the trappings of mainstream life (husband, kids, farmhouse), only to find a vast emptiness at the heart of all of it. This was quite a common experience to women at that time (and I suppose men, too – Richard Yates’ Revolutionary Road is one of the most searing indictments of the American Dream I have ever read, and EVERYONE pays the price), and all of it was made far more complicated for Plath because she still felt the need/desire to tell her mother everything. She never sufficiently separated from her mother. Her mother had expectations of her – not just of what she would accomplish but who she should be – and the stress of living up to that was finally too much.
This is not to lay the blame at Aurelia Plath’s feet. A person who commits suicide does that all by herself. It is her choice. Plenty of people grow up with domineering boundary-less mothers and don’t choose to commit suicide.
But all of these factors are indeed at play in Plath’s ultimate schism. The expectation that she should be this, this, and this, was too much for her to live up to – as a woman and as an artist – and once she shattered that mirror, or it was shattered for her by the dissolve of her marriage in 1961/62 – there was no going back. Failure was a big big deal to Sylvia Plath. And these letters, spilling over with frantic recitations of successes and achievements, pulsate with anxiety about failure. I think these letters show exactly the opposite of what Aurelia Plath hoped. It shows just how deeply and unhealthily intertwined these two were, and how neurotically Plath kept offering up her good news to her mother – when we know from her journals and poems that things were FAR from well. I don’t think there’s anything particularly odd about that. It’s just that Aurelia Plath’s publication of these personal letters – as a defense against the criticisms leveled against her (by her now-dead daughter), and also the vicious portrayal of the mother in Plath’s posthumously published The Bell Jar – opens her up to those attacks. That’s what you get, Mrs. Plath, for putting it out there. A college girl who writes her mother 3 letters a day, swooning with happiness that borders on ecstasy, sending her mother poems, tallying up her grades for her mother, and her scholarship money – doesn’t come across as a healthy happy girl who has a close relationship with her mom. She comes across as nervous, strung tight as a wire, and anxiously offering her mother accomplishments in a crescendo of nervous energy, the overall result being one of: “Do you approve of me now? Is it okay now? Is this enough? IS THIS ENOUGH, MOM???”
Aurelia Plath appears to have been a woman with ambitions in her own right (her introductory essays throughout Letters Home are incredibly revealing – but again, I don’t think they reveal what she thinks they reveal). In writing about her marriage to Otto Plath, Aurelia Schober, who was a teacher, writes, “Then I yielded to my husband’s wish that I become a full-time homemaker.” There’s a lot of anger in that line. Suppressed rage. “yielded to my husband’s wish”. Her language is full of strange passive-aggressive little digs like that, showing her to be the ruthless martyr that she was, and Sylvia Plath as a young girl got the message. Her mother had given up her whole LIFE for her. So Sylvia Plath ran around like a chicken with its head cut off to make SURE that her mother’s sacrifice had been worth it.
So these letters are very odd. And even odder is Aurelia Plath’s decision to publish them. It shows you just how blind people can be about things too close to them, as well as the shattering that occurs in the wake of a suicide. But you read these letters and you think, “Hmmm. I wonder if Aurelia Plath is really aware of the story these letters are telling.” It is NOT an antidote to the image we have of Plath of the suicidal avenger-poet. It is a counterpoint. I read these letters and think, “Wow. This girl is up-TIGHT. She needs to stop writing 3 letters a day to her mother as soon as possible.” Additionally, the letters are so highly edited that they are filled with ellipses that pepper the text, making you wonder what was left out. Again, I don’t think Aurelia Plath was fully aware of the impact all of those ellipses have on the text. It makes it look whitewashed, it makes it look sanitized. Frankly, it looks shady. It reminds me of the images we have of some of J. Edgar Hoover’s files, with almost an entire page blacked out, one or two words escaping the censor. It LOOKS like the text is hiding something.
Those ellipses have a cumulative effect.
It’s a messed up volume and Aurelia Plath (we don’t read her side of the correspondence) comes off worse than Plath does, which I think was the opposite of Aurelia Plath’s intentions. Aurelia Plath, in publishing her daughter’s letters, wanted to show that, contrary to all of the bitter poems, and The Bell Jar‘s portrayal of her, she and her daughter had a great relationship, as close as close could be. She is not bright enough, psychologically, to realize that that closeness WAS the problem. Sylvia Plath knew she could not tell her mother everything, she could not reveal to her the dark side of her life, her doubts, her rages … so she overcompensated in the other direction, and the split eventually became so vast that Plath had to put an ocean between them. (Plath was very explicit about all of this in her journals.) She understood she could not live near her mother. A visit from her mother to her home in England in the summer of 1962 (photo above) was shattering (Plath and Ted Hughes’ marriage was splitting up at that very point). Aurelia Plath, there to meet her grandson Nicholas Hughes (recently born) was aware of the tension and decided it was best to not stay with the couple, and found a room nearby. So obviously things were bad. It was the last time Aurelia Plath saw her daughter. Her mother’s visit was one of the sparks that lit the crazy fire, already burgeoning, of Plath’s final bout of productivity. She felt so revealed by her mother’s visit, her mother’s witnessing of her ultimate failure (being a good wife and mother) that she was devastated by it. So much for ‘we were close, we told each other everything’.
I don’t blame Aurelia Plath for her actions. The woman was doing the best she could. She had a lot of anger at her husband, for abandoning her (through dying), and for her own thwarted ambitions. She poured all of that neurosis into her daughter. But the mixed messages she gave her daugheter (“Don’t ‘yield’ to your husband’s wish to be a homemaker because it ruined MY life” as well as “Be a good girl. Don’t be a slut. Be conventional.”) were all too much of a psychological maelstrom for Sylvia Plath to withstand. She burned herself up in that fire of creativity.
To sum up: No, I do not find Letters Home to be a revealing look at another side of Sylvia Plath, the gushingly happy Sylvia Plath. To me, it’s all part of the same flow. I find the letters to be disingenuous anxious letters written (over-written) by a nervous girl to her overbearing mother, overwhelming her mother with how happy, happy, happy, happy she is. The letters make me actually nervous. I’m not saying Sylvia Plath was never happy, and that everything in the letters is a lie. I don’t believe that, either. But it’s the incessant chatter, the incessant desire to tell all to this woman, her mother, who actually DIDN’T have her best interests in mind, who was actually JEALOUS of her daughter, that makes it all ring rather hollow in the face of her best work, her most honest work, her poems.
Here’s a letter she wrote to her mother in 1956, when she was living in England, shortly after she met (and shortly before she married) Ted Hughes. Plath’s love for Ted was intense, real, and powerful. They clicked immediately. It was sexual and violent (their first meeting involved her biting his cheek, leaving him bloody – in the middle of a party!). It wouldn’t be until 1958-59, when Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath lived and taught in the Boston area, close to Mrs. Plath, that Sylvia Plath, in intense psychoanalysis, would really realize how destructive and too-close her relationship with her mother was. The writer’s block she experienced at that time was a direct result of being in close proximity with her mother, and Plath wrote in her journal pages and pages of feelings/thoughts about this: How much she hated her mother and also loved her, how nervous her mother made her, how inadequate her mother made her feel… Plath exhorted herself in her journals around that time to STOP sharing so much with her mother, to STOP offering up every poem she wrote as a little gift to her mother immediately upon finishing said poem. It was destructive.
Maybe I’m cynical (I know I am), but she’s pouring it on a bit thick here. It reads to me as grandiose and anxious to please her mother (Look how I cook, look how good I am, mother, look how well I am handling myself, look what a real and good woman I am), rather than a chatty letter full of good news.
Excerpt from Letters Home: Correspondence 1950-1963
SUNDAY MORNING
April 29, 1956
Dearest most wonderful of mothers,
I’m so struck full of joy and love I can scarcely stop a minute from dancing, writing poems, cooking and living. I sleep a bare eight hours a night and wake springing up merry with the sun. Outside myw indow now is our green garden with a pink cherry tree right under my window in full bloom, thick with thrushes caroling.
. . . I have written the seven best poems of my life which make the rest look like baby-talk. I am learning and mastering new words each day, and drunker than Dylan, harder than Hopkins, younger than Yeats in my saying. Ted reads in his strong voice: is my best critic, as I am his.
My philosophy supervisor Doctor Krook, is more than a miracle! She took me on an extra half hour last week, and I’m in medias res of Plato, marveling at the dialectic method, whetting my mind like a blue-bladed knife. Such joy.
Bodily, I’ve never been healthier: radiance and love just surge out of me like a sun. I can’t wait to set you down in its rays. Think, I shall devote two whole weeks of my life to taking utter care and very special tendering of you. I’ve already reserved London and Cambridge rooms . . . We’ll leave about the 22nd . . . for Paris, where I’ll see you through your first two or three days and get all set up for you so you’ll know what you want there, and then I’ll take off for a month of writing in Spain on the south coast . . . [getting] tan, doing nothing but writing, sunning and cooking. Maybe even learning to catch fish!
Ted is up here this week, and I have become a woman to make you proud. It came over me while we were listening to Beethoven, the sudden shock and knowledge that although this is the one man in the world for me, although I am using every fiber of my being to love him, even so, I am true to the essence of myself, and I know who that self is . . . and will live with her through sorrow and pain, singing all the way, even in anguish and grief, the triumph of life over death and sickness and war and all the flaws of my dear world . . .
I know this with a sure strong knowing to the tips of my toes, and having been on the other side of life like Lazarus, I know that my whole being shall be one song of affirmation and love all my life long. I shall praise the Lord and the crooked creatures He has made. My life shall be a constant finding of new ways and words in which to do this.
Ted is incredible, mother . . . wears always the same black sweater and corduroy jacket with pockets full of poems, fresh trout and horoscopes. In his horoscope book, imagine, it says people born in Scorpio have “squashed” noses!
. . . How I cook on one gas ring! Ted is the first man who really has a love of food . . . He stalked in the door yesterday with a packet of little pink shrimp and four fresh trout. I made a nectar of Shrimp Newburg with essence of butter, cream, sherry and cheese; had it on rice with the trout. It took us three hours to peel all the little tiny shrimp, and Ted just lay groaning by the hearth after the meal with utter delight, like a huge Goliath.
His humor is the salt of the earth; I’ve never laughed as hard and long in my life. He tells me fairy stories, and stories of kings and green knights, and has made up a marvelous fable of his own about a little wizard named Snatchcraftington, who looks like a stalk of rhubarb. He tells me dramas, marvelous colored dreams, about certain red foxes . . .
The reason why you must be at ease and not worry about my proud growing this time is because I have learned to make a life growing through toleration of conflict, sorrow, and hurt. I fear none of these things and turn myself to whatever trial with an utter faith that life is good and a song of joy on my lips. I feel like Job and will rejoice in the deadly blasts of whatever comes. I love others, the girls in the house, the boys on the newspaper, and I am flocked about by people who bask in my sun. I give and give; my whole life will be a saying of poems and a loving of people and giving of my best fiber to them.
This faith comes from the earth and sun; it is pagan in a way; it comes from the heart of man after the fall.
I know that within a year I shall publish a book of 33 poems which will hit the critics violently in some way or another. My voice is taking shape, coming strong. Ted says he never read poems by a woman like mine; they are strong and full and rich – not quailing and whining like Teasdale or simple lyrics like Millay; they are working, sweating, heaving poems born out of the way words should be said . . .
Oh, mother, rejoice with me and fear not. I love you, and Warren, and my dear suffering grammy and dear loving grampy with all my heart and shall spend my life making you strong and proud of me!
Enclosed a poem or two [“Firesong,” “Strumpet Song,” and “Complaint of the Crazed Queen”]. I don’t remember whether I sent you these.
Your loving
Sivvy
You are so right about all of this ! And the SP letter that you feature illustrates the point perfectly. This young woman is DESPERATE to be accepted by, and approved of, by Mommy. This isn’t just wanting to share some good news, it’s about needing desperately, desperately to be loved. No healthy person would want to be on the receiving end of all that, yet Aurelia (by publishing these letters) seems to have found it perfectly okay. Desirable, even. Your comment about her not being intelligent enough psychologically is spot-on.
“(I) shall spend my life making you strong and proud of me.” Says it all, really. Moral of the story : never try and appease vampires. Vampires will NEVER have enough, and they really will suck you dry. Psychotherapists see relationships like this all the time, embedded relationships that are way too close. The embedded people tend to see the “closeness” as a really good thing, and even as a virtue. My own father was like this with his mother, always trying to please, never succeeding. In my teenage years, I would have jumped for joy and opened a thousand champagne bottles if he had found the courage (or whatever it is) to tell that woman to get lost. Unfortunately (most of all for him), he never found the courage.
Great post. Very insightful. And I can only say I find SP’s journal entries around 1958-1959 the most painful and most honest entries of all, the ones when she is having therapy. I get the impression that the therapist was excellent.
God, I haven’t read this book for at least *mumble-mumble* years. I think that you nail it in your lucid introduction – these are quite disturbing documents, aren’t they? The little girl with the rictus-grin saying ‘look mummy, look what a good girl I’ve been’. The letter you quote is a good example: “Bodily, I’ve never been healthier: radiance and love just surge out of me like a sun. I can’t wait to set you down in its rays.” Blurgh.
I never finished the book. I found the letters too false and, eventually, tedious. But you’re right, the ellipses are intriguing. Perhaps AP cut those sections because they mentioned negatively people still then living. “Dearest mother, today I bitch-slapped that prissy old trout Olwyn halfway to Scunthorpe.”
And now everyone is dead, where is the “Collected Letters of Sylvia Plath”? We can’t wait for ever you know! Sorry, getting worked up.
Apart from the light that they shed on the mother-daughter relationship, and Plath’s mental health, do you think that the letters have much value? They seem to add little to the poems (apart from the chronology), or other
Sorry, that last bit should be “or otherwise to Plath’s biography.”
// “Dearest mother, today I bitch-slapped that prissy old trout Olwyn halfway to Scunthorpe.” //
Dying!!!! Now THAT would make an interesting letter.
I think only hard-core Plath fans could make it through these letters. They are definitely tedious and just really point out how the truth of the matter is in the poems, and in the journals (including the missing ones). They are helpful at times if you want to put a date on the completion of a poem – because she mentions such things so often to her mother – but Hughes did such a good job of dating each poem in The Collected Poems that it’s not really all that valuable.
The gushing “life is grand” language ends up reading vaguely psychotic after a while and you just feel bad for these two dames locked in this doomed dance.
And YES to your comment about the need for a collected volume of letters. I would LOVE to hear Plath’s correspondence with others – her friends and editors and colleagues – THAT would be a very interesting look at an unvarnished Plath, the business-woman Plath – ambitious and on top of her game (she always was, when it came to promoting herself). But those would be fascinating to read. Where are they??
Now that that “prissy old trout Olywn” is no longer in the picture (or – wait – is she or isn’t she? Who is in charge of Plath’s estate now? Frieda?) – maybe we can look forward to a nice juicy volume of real letters. Plath kept up a wide correspondence when she was in England – and you just kNOW that people kept those letters.
I get the impression that a struggling and talented writer would definitely want Sylvia Plath working for them. She got “Hawk in the Rain” published through force of will.
“Who is in charge of Plath’s estate now?”
I think Emory University in Atlanta has the majority of Hughes’s papers, and the British Museum has a large collection, but I don’t know about Plath. It’s vexing.
Frieda certainly has some control, as she was able to stop them using full poems in the movie “Sylvia” a few years ago, and it’s likely that she has possession of the archive.
I think there’s hope for us all if Frieda is in charge. I really like her.
What did you think of the Sylvia movie? I, naturally, went into it prepared to hate it – and I’m not really a Paltrow fan – but I thought it was pretty damn good, and Paltrow in particular was fantastic.
Oh, I loved it. I’m not a Paltrow fan, she’s a bit too smug, but you’re right, she was great in that. The last half hour when Sylvia disintegrates was superb. Daniel Craig was also excellent, stoic and sympathetic, if a little short.
I also loved that they reflect the most recent view (supported by Frieda, I think) that there was a reapproachment between Plath and Hughes just before her death. It leads some to conclude that she didn’t mean to kill herself. But I’m not sure.
Ooh, ooh, also Michael Gambon as the downstairs neighbour, so kind and so confused. Great stuff.
Yes, that re-connection scene in the freezing flat was heartbreaking – I totally believe it. They weren’t even divorced yet. They were just in the middle of a big ol’ marital mess.
Oh, and that scene with Gambon – which is apparently true – just killer. Paltrow has never been so raw. I had my doubts about her ability to show her disintegration – I could see her being the gleaming American girl in England and all that (and, unlike many movie actresses, I can actually buy Paltrow as an intellect, someone who reads, is well-read – I enjoyed her in Possession, too) – but wasn’t sure if she could pull of the 1962 year. My bad – she was phenomenal.
And yes, Daniel Craig was wonderful. I loved in particular the scene on the Cape when he comes home and she, in a panic, has baked 20 pies. He is totally baffled (which he wrote about a lot in The Birthday Letters) – like: why is she putting this happy-homemaker pressure on herself? It sure as hell isn’t coming from ME.
Also loved the choice to have Blythe Danner play Aurelia. She even looked like her- completely unrecognizable as the elegant breezy gorgeous Blythe Danner. She was all brittle and coiled-up with the perfect look from all of those photos – dark lipstick, strict cocktail dress … a very scary little cameo.
Panther – wow, that is a fascinating observation about the vampire, and I think it’s right on the money. These letters reveal way more than Aurelia Plath is aware, poor woman. I don’t blame her for wanting to believe she had a good close relationship with her daughter – but honestly, woman, publishing these? You have to be willfully BLIND to do that. Her preface, as I recall, has some quite bitter comments – referring to The Bell Jar as “the basest ingratitude” or something like that. You can feel how angry she is at the accusation pointed towards her by her dead daughter. Again, understandable – but to think that these letters would somehow vindicate her …
Cray cray!
I agree, too, about those 1958-59 journals. It is so nice to talk to someone who has such a clear memory of the Plath phases. They are indeed riveting reading – she was really getting her act together, putting together her issues and what was holding her back. You can feel what a survivor she was. And yes, that shrink seemed to be just what she needed, willing to say the tough things (“admit you hate your mother, come on, you can do it”) and sticking with her through that tough year.
Haha, no more reply buttons.
That bit of the story always gave me the chills. The downstairs neighbour reported that seven or eight minutes after he closed the door, he sensed that Plath was still there, so he went back out, and there she was, clutching her stamps and staring at the light. Creepy.
Blythe Danner is perfect. She gives the impression that what you are seeing is surface, and that the real Aurelia was somewhere beneath. That icy smile. Spot on.
I liked Jared Harris as Alvarez.
It’s been years since I read “Letters Home”, but that shrill “Sivvy” voice still rings in my ears.
Is my mind playing tricks on me? I seem to remember an anecdote that Aurelia would “grade” a very young Sylvia’s letters? stories? poems?
My belief is that the letters are not exactly her performance for her mother, nor are they the genuine truth. I think they are an interesting mix of several sides of Sylvia. In some letters (esp. when you cross reference with her journals), it seems Plath is expressing what she “wants” to be true about her life–loving husband, emerging poet, happy and resourceful homemaker, etc. She wanted those things very much and worked hard to find a balance between domesticity and professional success years before the phrase “work life balance” ever existed. The letters are certainly a side of Plath that she strove to live out and she wanted her mother to be proud of her, certainly. You can see the letters as a kind of “wish fulfillment” but also as a kind of desires to erase the shadow side, the pain of trying to keep it all together. It’s a sort of “if I say this is my life, it must be true.” Her letters also contain central, core concepts about her quest in life(desire for motherhood on her own terms, ambitions for Ted and herself, struggle to balance artistic freedom with need for money). Sylvia was a remarkable woman.
Many of her papers are at the Lilly library at Indiana U. Years ago I stopped in and spent an afternoon looking through scrapbooks, letters not published, and other materials. The librarian said to me (with a sigh) when I indicated why I was there: “Gee, I thought everything had already been written about her already.” Lady, you have no idea.
Sheila (that is my name also, by the way, my real name), the “basest ingratitude” thing is also a frequent feature of these relationships, where parent is vampirizing child. “You aren’t grateful enough for all the things I’ve done for you” is how such a parent keeps the child in line, i.e. through guilt. Sylvia HAD to be grateful, HAD to appease this woman, at least when she was a child and then a teenager, because the father was dead, she had no-one else. (Grandparents, yes, but she would have been aware that they were elderly, perhaps not in great health. In other words, mortal.) And if you’ve spent your childhood and adolescence being desperately grateful, stroking the other person’s feathers, etc. . .well, it’s going to be very, very difficult breaking away. Doesn’t she write in one of her poems (“Medusa” ?) of being ” caught in your coils” ?
Her baking of the 20 pies in “Sylvia” made me laugh. But it’s so telling. . . it definitely is not Hughes wanting her to be this domestic goddess. It’s pressure from within, to be conventional, to be “the good wife”, “the homemaker.” All drummed into her by Aurelia who also wanted her to be an extremely successful (and secure) academic, AND a renowned poet, AND (before marriage) a clean-cut virgin. And always a prize-winner, and a grade A student. So many demands.
I’m not surprised she had times of paralysis, when she felt she could not write. I am AMAZED that she wrote as much as she did as well as she did.And once she broke out of the shiny, brittle, thesaurus-consulting poetic voice, there was no stopping her.
Remember Aurelia’s capitalization of THE BOOK and THE CHAPTER when referring to her husband’s work in the introduction? Still so angry after all those years.
Yes! She really was in a rage, wasn’t she – I had forgotten about that. Then there’s the letter that Sylvia made her sign after the death of her husband that she would never marry again. Aurelia seemed to write it off as a joke – and that of course she would never marry again – even though she was a young woman when he died. An odd intertwined moment.
Patty – // Lady, you have no idea. //
Ha!! Exactly.
I can see your point, her imagining and her wish-fulfillment, the concepts/themes of her poems manifest in the images she uses in her letters. They are certainly not worthless documents, but I do find them tedious and also disturbing.
I suspect that Aurelia was one of those people (usually women ?) who would never, ever, EVER admit that she was angry. But it comes out in other ways, of course. Passive-aggression. And, I would suggest, it comes out in publishing these letters, all the difficult bits (difficult for Aurelia herself) cut out, and with these seething-but-smiling-nicely editorial comments. It’s like she’s saying to Sylvia, “I’ll make everybody see that I was NOT at fault ! I’ll show them how ungrateful you were, writing these letters to ME and then dissing me behind my back !”
Of course, as you’ve pointed out, that is not what we do see when we read these letters. We see a highly-strung young woman trying desperately, ceaselessly, in every way she knows (3 times A DAY ????) to get the approval of her mother. And a young woman who has her mother’s genuine acceptance and love does not need to do that.
The sentimentality in these letters is one of the most disturbing things. “I know that my whole being will be one song of affirmation and love all my life long”. ?. . .oh, dear. And all this, you’ll come to London and I’ll really bend over backwards to care for you and give you a marvellous time and. . . ? SP clearly feels she has to look after her mother and her mother’s needs 24/7. This isn’t just welcoming, it’s lying down in front of someone and saying “Walk over me. It doesn’t matter at all. It’ll be a joy and a privilege.”
The relationship that comes over in this book is sick. In the genuine sense of that word. And no, Aurelia cannot see this. That is part of the sickness.
Lots of projection here–as always with Plath zealots–together with equal parts identification and psychobabble from the “child’s” point of view. It reminds me of Mark Twain’s observation about the astonishing metamorphosis his parents underwent between the time he was 12 and 22, when those erstwhile imbeciles apparently used the intervening years to acquire astonishing wisdom. Allowing that I suffer from the double disadvantage of both being a parent and having actually known Aurelia Plath for over a decade, I find myself somewhat less glib than commentators on this site when it comes to assessing Aurelia Plath’s habits of mind and behavior as a parent. One small factual point, however: All deletions from LETTERS HOME indicated by ellipses were enforced by Ted Hughes against the express wishes of Aurelia Plath. So much for that bit of delusion anyway… [ellipses here represent most of the others as well].