When English Heritage proposed putting a blue commemorative plaque on the Fitzroy Road building, Frieda insisted that it be placed on the wall of 3 Chalcot Square, where her parents had lived for nearly two years and where they wrote some of their best work. The ensuing attacks from those who believed the plaque should be at the Fitzroy Road residence exacerbated Frieda’s anger about the way her mother has been “dissected, analyzed, reinterpreted, reinvented, fictionalized, and in some cases completely fabricated.” Still, like her father, Frieda has come forward with an Ariel—only this time it is exactly what those analyzers and reinventors have desired for nearly five decades: a Sylvia Plath composed by the poet herself, silent no more.
APPENDIX A
Sylvia Plath and Carl Jung
The Smith archive includes several pages of notes Plath took while reading Carl Jung’s The Development of Personality. Unfortunately, no dates are affixed to the passages that Plath copied out, and she does not annotate her responses to them. Plath scholar Judith Kroll suggests this material dates from late 1962, because it deals with “many topics relevant to her concerns near the end of her life.” Uninterested in dealing with Plath in biographical terms—or at least unwilling to do so—Kroll, like Diane Middlebrook and Jacqueline Rose, is more concerned with exploring how both Plath and Hughes made use of Jung in their work. As Margaret Dickie Uroff notes, Plath wrote her mother about reading Jung for her senior thesis on Dostoevsky, and Plath herself notes in a 4 October 1959 journal entry that reading Jung confirms her use of certain images in her “Mummy” story—especially that of the child dreaming of a “loving, beautiful mother as a witch or animal,” and another image of the “eating mother … all mouth.” Although critics like Kroll and Rose shy away from the biographical approach, Plath herself had no problem with it, concluding that she was the “victim” of what she wrote and not an “analyst. My ‘fiction’ is only a naked recreation of what I felt, as a child and later, must be true.”
Less fastidious than her academic commentators, Plath realized that her “fiction” could be read both ways: as stories and as accounts of her own life. The problems for the biographer, however, are chronology and causation. It would be illuminating to know if Kroll is right about the passages coming so late in Plath’s development as an individual and as a writer. Then Jung is a kind of “proof” for Plath, and also, perhaps, a catalyst for her final burst of creativity. If the passages come earlier, a case could be made for them as influences, writing that shaped her psyche and her style. Critic Tim Kendall argues that Jung served as Plath’s vindication while she also becomes “her own case history.” It is the same dual role—both victim and analyst of her victimhood—she plays in “Daddy,” Kendall concludes.
This discussion of Plath and Jung appears in an appendix precisely because her handwritten quotations from Jung cannot be dated and thus cannot be confidently inserted into a narrative of her life. Even so, what Plath copied explains certain mysteries that appear in her journals and letters. To begin with, what exactly did Aurelia do to Sylvia that made her both grateful and hostile? Both the Smith and Emory archives contain letters from a mystified Aurelia, who emphasized how tactful and tolerant she tried to be with Sylvia.
Carl Jung ratified much of what Sylvia (and her fictional alter-ego, Esther) felt, observing that parents “set themselves the fanatical task of ‘doing the best for the children’ and ‘living only for them.’” As a result, parents never develop themselves, so focused are they on thrusting their “best” down their children’s’ throats. “This so-called ‘best’ turns out to be the very things the parents have most badly neglected in themselves. Thus children are goaded on to achieve their parents’ most dismal failures and are loaded with ambitions that are never fulfilled.” Precisely so. Aurelia writes in the introduction to Letters Home that after the first year of her marriage, she realized she would have no peace with Otto unless she did exactly as he said. Her own proud independence, her literary interests, would have to be subordinated to his work. In a letter to Ted Hughes that is in the Emory archive, an agonized Aurelia tells Ted (years after Sylvia’s death) how she longed to share her joy in literature, instead of constantly playing the nurturing mother—not only to Sylvia, but also to Ted when the couple visited—and she did everything in her power to make them comfortable, never demanding any time for herself. One of Aurelia’s notes in the Smith archive welcomes Ted and Sylvia home with the announcement that the refrigerator is not only full, it is stocked with ready-made meals. She did not want a dependent life for Sylvia, and yet Sylvia found it hard not to replicate her mother’s marriage to a powerful man. She “inherited” the desire to abase herself—which haunted her even as she arose from her bed with Ted to become her own person and poet.
Aurelia’s insistence that she did not project herself onto Sylvia is countered by Jung: “The infectious nature of the parents’ complexes can be seen from the effect their mannerisms have on their children. Even when they make completely successful efforts to control themselves, so that no adult could detect the least trace of a complex, the children will get wind of it somehow.” Jung told the story of a mother with three loving daughters who were disturbed about their dreams, which all had to do with her turning into a ravening animal. Years later, the women went insane, dropping onto all fours and imitating the sounds of wolves and pigs. All this and more Plath noted in four pages of verbatim passages.
Plath copied out other passages in Jung that attacked the “sanctity of motherhood,” noting that mothers had produced their share of lunatics, idiots, and criminals. As much as Plath embraced motherhood, she also found she had a profound need not to sentimentalize it. She pointed out in letters to Paul and Clarissa Roche that taking care of children was an exhausting enterprise. No wonder she became enraged when her husband told her family life was becoming too much for him. Her death, in a way, finally forced fatherhood on him, making it his inescapable fate.
A final page of passages on marriage may indicate why Kroll believed Plath was reading Jung in the latter part of 1962. Jung describes marriage as a return to childhood and to the mother’s womb in an effort to recapture the community of feeling that adults so rarely achieve. As parents, husband and wife become part of the “life urge.” But this initial harmony inevitably turns to anguish and pain for anyone who puts a premium on individuality and independence. Sometimes the Jung quoted in Plath’s copied-out passages sounds very like her own verse, as here, where he describes the trajectory of marriage: “First it was passion, then it became a duty & finally an intolerable burden, a vampire that battens on the life of its creator.” In Ted Hughes, in other words, Sylvia had created a monster.
APPENDIX B
Sylvia Plath’s Library
Plath underlined, starred, and annotated the following passages in books now part of her collection at Smith College. These selections reflect her wide reading in literature, philosophy, and theology that led her to believe in the primacy of the poet. In literature, especially in the work of D. H. Lawrence, she could read the prophecy of her own life and the means by which she would accomplish her own death.
[W]hile all of us, at bottom, pursue only our private interest, we wear these fair disguises in order to put others off their guard, and expose them the more to our wiles and machinations. [In the right-hand margin, Plath wrote, “good.”]