Sylvia Plath: A Biography Read Online Free PDF Page A

circumstances surrounding it, that she wished to die herself — or so she later told friends.
    One of the most frightening immediate reactions to Otto’s death was a quick reversal in the family’s financial position. Otto was not entitled to a pension from Boston University, so the only financial resource the family had was an insurance policy, and much of it went for Otto’s medical expenses. After Aurelia spent $375 for a burial plot, she had little money left. She quickly returned to teaching high school languages. For a position that paid $25 a week, she left home at 5:30 a.m. to commute to Braintree High School, where she taught three classes of German and two of Spanish each day, in a post that was considered part-time. Her own health problems worsened and by the next year her duodenal ulcer, which had developed during the last two years of Otto’s life, became serious. Warren and Sylvia were also frequently sick. The week after their father’s death, in fact, they got measles, followed by pneumonia for Warren and sinusitis for Sylvia. The next summer, both children had tonsillectomies.
    Financial worry increased within the Schober family too when, a few days after Otto’s funeral, Frank Schober, Sr., lost his job with the Dorothy Muriel Corporation because of management changes. Then he was told that some eye problems from macular degeneration would steadily worsen, so he left accounting completely and took a job as maitre d’hôtel at the Brookline Country Club.
    As the older child, Sylvia felt responsible for much of the financial worry her family was experiencing, and she also feared further change. Her reaction to Otto’s death was a natural one — an overwhelming fear of losing the parent who was left. When she came home from school on the day she learned of Otto’s death, she brought a note for Aurelia to sign. It promised that her mother would never remarry. Aurelia willingly signed the note, unthinkingly reinforcing Sylvia’s sense that she was herself an adult. Always central in the life of her family, Sylvia expected events to revolve around her.
    Losing Otto, then, made Sylvia heavily dependent on her mother. Her later fiction showed that shifting alliance, from the father as head of the family to the mother as the source of all support and love. No wonder Sylvia was fearful about her standing with her mother: she had in the past been judged more critically, she felt, by Aurelia than by Otto. It was her mother’s letters that urged her to be better, to do more difficult things, to try to excel.
    One of the interesting patterns in Sylvia’s writing about her parents is that she consistently described Otto’s death in terms of the child’s loss. Her attention remained on the child as she comes to understand absence and on the child as different, as an outsider, because of the absence of a parent. “You will be aware of an absence, presently,” she wrote in a late poem to her own son, after her husband was no longer living with her and the children. In her powerful story “Among the Bumblebees,” written in 1952 for a Smith College English class, she created the picture of a daughter bereft after the death of her father.
    The story opens with the, Biblical-sounding “ In the beginning there was Alice Denway’s father, tossing her up in the air until the breath caught in her throat, and catching her and holding her in a huge bear hug.” From that initial comforting image of the father as protector, in control whether he is in the ocean or on campus, Plath describes his descent into illness and death. In the closing scene when the child Alice monitors the weak pulsing of his heart, she realizes that he is about to die, that he has forgotten her as he has withdrawn into the “core of himself.” She has already lost the powerful parent who had earlier made her feel as if, with him, “she could face the doomsday of the world.”
    Once her father was dead, Sylvia was less sure about her