Sylvia Plath: A Biography Read Online Free PDF

place in the world, about her mother’s ability to care for her — about her very existence. But she continued to benefit from the love of her strong mother and the Schober family, as well. Her father’s death may have struck like a hurricane, but the efforts of her extended family helped her rebuild her young, promising life.
     

 
    2 - Adolescence
     
    1940 - 47
     
    “Once I Was Ordinary”
     
    For a time after Otto’s death, Sylvia and Warren had a great deal of attention. They no longer had to share Aurelia’s energy with an ailing husband, and they gained the care of their grandparents as well. When Aurelia went back to teaching, the Schobers moved in with the Plaths at 892 Johnson Avenue, putting their own house up for sale.
    The emotional fabric of the new family was quite different. The family before had been characterized by order and control, with Otto Plath the unquestioned patriarchal head of the household. Now it was less formally organized; authority was divided. Aurelia made decisions but she was still, in her mid-thirties, a relatively young daughter and she relied on her parents’ opinions. She was happy within a traditional framework. In effect, Sylvia and Warren had moved back in time at least part of a generation. The household norm became that of their European grandparents as often as it was that of their mother. There are indications that Aurelia was often tired beyond endurance, and that she needed whatever help her family could provide.
    Mrs. Schober became particularly influential. Not only was she at home all day, to be with the children and to cook and clean, she was also the licensed driver. Aurelia Plath would not learn to drive for a dozen more years, so the family car, a second-hand Plymouth, belonged to her mother. After some investment losses during the 1920s, Frank had turned control of the family finances over to his wife. The Plath—Schober household gradually became a matriarchy. The change was confusing for Sylvia; she had spent her younger days identifying with her father and grandfather, even preferring zippers on clothes instead of buttons, and now she was surrounded by women’s things and women’s attitudes.
    For the Plath-Schober family — certainly for Sylvia 1942 was the year of decision. It was the year that the family moved inland. It is significant that in Sylvia’s recollections, her father’s death and the move to Wellesley came at the same time. In fact, she was eight when her father died in 1940 and nearly ten when the family moved away from Winthrop in 1942. She writes in The Bell Jar that she was happiest before she was nine. With psychological accuracy rather than factual correctness, Plath the writer fuses many events, any one of which might have created apprehension for a child: her father’s death, her mother’s being away from home teaching, her grandparents’ coming to live with them, her mother’s illnesses, the war, and the move to Wellesley away from the school and the two homes — the Schobers’ as well as the Plaths’ — that had been most familiar to her.
    One of the reasons for the move to Wellesley was that Aurelia had been offered a position at Boston University. In a course in Medical Secretarial Procedures, which she created, she taught methods of interviewing patients, the nomenclature of disease, procedures for handling insurance forms, case histories, and office maintenance. The move was also meant to benefit the family’s health — Mrs. Schober’s arthritis and the children’s sinus problems would be better inland. Moving to Wellesley also located the Plaths in an elite upper-middle-class suburb, where education was valued and where Wellesley College might provide a good education for Sylvia.
    Soon after they moved, however, Aurelia experienced a frightening gastric hemorrhage. She was hospitalized three weeks in the winter of 1943 and, despite the Schobers’ loving care for the children, Sylvia was terribly afraid her