Plath’s stories about forgotten women were destined themselves to remain forgotten—like her early poetry, they have received virtually no attention from scholars or biographers. Yet these early stories are among the most interesting in Plath’s juvenilia, for they reveal her intense interest in lonely women living on the periphery of society. After numerous rejections, she would abandon this subject matter in favor of less literary, more formulaic stories designed to appeal to a mass audience that, in the early 1950s, had little taste for what Thoreau called “lives of quiet desperation.” Yet she thought that these rejected stories were “better, less trite, less syrupy” than those she would eventually publish, which she called “the usual ‘Seventeen’ drivel.”16 She would return to the image of the disenfranchised woman in both The Bell Jar and Ariel, in which her female characters deliver scathing critiques of the patriarchal, conformist society that had relegated them to the margins.
Eight of the nineteen stories Plath wrote during high school (1948–1950) are about working-class women full of dreams and paralyzed by their meager circumstances. If James Joyce’s Dubliners was a literary model, Aurelia was a personal one. In nearly all of these stories, Plath pits freedom and escape against a small life of drudgery and solitude. Madness and suicide threaten.
In “Heat” (1948), Judith Anders trudges home from her boring office job to her boarding house. As she waits for the bus in unbearable heat, a voice inside her head berates her for succumbing to a life of “The same work, day in, day out….Filing letters, pounding typewriters. So dull, so dull.” The voice within exhorts her to “get away” and “Break the pattern”—“Find yourself.” Judith answers back that she likes to draw and write; the voice tells her it’s not too late to pursue a different, less bleak life. When she reaches her boarding house, she goes to her room and immediately falls asleep. When she hears the phone ringing for her, she is too tired to answer. The voice in her mind says the person calling is about to give her a “chance to open the door” to another life. But Judith keeps sleeping. “There was no escape,” Plath ends.
Similarly, in “East Wind” (1949), the spinster Miss Minton suddenly realizes, on her way home from her dull job, that she must “escape” from her “monotonous” life. Her resolve to escape weakens as she nears her dismal apartment building, and she contemplates drowning herself in the nearby river. But at the last minute she pulls back and returns to her lodgings, haunted by the “thin, lonely weeping” of an orphan child outside. Miss Minton would reappear, in richer form, in Plath’s award-winning short story “Sunday at the Mintons,” which would win first prize in the 1952 Mademoiselle college fiction contest.
Like “East Wind,” “Gramercy Park” (1948), “Sarah” (1948), and “The Island” (1949) all feature older women living alone and longing for company.17 In “The Island”—a “radio play” Plath cowrote with her Crockett classmate Mary Ventura—the drowning cry of Helen, a lonely widow (“I’m sinking down…down”) recalls the last line of Plath’s poem “Lorelei”: “Stone, stone, ferry me down there.” In “The Dark River” (1949), a single woman cannot feel love on account of “the mysterious black river” of her childhood; the girl she once was is “doomed forever to wander through the lonely hallways of my mind.” The source of the “black river” is never revealed, but the protagonist’s hints of childhood trauma suggest a dramatic, perhaps paternal, loss.
“The Brink” (1948), which was rejected by Seventeen, is the psychologically distressing story of a single woman, Janet, who loses her grip on reality while riding a city bus on her way home from a dead-end job. The following passage looks forward to the sinister train ride, dark tunnels, and mocking wheels in Plath’s 1952 short story “Mary Ventura and the Ninth Kingdom”:
When had she started her journey? She had been on the bus for ages, but she remembered nothing before that. There had been houses, people, and cars, but no beginning—nothing before her bus ride. Her memories suddenly trailed down into darkness. The motion of the bus was ironic now. The turning wheels mocked her. They gulped up the miles and mocked her for not remembering. Darkness, she recalled. A dark tunnel! That was it! She had come out of a dark tunnel on the bus. Still, there was something, something more.
The story’s title suggests that she has come close to an unveiling, and looks forward to Plath’s late poem “Edge.” Is Janet mad, or has she simply come out of the “darkness” to finally understand the true, hollow nature of existence? Is it this realization that drives her to “the brink” of insanity? Plath will posit similar questions in The Bell Jar regarding Esther Greenwood’s breakdown, which may, she hints, be a “sane” response to the oppressive society in which she lives.
The nameless young woman searching for a cheap room in 1948’s “The Attic View” suffers a darker fate. She rents an attic garret with a view of the sea in a boarding house near the harbor, despite its lack of heat and electricity; the view is her only solace in a tedious existence. One day, she hears about a “secretarial night-course for working-girls. This sudden possibility of a future—of advancement—was like a glittering rainbow in her dismal world.” She enrolls in the course, but falls ill after walking home in a blizzard. No one except a fellow boarder, “a shy young artist,” notices that she has not appeared for meals. The landlady eventually finds her dead, and complains to her cronies “how she had been done out of a month’s rent.” Only the young artist cares about the woman’s death—a significant detail in a story that pits uncaring and “impersonal” humanity against the sensitive individual. The story ends as another young woman moves in, similarly seduced by the “romantic vistas of ocean, land and sky from her attic window.”
“The Attic View” is melodramatic, but it contains a pointed, politically subversive message: the heroine, who dares to hope for more, dies when she tries to escape oppression. For the editors of women’s magazines in the late 1940s and early ’50s, these stories’ messages were perhaps too close to the kind of leftist ideology that was increasingly linked to communism. Plath, whose family lived on the edge of financial hardship, sympathized with characters trapped in poverty by economic and social forces beyond their control. By her third year with Crockett, she was writing working-class dramas in the tradition of the Irish socialist playwright Seán O’Casey, such as her short, grim 1950 play, Room in the World, about a poor tenement family facing desperate times. Plath was a keen observer of the American political landscape and the double standards that defined her socioeconomic place within it.
Another group of high school stories provides a clue about what would come to be one of the central concerns of Plath’s writing life: power. These stories, written between 1948 and 1950, are all set in a comfortable, suburban, middle-class world, yet they too explore the politics of gender and circle back to women’s powerlessness.
“The Visitor” (1948) weighs the merits of marriage against those of a career. The narrator, Margot, recounts a visit from her mother’s old art school friend, Esther Holbrook, who has now become a famous fashion designer. Margot’s mother, by contrast, married a minister and had four children after graduation. The story explores the two women’s choices in simplistic terms. Margot thinks, initially, that Esther is the more secure: “Esther would describe an experience in Paris or an amusing incident that occurred in London, always managing to suggest the slight superiority of the career woman over the woman who had forfeited ambition and settled down in marriage.” Yet by the story’s end, Esther reveals her “envy” of Margot’s mother: “I never realized how empty my life has been without a family.” The married mother would achieve a similar victory over the “career woman” years later in Plath’s 1960 short story “Day of Success” (published posthumously in 1975).
Plath probably wrote “The Visitor” with an eye toward publication in a conservative women’s magazine like Ladies’ Home Journal. Her own feelings about a career versus marriage and motherhood were much more complicated.
Her mother’s experience as a college instructor, with both its intellectual rewards and familial sacrifices, provided a vivid example of this conflict in her own home. After the war, there was tremendous pressure on women to vacate the workforce for returning soldiers; to remain employed was considered an abdication of feminine duty. Aurelia’s experience assured Plath that it was possible to join a profession and raise a family, yet the stigma of a working mother was very real in white, middle-class, mid-century America. Plath’s constant negotiation between domesticity and a literary career would become one of the central dramas of her life.
Other “suburban” stories from this period are narrated by high school girls and based on events in Plath’s adolescence. They examine “the game” played between girls and boys in sexually charged situations. In “A Day in June,” two girlfriends trick a pair of boys into paying for their canoe during an outing. “Why not prove your power? Why not?” asks the female narrator, who attempts to appear “coquettish.” “It takes a while to persuade the boys that you have no money, but you conceal your wallets in your pockets and play the game.” Later, the girls feel “ashamed,” and they eventually repay the boys, who walk away, disgusted. The narrator is overcome by self-hatred: “The afternoon shatters around you into a million glassy fragments. Malicious, dancing slivers of green and blue and yellow light rise and whirl about you…suffocating, smothering flakes of color.” Plath suggests that the narrator’s misery is the result of larger societal forces beyond her control. The girls have been taught to “prove” their “power” through passive coquetry, but they sense that they have demeaned their self-worth in the process.
“First Date” is an interior monologue in which a teenage girl feels paralyzed as she waits to be picked up by the proverbial “boy in a yellow convertible.” She longs to run from the scene, to tell her date that she is sick, but she knows her mother will not allow this. At the same time, she fears the boy will not come. “I think I am going to be sick. This time I really am,” the girl says, gliding demurely down the staircase to her waiting date, who has no idea how much anxiety he has caused. But the reader knows. Plath suggests that there is something wrong with a ritual in which a woman waits while a man acts. Her protagonist longs to be subject rather than object. The girl’s repeated claim of sickness becomes a metaphor for all that is wrong between the sexes.
The lonely, single women in Plath’s boarding house stories are casualties of romantic failure; without a marriage and family, they are doomed to lives of monotony and wage slavery. They are obvious examples of what happens when women opt out of “the game.” But stories like “A Day in June” and “First Date,” with their portraits of unhappy young women trapped within a game whose rules they have not created, also hint at the roots of female powerlessness. The fate of Plath’s single women suggests the high price of not playing.
* * *
AS COLLEGE APPLICATION SEASON DREW NEAR, Sylvia, now a junior, was increasingly aware of the financial gulf that separated her from friends who regarded European graduation trips and fully paid college tuition as their birthright. Earning top grades was no longer just for fun. She had to win a scholarship if she hoped to attend Smith College. Aurelia was distressed by the way Sylvia would work at her typewriter for eight consecutive hours, forgetting to eat: “She drove herself furiously.”18 Yet Pat remembered that Aurelia would often say, “She’s just got to get this scholarship,” and that Sylvia knew “the pressure was on.”19
In January 1949, she began studying hard for her midyear exams in English, Latin, French, and math. Despite her hours in the library, she still found time for weekend dates. In her diary she listed twelve boys she had “gone out with” during the 1948–1949 academic year. Many of these dates took place at school dances or the Totem Pole club, but one stood out: the Phillips Andover spring prom with Mike Sides, the brother of a Wellesley friend. Andover was the most elite prep school in the nation, and Sylvia could not help but marvel at the invitation. She spent the balmy May evening dancing amid Japanese lanterns and belle époque decorations, “falling in love” with her dance partners. The posh weekend was the “most outstanding” of her junior year—yet another tantalizing reminder of the privileged world that awaited her if she worked hard enough.20 This was also the month Mr. Crockett famously rounded up his charges to watch the sun rise over Babson Park and recite poetry. Sylvia wrote, “The early hour was so that everyone could hear ‘dawn take her first breath’ and thereby reach a higher ‘kinship with infinity.’ ”21 At year’s end, she and her old crush Frank Irish were named coeditors of The Bradford. Her “exceptional ability as a writer,” her “keen critical eye,” and her “noteworthy reputation of sticking to a task until it is done” were all noted in the Bradford article that announced her editorship.22
In June, Sylvia began playing tennis at the Wellesley College and town courts. She often played with Mary Ventura, a fellow Crocketteer and talented writer to whom she had grown close. (She would later write a short story about Mary and use her name in some of her fiction, though their paths diverged after high school.) She called the tennis courts, where she met several dates, her “stage” that summer. Under the informal instruction of various athletic young men, she made progress, though her high school friends remembered that she did not play very well.23 Still, by the end of the summer she was confident enough to compete in local tournaments. “I must talk firmly to myself and be convinced that it is not a matter of life and death or lifelong disgrace if I lose!” she wrote Hans in August 1949.24
On the tennis courts she met John Hodges, a Wellesley boy and rising Denison University sophomore. They started playing regularly, and soda dates to Howard Johnson’s and drives around the countryside followed. John began teaching her how to drive, letting her steer as he put his arm around her. She called the lessons a “nervous strain.”25 The two exchanged photos during the last week of June before she left for a Unitarian youth conference on Star Island in New Hampshire.
Star Island, part of the Isles of Shoals off the New Hampshire coast, had been a Unitarian retreat destination since 1915. Visitors stayed at the Oceanic Hotel, a grand white Victorian structure with a long, expansive porch that overlooked Gosport Harbor. The co-ed youth retreat, officially dubbed the “High School Week at Star Island,” attracted about 160 Unitarian high school students from well-off Massachusetts suburbs. There were two-hour-long morning workshops on “religion, world affairs, human relations, and personal and racial problems” and afternoon sessions devoted to developing Unitarian youth groups at home.26 Sylvia chose to attend the “Personal Problems” workshop, held outdoors each morning. “What a place!” she wrote to Hans in early July. “I came away even more determined that there is a magnificent power above us all—call it nature, or call it God—which is responsible for the vast beauty of heaven and earth….I cannot help but be awed by the huge glory of the painted sunsets, or the first rosy light of dawn across the ocean.”27 Each night, the retreat members (or “Shoalers”) carried candlelight lanterns up the steep hill into the Gosport Chapel, a stark, stone meetinghouse built on the island’s highest point, where they hung them on brackets in the wall. The ritual’s simple beauty astonished Plath. In her diary, she wrote, “Chapel is lovely….There is something here I have never experienced before—complete peace and love for all the clean-cut, scrubbed young faces around me, with promise and talent latent in them.”28
Sylvia had no shortage of dates when she returned to Wellesley on July 3, just in time to attend the Independence Day fireworks in the town park. When she and John Pollard went on a double date with Betsy and Jack Hoag in early July, Jack pulled up in a “flashy convertible,” but Sylvia claimed to be unimpressed, especially when he began bragging about his position as a junior manager at his father’s advertising firm. “Betsy and I nearly burst out laughing as he explained how he wears a ‘coat & tie’ to work, and he’s eventually going to take over his ‘father’s place as
president.’ So he’s enterprising…so money’s important—(so I think of John sweating it out in Denison’s [sic]factory in Framingham).”29
She normally came home from dates at one or two in the morning after a long but frustrating necking session. One date, Bruce Ellwell, took her to the stock car races in Westboro, which, to her surprise, she enjoyed: “the roar of the motors is quite intoxicating and there are enough minor accidents to make things exciting—wheels coming off, skids into fences, collisions, etc.” Later, though, she was horrified by a bad accident she witnessed, and disgusted by her own attraction to the violence: “I was shocked & sick that life seemed such a paltry thing—that people could enjoy the rest of the races—the speeding cars, courting death & destruction. But I was too much one of the crowd—the spirit was intoxicating….Am I heartless like the rest of that bloodthirsty mob?”30
She was troubled by her desire to go parking with Bruce after the accident; there was something perverse about sexual desire after the “death & destruction” of the races. But she was “only human,” she mused in her diary, not “bad.” She worried, as usual, about appearing “fast,” and upset that she had to play a “prim part.” But she did not want to attract the “wrong kind of boy.”
Why is everyone so embarrassed and secretive about physical differences & intercourse, etc? Maybe if we could talk without such inhibitions, sex problems would be easier to solve. Mine is = how far can I go & still have a guy respect me? Naturally I would never have intercourse & I know enough now to control any guy I meet. Also I don’t go in for heavy petting even though it might prove satisfying. But just kissing & hugging or necking…it’s fun and what’s wrong with that?
She felt that she had been naive about her previous romantic encounters and had developed a reputation as “cheap & easy-to-get.” But she vowed that things would be “different” her senior year. She had learned her lesson. “I’m pretty,” she declared, “and someday, if I’m ready, I’ll create the right one in my mind & he’ll come.”31
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