Eddie tried to convince Sylvia that there was no shame in sex before marriage. Like her, he was bothered by the sexual double standard. “I feel that a woman has a right to her sexual life just as a man does,” he wrote to her in October 1950.32 He even laid out a sardonic list of rules for Seventeen heroines: they must not smoke, drink, argue, have breasts, or “be possessed of the organs of reproduction, nor of the desires which accompany same.” If she breaks these rules, “the heroine must thoroughly regret such transgressions in the end.”33
These were refreshing words for a young woman who had been troubled by these double standards, but sometimes Sylvia pushed back against Eddie’s sexual freethinking. She rightly noted that men did not have to worry about pregnancy or getting a “fast” reputation (“everyone sets on the girl like buzzards”). She felt that losing her virginity before marriage would damage her chances of finding an “idealistic husband.”34 Eddie tried to reassure her that was not the case. “The only thing I can say to that is just plain old-fashioned B. S. Maybe the church-going hypocrites who so solidly support the double standard stick to that, but the guys I consider real idealists, the ones who fight for the little guy, knock down racial barriers, stick their neck out by hollering against war, get called red or crackpot for whatever they do or say—they are the ones who love a woman, not her past. As an aside, most of them wouldn’t have a virgin, and the reasons for that feeling are also many and sound.” Sex with the right person, before marriage, was worth it. He and his girlfriend “were never happier” than when they were sleeping together during their four-month relationship. But each solution was “individual.”35 She had to decide what was right for her.
Like Sylvia, Eddie was deeply skeptical about the hawkish direction in which America was heading. “Last night when we were riding in, I was listening to Truman,” he wrote to her that September.
I was feeling alive to the hilt with the vigor of the experience, and there he was telling me that after all this living, I’m going to die in Korea. Why WHY WHY WHY??? I want to know what the hell its [sic] all about. I’m damned if I intend to stop living for a lot of fancy slogans. Give me the reasons, in human terms, tell me why I must kill Yaakov Shmudnig and he must kill me….But don’t tell me I’m saving the world—from what? Are the Chinese or Koreans worse off under Communism than under our often peculiar forms of “Democracy”?36
He later mused that communism would triumph in the end if it was right, and he called General Douglas MacArthur “a megalomaniac, neo-Prussian.”37 He knew that these sentiments could get him into trouble, but he trusted Plath. She responded with a heartfelt letter about her own fears of war. “I guess you’re a Communist nowadays if you sign peace appeals. Ed, people don’t seem to see that this negative Anti-communist [sic] attitude is destroying all the freedom of thought we’ve ever had. They don’t see that in the hate of Russia, they’re transferring all the hate they’ve ever had….I get stared at in horror when I suggest that we are as guilty in this as Russia is; that we are war-mongers too.”38 Eddie thought this letter was a masterpiece. He read it out loud to friends and continued to bring it up years later.39
Eddie did not influence Sylvia’s feelings about the Korean War, which she had already made clear to Hans-Joachim Neupert that August in a letter about the evils of the atomic bomb and the stupidity of fighting in Korea for “a little piece of land.”40 But Eddie’s antiwar stance must have made her feel less alone. That September, she wrote to him about her growing fears of military escalation: “I want to stop it all, the whole monumental grotesque joke. But writing letters and poems doesn’t seem to do much good. The big men are all deaf; they don’t want to hear the little squeaking as they walk across the street in cleated boots.”41
The real point of this extraordinary correspondence was not sex or politics, but writing. Sylvia recognized Eddie’s literary ability and felt that she could learn something from his “technique.”42 They began critiquing each other’s work. In September 1950 she sent him “Kitchen Interlude,” “Evolution,” and “Bitter Strawberries,” while he sent her fragments of his essays and short stories. (He eventually published her “Evolution” in the Roosevelt literary magazine, Experiment.) He knew he had stumbled into a correspondence with a serious talent, and he briefly assumed the apprentice’s role. “Please, doctor—is the patient improving?” he asked.43 If Sylvia had never met a boy like him, he had never met a girl like her—mature, sensitive, unruffled by talk of bisexual roommates or one-night stands. She valued their intimacy. “Don’t stop talking to me, please. It’s as important as if we were the only people alive,” she wrote to him in September.44
Lines like these made Eddie want to close the distance. As early as his third letter he floated the idea of a visit: “cut me loose before I find myself in the ridiculous and embarrassing position of being infatuated with a girl I never even met….if you don’t stop building yourself up to me, you are liable to wake up some morning and find me sitting in a tent on your front lawn.”45 For Sylvia, however, he was a safe confidant to whom she could express both her insecurities and bold ideas without shame; he did not understand that he might as well have been a priest behind a curtained confessional. She admitted, for example, that she did not want to get married after college: “I’m not going to be disposed of so summarily.”46 Her letters to him became, like her journal, an outlet for subversive self-expression without repercussions. “You are a dream,” she wrote in her journal. “I hope I never meet you.”47
Eddie’s letters provided a distraction from the looming reality of Sylvia’s departure for Smith. Finally, she would be leaving Wellesley, her cramped house, her mother’s and grandmother’s watchful eyes. But the very thing she had desired—a spot at Smith—caused her anxiety as she pondered the effort it would take to live up to her own exacting standards. She would have to make a name for herself all over again, only this time she would be among some of the brightest and wealthiest girls in America.
One night in late August, around midnight, she left her house and walked out onto Elmwood Road. She was “sick with unfulfilled longing, alone, self-reviling,” trying to find “peace inside”:
And there, miraculously, was the August night. It had just rained, and the air was thick with warm damp fog. The moon, full, pregnant with light, showed strangely from behind the small frequent clouds….There seemed to be no wind, but the leaves of the trees stirred, restless….Lightning, heat lightning flicked off and on, as if some stage hand were toying with the light switch….The air flowed about me like thick molasses, and the shadows from the moon and street lamp split like schizophrenic blue phantoms, grotesque and faintly repetitious.48
The passage is full of Plathian leitmotifs—malignant moons, feverish heat, restless trees, thick fog, curious shadows, blue light—that would resurface in the Ariel poems. Nature’s contours suddenly seemed starker, less protective, though the pregnant moon still offered respite from the burning questions of selfhood.
* * *
ALTHOUGH SMITH COLLEGE WAS FOUNDED in 1871 on conservative Christian principles, it took women’s academic achievement seriously. By the 1950s, Smith was part of a group of elite women’s colleges, known as the Seven Sisters, which included Wellesley, Barnard, Mount Holyoke, Vassar, Bryn Mawr, and Radcliffe. Up until the 1960s, the college embraced founder Sophia Smith’s twin visions of piety and productivity. Plath’s contemporaries remembered Smith at that time as a conservative school that reflected the mores of the Eisenhower era.49 Nancy Hunter Steiner, Sylvia’s senior-year roommate, wrote that the “stereotyped Smith girl of the mid 1950’s was a conformist….She was a doer, busily directing the activities of some prominent or obscure organization in preparation for a future role as a participating member of her community. There was about her an air of noblesse oblige.” Smith, she wrote, “placed a high value on involvement.”50
Educating oneself for the greater moral good did not hold much
appeal for Sylvia, who was—though a humanist—intensely individualistic. She would repeatedly resolve not to overcommit herself to any clubs or organizations. For Plath, time alone was a necessity. She fared best in small groups; parties and small talk exhausted her. (She once fantasized about getting tuberculosis so she could take a rest cure away from society.)51 During her second semester, she told Aurelia she needed to “conserve” her time “for a more personal and perhaps selfish line of development”: “I cherish a few of my angles a bit too much to rub them off.”52 Although she would eventually be elected to academic and social committees, she did not seek such offices herself. “Sylvia did not possess the instincts of leadership,” Nancy remembered. “Her pursuits were solitary.”53
But at Smith, solipsism was self-indulgent. In the early 1950s, even educated women were encouraged to pour their ambition into family life. Adlai Stevenson, in his infamous 1955 Smith commencement speech, would tell Plath and her classmates that it was their civic duty, given the Cold War “crisis,” to embrace “the humble role of housewife.”54 Stevenson, a liberal Democrat, was one of Plath’s idols. But in the fifties, neither Smith nor American society at large was much interested in women’s struggle for self-determination. Nancy remembered that Stevenson’s address “seemed to hurl us back to the satellite role we had escaped for four years—second-class citizens in a man’s world where our only possible achievement was a vicarious one.”55 Louise Giesey White, who attended Smith with Sylvia, recalled that though the college clearly “valued women, feminism wasn’t a big thing.”56 One of Plath’s English professors, Mary Ellen Chase, foreshadowed Stevenson’s speech when she wrote in the Smith Review Fall 1952 issue that most Smith women did not “indulge in fantastic notions that we shall reform American society…or turn out many giantesses in the earth. We are, instead, inclined to look upon such presumptions as a bit ridiculous, and, on the whole, mistrust taking ourselves too seriously.”57 Sylvia’s Smith friend Ellie Friedman Klein said that if you were lucky you ended up at a place like Smith “where you could do it all. But then when you started to do it all, you were called back.”58 Plath took her talents and her desires seriously, and was not about to be “called back.”
Sylvia’s professors, well aware of her exceptional talent, would encourage and nurture her throughout her time there. But during her college years she would also receive the message that introspection and disengagement were suspect, even un-American. Although she mocked herself for having a “persecution complex,” she felt she was “paying a penalty for my individualistic ways of life.” Smith could be “Heaven” but also “Hell” for “overly-sensitive” people like herself. Louise—one of a handful of Democrats on campus—found Smith intellectually stimulating but politically suffocating. She wondered if Sylvia, from a similar class background, with similar Democratic leanings, felt alienated. “I had not experienced Smith as a supportive place for people like us. We just didn’t value the same things,” she recalled. Sometimes Louise was astonished by the college’s conservatism. She experienced significant pushback when, as president of the college’s Christian association, she tried to organize a trip to an African American inner-city church in New York City. “It was very controversial,” she said. Plath’s determination to preserve her individuality—to maintain, as she put it, her “peculiar rough edges” and not become “a nice neat round peg in a round hole”—would be the central struggle of her Smith years.59
* * *
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In early September 1950, Sylvia arrived at Haven House, an elegant, nineteenth-century dormitory on Elm Street with pale yellow siding, white trim, and large windows framed by black shutters. Her third-floor room was tiny, but after sharing a room with her mother, it felt like a “New York apartment.” The first thing she did was position her desk, with its “velvet” maple sheen, before the window to take full advantage of the light and view across to Hopkins House.60 Next, she bought some expensive draperies and a “deep wine” bedspread—her “dream” color.61 Finding beautiful accessories was more than just a matter of taste. Sylvia’s room was her private sanctuary where she would do most of her reading and writing. She knew the right colors would soothe and inspire.
Sylvia initially enjoyed the hallway introductions and cheerful bustle of the dorm, which she shared with forty-eight other young women. But by late afternoon on her first day, she became tired and retreated to her room. There, she lay down on her bed for half an hour listening to the ticking clock, “so rhythmic and self-assured.” The meditative interlude steeled her for another round of hallway introductions and an evening cider party in the house president’s room. Sylvia knew other young women from Wellesley attending Smith—Pat O’Neil and Louise Giesey, both Crocketteers. “Girls are a new world for me,” she wrote Aurelia when she finally returned to her room at midnight. “I should have some fascinating times learning about the creatures.”62 She began finding her way “slowly” amid the “604 new faces, voices, screams.”63
During her first week at Smith, Sylvia was subjected to a humiliating physical exam that involved stripping naked as female attendants snapped photos. She called it “peculiar” and may have drawn on the experience years later when she began to use Holocaust imagery in her poems.64 At five nine and 137 pounds, her posture was deemed decent, though a nurse told her she tilted too far forward when she stood and was “in danger of falling on” her “face.” “Well!” Sylvia wrote to Aurelia, next to a small drawing of herself tilting precariously forward.65 She hoped it wasn’t a prophecy of things to come.
She spent the next few days shopping, registering for classes, and attending teas and class meetings. She was pleased when two college newspaper staff members asked her to consider writing articles. Clearly her literary reputation had preceded her. Her faculty adviser, Kenneth Wright, had also heard “nice things” about her, though he told her Smith would “expect a lot”—praise that probably made her anxious.66 The high point of that first week was the college convocation. “I never came so close to crying since I’ve been here when I saw the professors, resplendent with colors, medals & emblems, march across the stage,” she wrote Aurelia. “I still can’t believe I’m a Smith girl!”67
Plath carried her split sensibility about privilege with her to Smith. The only freshman on a floor of juniors and seniors, she enjoyed mocking the trivial concerns of the older students to Aurelia: “you should hear them ‘Deah me, I must go to the Yale-Cornell game, I’ll call up Bill…’ or ‘She didn’t marry him…Oh, God!’ ”68 As much as Sylvia wanted to fit in, she kept her distance from the wealthy young women who considered Smith an expensive finishing school, the ones who were “always talking about Europe & N.Y.”69 Jane Truslow Davison recalled that Smith was then in the throes of “the last gasp of debutantism….There were a lot of class-oriented secret societies and clubs.”70 Sylvia’s friend Janet Salter Rosenberg remembered, “Sylvia really was annoyed that she didn’t have money.” But at the same time, she mocked those who had it. “I remember Sylvia telling me with great resentment that the biggest problem these people had was which fur coat to wear on a date.”71
Sylvia was beginning to think that dates, rather than grades, were the most valued social currency on campus. As early as the first week, she got the message when a friend told her “about how good it is not to work too hard, but to allot time for ‘playing.’ ”72 Indeed, Margaret Shook, who served on the editorial board of the Smith Review with Plath, remembered a popular Smith ditty, sung to a tune from Annie Get Your Gun:
You’re sharp as a pen point
Your marks are really 10-point,
You are Dean’s List, Sophia Smith,
But a man wants a kiss, kid,
He doesn’t want a Quiz Kid,
Oh, you can’t get a man with your brains.73
Sylvia needed confirmation that there were intellectual women at Smith, not just debutantes biding their time until ma
rriage. As usual, she gave herself little leeway to fail: “the whole episode here is up to me,” she wrote Aurelia. “I have no excuse for not getting along in all respects. Just to find a balance is the first problem.”74
In letters home, Sylvia enthused about her yearlong classes in French literature, freshman English (with Mary Ellen Chase, among others), botany, European history, art (“Basic Design”), and phys ed. She loved the library’s “quiet and refreshing” atmosphere and vowed to “spend all the hours I can during the day there.” She attended her first chapel service, which she called a “Beautiful ceremony, but nothing I could ever believe in.”75 She was making friends; during her first week, a group of students had ended up in her room dancing the Charleston. One of them was Ann Davidow, who stayed long after the others left. She and Plath discussed “God and religion,” and Plath sensed a deeper connection. Sylvia described Ann to Aurelia as a fellow “free thinker” who had been raised Jewish. They even complemented each other physically: Ann was almost as tall as Sylvia, “freckle-faced, short brown hair and twinkling blue eyes.”76 Later Sylvia would learn that Ann struggled with depression and suicidal thoughts, a secret that bound them closer. In late October, Sylvia met Enid Epstein, a Jewish New Yorker who had published poems and drawings in Seventeen. She was thrilled to meet another young woman with serious artistic ambition; the two would be nearly inseparable during her junior year. Meanwhile, she became closer to her Wellesley friends Louise and Pat.
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