Nom de Plume by Carmela Ciuraru

Author:Carmela Ciuraru
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins US
Published: 2011-05-31T16:00:00+00:00

She found sexual satisfaction in picking her nose

Chapter 10

Sylvia Plath & VICTORIA LUCAS

She was a good girl who loved her mother. That, at least, was the benign impression Sylvia Plath gave the outside world—a smiling façade of conformity; feminine, pure of heart; accommodating, polite, bright-eyed, and pretty. She admired her mother, Aurelia, and was desperate for her approval. There were no secrets between them. Aurelia was nurturing and boundlessly devoted; Sylvia was her dutiful, adoring daughter. Such was the seamless porcelain exterior of their relationship, and both players were invested in protecting it. Meanwhile, writing in her journals, Plath recorded the brutal truth. “I lay in my bed when I thought my mind was going blank forever and thought what a luxury it would be to kill her, to strangle her skinny veined throat which could never be big enough to protect me from the world,” she wrote on December 12, 1958, following a session with her therapist. “But I was too nice for murder. I tried to murder myself: to keep from being an embarrassment to the ones I loved and from living myself in a mindless hell.” She resigned herself to the ineluctable role she’d been cast in: “I could pass her on the street and not say a word, she depresses me so. But she is my mother.” Sylvia was adept at dealing with Aurelia. Before speaking to her, it was as if Sylvia had trained herself to neatly tuck in her fury and put it to bed, permitting it to stir again only in her mother’s absence.

Plath’s biography is familiar to just about every English literature major, reader of contemporary poetry, and suicidal teenager. She was toxic because she was so seductive, and seductive because she was so toxic. Her fame is immeasurable. Even many nonliterary types know that Sylvia Plath was the mercurial poet who gassed herself in an oven.

She was born at 2:10 p.m. on October 27, 1932, in a suburb of Boston, Massachusetts. Her father, Otto Plath, was a biology professor at Boston University, a well-regarded etymologist, and twenty-one years older than his wife. “At the end of my first year of marriage,” Aurelia later wrote, “I realized that if I wanted a peaceful home—and I did—I would simply have to become more submissive, although it was not my nature to be so.”

By the time she was three years old, Sylvia proved quite brilliant. Once, while her mother was baking in the kitchen, she played alone on the living room floor. She was unusually quiet. Otto went to check on her, and, as Aurelia recalled, both parents were stunned to see what their daughter had done. Using a set of mosaic tiles she’d received as a gift, she reproduced “unmistakably the simplified outline of the Taj Mahal, the picture of which was woven into a mat in our bathroom.”

When Sylvia was eight years old, her father died of an embolism brought on by complications of diabetes. We know how well she came to

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.