Читать книгу Breaking Down Plath - Patricia Grisafi - Страница 10

Plath was born in Boston, Massachusetts, on October 27, 1932, to Aurelia Schober Plath and Otto Plath. Aurelia was a second‐generation American of Austrian descent, and Otto was an immigrant from Germany. Otto's German heritage would play a huge role in Plath's self‐conception as a middle‐class New Englander.

Aurelia was a teacher, and Otto was a professor who specialized in bees. He even wrote an influential book, Bumblebees and Their Ways (1934). Sylvia had a brother, Warren, who was two years younger. This would be their family unit until Otto Plath's untimely—and ultimately preventable—death when Sylvia was eight.

Otto Plath suffered from diabetes but ignored his condition until his leg had to be medically amputated. Afterward, his health plummeted, his amputation became infected, and he died of complications due to diabetes. Otto's death would haunt Sylvia for the rest of her life.

Sylvia would later write about how idyllic her childhood had been until her father's death in the essay “Ocean 1212‐W”: “And this is how it stiffens, my vision of that seaside childhood. My father died, we moved inland. Whereon those nine first years of my life sealed themselves off like a ship in a bottle—beautiful, inaccessible, obsolete, a fine, white flying myth.” Ultimately, her father's death would shape Sylvia's relationships with men, religion, politics, and herself, and would be the basis for some of her most powerful poetry.

After Otto's death, Aurelia moved the family away from its home in the seaside town of Winthrop, Massachusetts, inland to the suburbs of Wellesley. There, Sylvia lived in a multigenerational home with her maternal grandparents. Aurelia always managed to make ends meet, but the family had to be frugal. Aware that she wasn't as financially privileged as other children in the neighborhood, Sylvia—already showing signs of precocious intelligence—became an overachiever and a perfectionist. She spent most of her middle and high school years winning academic awards and accumulating scholarships.