Six Degrees of Separation with Sylvia Plath April 17, 2007
Posted by amanda in : Uncategorized , trackbackA math professor (Dr. Edmunds) at UMW sent this e-mail to Professor Emerson and she passed it on to me. It’s a really good story:
My brother recently dug up this poem by Sylvia Plath, I thought you might enjoy it. It’s about the house in Winthrop, Mass. that my mother grew up in - my grandparents bought it from Sylvia’s grandparents. It is also mentioned in The Bell Jar as a place she contemplates for various forms of suicide. We spent a lot of time there as kids as it’s right on the ocean in a beautiful spot. My mother met Sylvia when the transaction was being made, they were both about 11 at the time. My mom said they were sent upstairs to play and Sylvia was totally freaked by my mom’s dolls as she had apparently never seen one! She just held one and stared at it for the longest time…
Sylvia Plath would have been 11 around 1943 and here are what the dolls might have looked like:
I have an eleven-year-old sister, so maybe I am biased by circumstance, but it is completely unbelievable that she would never have seen a doll before. It brings up all kinds of questions about her parents and her childhood: what did she play with? what did she think of the dolls? and, did she ever give Frieda dolls? I wonder how Sylvia Plath internalized this situtation, as obviously Dr. Edmund’s mother remembers it…
Personal anecdotes about Sylvia Plath are rare, but rarer still are ones about her as a child. I love this story, it is extremely poetic!
Here is a link to the poem “Point Shirley.”
Ps. Thanks to Mark for making this excellent post on his blog for Dr. Campbell’s class….go check it out and enjoy the song: http://blogs.elsweb.org/marksawesomeblog…
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