American Isis Read Online Free

contaminated with it, struck hard at a suburban girl living in Winthrop, Massachusetts, six miles from Boston. Disaster could strike at any moment—as it did with the great hurricane of 21 September 1938, when land and sea converged in a toss-up that pitched a shark into grandmother’s garden. Sylvia saw the sea rear up with “evil violets in its eyes.” All day she heard her mother make frantic phone calls, anticipating the worst from an all-devouring storm that could annihilate the only existence Sylvia knew. It seemed like Armageddon, a toppled world with upended telephone poles and ruined cottages bobbing in roiling waters.
    Sylvia felt the elation of terror, the next day finding the wreckage satisfying and somehow commensurate with her imagination of disaster. She was born to a biblical life, calling the torrential rain a “Noah douche.” She began writing poetry and stories almost as soon as she learned her letters, and the perfect storm that remade her universe became associated with her own creative cosmos, which could similarly reshape reality into her own realm. That tautological process of inventive perception, in which the world was bent back into the word wrap of phrase making, was the very stuff of life for her. When she succumbed to her first creative dry spell in the summer of 1953, she saw it as a living death and attempted to end her existence. A second, famously successful suicide would come later when she was an exhausted, worded-out poet who could no longer generate the energy that had peaked in her thirtieth year.
    Sylvia Plath, however, was no solipsist. More than most children her age, she was a world citizen, enthusiastically learning geography in elementary school lessons and reports that she put together with A + accuracy. She could not have had a more encouraging mother, one who wrote her daughter notes full of praise and pride. Aurelia Plath, herself a top student, well-read and self-sacrificing, seemed the perfect parent, and Sylvia would often tell her so in notes written during summers spent away from home at camp. Unlike Otto, who made demands on his children, Aurelia offered suggestions, alternatives, and an array of esteem-building exercises—which her daughter would come to loathe. What was wrong with mother? In one sense, nothing. In another, what was wrong with mother was that she was not Otto Plath. He had the mystique and the majesty of higher learning his daughter revered. Aurelia did not expect any less from Sylvia than Otto did, but Aurelia had also been her husband’s servant. How could she function as her daughter’s master?
    Otto’s death on 5 November 1940 remained a suppurating wound in Sylvia Plath’s life. How could such a powerful man die, especially before his time? He was only fifty-five. But he had refused to see doctors until it was too late. Even after his diabetes was diagnosed, he continued to consume a diet heavy in fats and sugars that hastened his demise. Aurelia nursed him through his dying days, restricting contact with the children to spare them the sight of their father’s agony. She also decided not to have Sylvia and Warren attend the funeral. But to her daughter, Aurelia’s actions meant that Sylvia was deprived of her father’s affection and approval. This reaction made his death seem even more mysterious and arbitrary, a tyrannical disruption of her childhood that made him blameworthy, too. How could a father so dominate her world and then just disappear? It was monstrous. A child who, after her father dies, says she will stop speaking to God (speaking to, mind you—not praying to) is one who brooks no equals, let alone superiors, in her cosmos. She may for a moment—even a year—feel overpowered by another, but all of her writing speaks to a need to dominate the world’s attention.
    It was Aurelia who introduced Sylvia Plath to poetry, reading poems that she thought suited her