American Isis by Carl Rollyson Page B

she anyhow?” She quoted a line from William Ernest Henley’s famous poem, “Invictus”: “My head is bloody, but unbowed,” to which she added her own line, “May children’s bones bedeck my shroud.” Those children would be the death of her, she implied in her gruesome poetic joke, which was such a counterpoint to Henley’s own concluding lines: “I am the master of my fate: / I am the captain of my soul.” Sylvia had a few inconsequential dates that summer, and in late August she enjoyed a few days with Dick. But mostly she was learning, as she wrote to Aurelia on 4 August, the “limitations of the woman’s sphere.”
    As so often, though, what Sylvia said on one page would be contradicted on another. Her shifting moods made it impossible for her to settle down. Thus a journal passage written after her return to Smith for a second year pays tribute to blind dates and the thirty-odd boys who had made her more conversant and confident. She was making her entrances downstairs in Haven House with a “practiced casualness,” no longer worrying whether her slip was showing or her hair uncurling. Now Sylvia could see herself as an attractive creation. It was show time at Smith College. What had bothered her so much about her babysitting stint in Swampscott was, as she put it in her journal, living in the “shadow of the lives of others.” The very expression of this sentiment in the passive voice suggests how much Sylvia missed the spotlight.
    Resuming correspondence with Eddie Cohen was one sure sign that Sylvia had recovered from her summer in shadow. She had also come to realize how awful she had been to Eddie after his long ride to see her. She told him about Dick’s tentative courtship, which Eddie diagnosed as her suitor’s uncertainty about himself and Sylvia. Eddie did not need to read her journal to sum up her problem: the huge discrepancy between the way she was living and her ambitious plans, a discrepancy that marriage would complicate. But he did not know that Sylvia was also keeping score, estimating that a woman had only about eight years before the wrinkles began to show and she was no longer physically attractive.
    Then Sylvia had one of those Jane Eyre/Thornfield Hall episodes. Everyone in Haven House was invited to Maureen Buckley’s coming-out party at her family’s mansion in Sharon, Connecticut. Maureen was the sister of William F. Buckley Jr., then a senior at Yale and later the founder of the National Review and one of the guiding lights of American conservatism. Bill had brought along his Yale class to meet all the Smith girls. Sylvia, sought after by several dance partners, gloried, perhaps for the first time, in her womanhood, feeling like a princess escorted by the scions of wealthy families, including Plato Skouras, son of Spyros Skouras, head of 20th Century Fox. One of her courtiers actually addressed her as “Milady.” Another said she looked like the Botticelli Madonna hanging over the Buckleys’ fireplace. That night, as she drifted off to sleep and into “exquisite dreams” in what might as well have been Thornfield Hall, she could hear the wind “wuthering outside the stone walls.”
    This idyll—coming so soon after a summer of baby-minding and Sylvia’s provisional romance with Dick—she transformed into lines that placed her in the pastoral world of Renaissance poetry, picturing the sculpture of a bronze boy “kneedeep in centuries,” bedecked with leaves heralding the passage of time. From longing to frequent barrooms to frolicking on landed estates, Sylvia Plath could hardly contain herself. Returning to the Smith campus, however, she confessed to Aurelia that the course work frightened her, and she could not keep up. She saw her future as only work and more work.
    Eddie was talking of coming east again, and this time Sylvia wanted to show him a better