Beuscher’s therapy provided no permanent solution to Plath’s anxieties—or to her sense of her mother as a “walking vampire,” sucking the life out of her. Sylvia might have been happier about hating her mother if Aurelia had not been so self-sacrificing, so saintly, that it enraged Sylvia when she thought her behavior worried her mother. She despised Aurelia because she had subjugated herself to the autocratic Otto, who wouldn’t go to a doctor when he was sick, who died because he could not deal with disease. Yes, her mother had genuinely suffered, but the agony was also a lie, because Otto’s tyranny had never been opposed or even admitted. Instead, Aurelia just gave herself over to her children. Aurelia’s long battle with ulcers revealed how her children had bled her dry. Otto, with his gangrenous leg, would have been a “living idiot” if he had survived longer, Sylvia thought. Lucky for him that a blood clot had gone to his brain, so Aurelia could assume the role of mourning angel, telling her children that Daddy was gone. A disgusted Sylvia ended her journal rant with “Men men men.” Sylvia told this tale about herself and her family in the third person, with scathing fairy-tale energy that ended in a sarcastic portrayal of Aurelia’s “honey sweet” version of her innocent children’s happy lives.

Sylvia hated her mother as one hates the messenger arriving with bad news. It felt like Aurelia had killed Otto and played the noble grieving wife, when, in fact, he, “an ogre” like all men, “didn’t stay around.” Sylvia’s dismissive treatment of men exacted her revenge, she admitted in her journal. Men left and had fun; women stayed behind and mopped up. And Sylvia, still telling the tale of her life in the third person, pictured herself as the good girl who had gone mad and had been locked in a cell. The daughter had tried to kill herself as the only way to rid herself of her mother. This had been her golden rule: to do to herself what she wanted to do to her mother. She vowed to do everything her mother said not to do. She no longer wanted her mother’s sacrifice, so she had sacrificed herself. Now, Sylvia slipped back into the first person, resenting her mother worrying about her and Ted. “She wants to be me: she wanted me to be her: she wants to crawl into my stomach and be my baby and ride along. But I must go her way,” was Sylvia’s summary judgment.

Dr. Beuscher associated Sylvia’s writing block with hatred of her mother. Not writing withheld the very thing that excited Aurelia’s approval, which would also be a form of appropriation, making Sylvia’s achievement Aurelia’s. Sylvia’s suicide had been an effort to punish her mother and to show that her kind of love was inadequate. Sylvia had felt better about her mother while living in England, because letters could function as a way for both of them to keep their desired images intact.

Sylvia did not seem to realize the danger of relying on Ted to be absolutely everything her father and mother were not. With him, she believed, she had rejected the compromises, the settling for less with smaller men. Dr. Beuscher had identified the risks: Would Sylvia have the courage to admit she had chosen the wrong man? Plath said the question did not scare her. Instead it prompted another aria about her husband’s virtues. A bad sign.

Indeed, the compulsion to lionize Ted drove Sylvia to obsessive thoughts about motherhood and family, to experience the same kind of dynamic that Marilyn Monroe was playing out with Arthur Miller. The adoring, virtually simpering persona that Monroe affected in her public appearances with her big man reappeared in reports of Plath’s obeisance to her master. Thirteen December: a girl appears at the door of their apartment, selling Christmas arrangements, and Sylvia calls to Ted, telling the girl, “The man decides in this house.” Dr. Beuscher might have pointed out that Sylvia no longer felt the need of a father for reasons quite different from what Sylvia supposed. Or rather, Sylvia would need and yet reject that father once again when she saw that Ted was not so different from Otto after all. Such thoughts did occur to Sylvia in moments when an angry Ted accused her of behaving just like her mother. She was mulling over a story about a man with “deep-rooted conventional ideas of womanhood.” Talking with Ted about jobs—their money was running out—may have turned Sylvia’s attention to the notion of a story about Dick Norton and the doctor’s life she had renounced when she rejected him. Such a marriage would have deprived her of the very experience she needed to become a writer, she reasoned. Moreover, as a doctor’s wife she would have resented his opportunities. But the story went nowhere, and Sylvia diverted herself with looking up the requirements for a PhD in psychology.

The sessions with Dr. Beuscher became more stressful, reducing Sylvia to tears as she admitted to jealousy of Ted and suspicion of his appeal to other women—and, at last, confessing that she identified him with her father, their faces and bodies becoming interchangeable in her dreams. Ted became the missing man, the father out with the girl on the Smith campus, a scene that had enraged Sylvia and fueled her dread about her husband leaving her. Sylvia’s journal entries about her colloquies with Dr. Beuscher resemble a cathartic Greek play, with Plath worrying that perhaps like others in her life, Dr. Beuscher would abandon her. Sylvia had not been paying for treatment and was relieved when her therapist suggested a fee of five dollars an hour. Like Marilyn Monroe, who also was undergoing psychiatric treatment at the time, Sylvia Plath wondered why she could not count on even those closest to her, why she suspected their motives—while at the same time she puzzled over a sense of guilt that resulted in punishing herself. And like Monroe, Plath read Freud in hope of understanding her rages at herself and others that led to her suicide attempt. Both women wondered if bringing another child into the world might somehow redeem them, make their lives worthwhile by grounding them in the continuity of existence. But birthing a child was also a frightening prospect. Sylvia dreamed of losing a month-old baby. She had trouble rising in the morning and was slipping into passivity, “going sloppy,” she wrote.

Sylvia tried to keep her doubts to herself, knowing how much they would upset Ted. Judging by his letters home, he had worked up a good writing schedule by January 1959, while Sylvia still struggled. He had it all settled in his mind that they would return to England by the end of the year. For both Ted and Sylvia, a dinner party with Robert Lowell and his wife, Elizabeth Hardwick, proved rewarding. Lowell was a great admirer of Hughes’s poetry, and Sylvia made a point of recording how tenderly Lowell kissed his wife. Such displays of affection, on which Sylvia put a high premium, present a very different picture from Hughes’s fond but also cavalier recollection of meeting Lowell, the mad poet, who from time to time had to be institutionalized when his behavior became erratic and sometimes even violent. Sylvia, for her part, looked forward to Lowell’s poetry class at Boston University, which would begin shortly.

In the afterglow of the Lowell-Hardwick party, Plath wrote “Point Shirley.” Set in her grandmother’s back yard after the great hurricane of Sylvia’s childhood, the poem evokes the image of a spit of sand slowly eroded by the sea—an apt image of her own memories wearing out over time, suggesting the grief of loss, which is emphasized by the blood-red sun sinking over Boston. Sylvia remembered her grandmother’s love, which she now wanted to get from “these dry-papped stones.” Although motherhood and birth are never mentioned, they seem present in the poet’s yearning to generate a new life that arises out of her love for the old. She had Dr. Spock on her reading list. She enjoying visiting a friend and playing with her children, feeling a part of “young womanhood” absorbed in “women and womentalk.” She was even keeping her poems away from Ted because his opinion might paralyze her. After a visit to Stanley Kunitz, she concluded that Kunitz did not like women poets. Listening to him, she could only think about having a baby, and of her disappointment at the arrival of another menstrual period.