Sylvia Plath: A Biography by Linda Wagner-Martin Page B

a fainting spell; and black is death”). She asked repeatedly, “What is my life for and what am I going to do with it? I don’t know and I’m afraid.”
    Most college freshmen show some confusion about the future, but few express such deep and unremitting anger. Plath’s rage and her resulting depression were more likely the product of her childhood years of loss and perceived abandonment, emotions always hidden — so that her anger did not upset her mother — or disguised — so that she could remain safely within the pleasant family circle. Like a small child, Sylvia usually expected great happiness in the future. She was repeatedly disappointed. Nothing could have met her exuberant expectations.
    Part of Sylvia’s anxiety stemmed from financial worries. An accounting she gave of her expenses during the 1950-51 year shows how carefully she watched even small amounts of money: $270 covered food and room, art supplies, books; $15 for the year’s entertainment, and $50 for clothes. She wrote to Warren in a humorous poem that she had “nuffin’” to wear and her closet was “grungy.” She did not even walk along Green Street, where the clothing shops were. Aurelia’s health was poor, and with Warren now at Exeter both children could have used more money for clothes, entertainment, and travel. Sylvia worried often about her mother. She took a job with Press Board, making $20 a month for spending several hours each day writing press releases for Smith. She also sold stockings in her dormitory. In some ways, a new source of pressure was added once Sylvia learned that her Smith scholarship was funded by Olive Higgins Prouty. At the suggestion of Mary Mensel, Smith’s scholarship counselor, Sylvia wrote to Mrs. Prouty and thanked her. Thus began a relationship that was to be important to Sylvia throughout her life. Mrs. Prouty invited Sylvia to tea, and from then on, Sylvia felt great pressure to maintain the reputation she had with her patron. Typical of her complex relationships with supportive older women — including her mother — Sylvia alternated between gratitude for Mrs. Prouty’s help and anger at what she saw as her benefactor’s influence on her life.
    Throughout freshman year Sylvia’s social situation remained unsettled. She was planning to break off with Bob Riedeman, now a junior at University of New Hampshire, although she invited him to Smith for a fall weekend and saw him over Thanksgiving. Part of her challenge at Smith, as she saw it, was to make a good “catch.” Smith was the hub of a wheel that radiated out to many men’s colleges within reasonable commuting distance. Fall mixers with men’s colleges were a regular part of the Smith calendar. But Sylvia saw herself as a giantess, five feet nine inches tall and weighing 137 pounds, and a scholarship student as well. She convinced herself she was doomed to be a wallflower, as described so well in her story “Initiation,” and so she was willing to date anyone who asked her out. One of her blind dates, a twenty-five-year-old disabled veteran, took her on a long walk and suggested they have sex. Sylvia wrote about the date to her mother, wondering naively whether she should see the man again. But in her journal, she described the experience — his moving her hand along his penis, her disgusted yet curious reaction. Her description of the “soft, writhing flesh” foreshadows the scene in The Bell Jar in which Buddy Willard proudly shows her his penis; as does her anger at the double standard: in the journal she exclaims, “I hate you. Damn you. Just because you’re a boy. Just because you’re never worried about having babies!”
    Evidently Sylvia did not see him again. But she wanted a boyfriend as much as she wanted good grades, and she often put the two together, “I know I am capable of getting good marks; I know I am capable of attracting males.” These were parallel ambitions for many women in the Fifties, and Sylvia equated