Fathers and Daughters in Sylvia Plath's "Blossom Street"

NOTES FATHERS AND DAUGHTERS IN SYLVIA PLATH'S "BLOSSOM STREET" Sally Greene University of North Carolina As a young poet and an English major at Smith College in the 1950s, Sylvia Plath could not have avoided the influential presence of T. S. Eliot. Indeed, her letters and journals indicate that, as she was to do with so much else, she internalized Eliot's work, letting it settle until she found occasion to recall it, to reshape it into something entirely her own.1 As a trivial but perhaps telling example, she signed one of the first of her letters that suggested a need for psychological help "your hollow girl."2 Dwelling on why the hollow man becomes not "woman" but "girl" is unnecessary; Plath was a girl to the mother she was addressing , and especially so in the early letters from Smith. But the point becomes more interesting on examining Eliot's influence on Plath's story "The Daughters of Blossom Street."3 Published first in London Magazine in 1960 and later collected in Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams, "The Daughters of Blossom Street" is a companion piece to the collection's title story. Like "Johnny Panic," it takes place in a setting that resembles Massachusetts General Hospital, where Plath worked during the winter of 1958—59 as a secretary in a psychiatric clinic, and where she had earlier, after her first suicide attempt in August of 1953, received insulin shock treatments. Plath's original title was "This Earth Our Hospital," a title she considered "very good," even good enough for a provisional title of a volume of stories.4 Though she does not say so in the published journals or letters, the title is almost certainly an allusion to a passage from Eliot's Four Quartets: The whole earth is our hospital Endowed by the ruined millionaire, Wherein, if we do well, we shall Die of the absolute paternal care That will not leave us, but prevents us everywhere.5 The imagery is metaphysical: Eliot is building a paradoxical conceit in which Christ is the "wounded surgeon" whose best representative on the imperfect earth—the "hospital" endowed by Adam, the "ruined millionaire"—is the church, the "dying nurse" who can restore 226Notes humanity to health only by attending to its worsening disease.6 Those who "do well" will be rewarded by a "paternal care" that will continually go before them, "prevent" them, in the archaic sense of the word. In Plath's story, the hospital is no metaphor. Its walls are literal, and so are the patriarchs who govern it. Like Eliot's hospital, Plath's is a self-contained universe, but within it a division of power coincides with a division of gender, complicating the possibility of universal salvation. The action centers on the secretaries, seen from the viewpoint of one of them who works in the psychiatric clinic. At a weekly status meeting, it is disclosed that another of the secretaries, Emily Russo, is dying of cancer. Shortly after the narrator and a secretary named Dotty have delivered get-well flowers to her room on behalf of the group, she dies. The secretaries are surprised to learn that at her death Emily had been attended by a young employee named Billy Monihan, who had claimed, contrary to anyone else's knowledge , to be her nephew. Billy, who works in patient records, is not a favorite among the secretaries. He is inefficient and, worse, he has a habit of "hang[ing] around that Emergency Ward entrance" with a "vulturelike" interest in death that, at least according to Dotty, borders on necrophilia (p. 126). But the women's attitudes soften when they learn that, in the chaotic scene that the hospital has become as a result of a hurricane that has been enveloping the city, with victims streaming in and a power failure casting all into near-darkness, Billy has died of a concussion when he tripped down a flight of stairs, rushing to deliver patient records. "You'd think he'd laid down and died for the whole bunch of us sitting there on those cots," the narrator observes (p. 130), completing a Christ-identification that...