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

constrictions and limitations.... I am I — I am powerful.”
    On September 27, 1950, Sylvia took with her to Smith her fears, complete with her self-contradictory image as the responsible intellectual and the daring woman who insisted on living fully. She was intent on realizing potential, including her sexual potential. Yet the admonition she put foremost — with characteristic guilt at her good fortune — was to prove herself worthy of the $1300 in scholarship money.
    The self-imposed pressure was intense. Sylvia’s letters from Smith, one written only a few hours after she arrived, show her nervousness about being there. “I’ve so much work to do.” “Just now the schoolwork seems endless.... I don’t see how girls can play bridge in the livingroom all night. For these first months, I’m going to study every chance I get. I’ll be amazed if I get one A.” The steady litany of exhaustion in these letters home suggests either that Plath was defeated before she began, or that she felt bound to convince her family of the incredible work ahead.
    Part of Sylvia’s uneasiness stemmed from the fact that — at Smith as in Wellesley — she felt that she was an outsider. Both Smith and Wellesley radiated well-kept serenity, expensive serenity. Wellesley’s exclusive shopping districts and the mammoth stone castle that serves as its Town Hall surrounded Sylvia with the marks and the privileges of wealth. In a somewhat understated manner, the Smith campus gave the same impression. Immaculate lawns and parks surrounded Paradise Pond; the women lived in thirty-five houses that served as dormitories. Sylvia lived in Haven House, one of the frame residences along wide, tree-lined Elm Street. She was given a single room on the third floor. Considering her need for a great deal of sleep, such a room should have been ideal.
    At first she was ecstatic at having forty-eight girls as house-mates. As she wrote to Aurelia, “Girls are a new world for me. I should have some fascinating times learning about the creatures. Gosh, to live in a house with 48 kids my own age — what a life!” The next day in another letter home she announced somewhat prematurely, “I’ve gotten along with everyone in the house. It’s good to see more faces familiar to me.... The food here is fabulous. I love everybody. If only I can unobtrusively do well in all my courses and get enough sleep, I should be tops. I’m so happy ... I keep muttering, ‘I’M A SMITH GIRL NOW.’”
    But there were hints that Sylvia was not quite right for Haven. Comments about her constant studying hurt her feelings, and there was a time after Thanksgiving when she was afraid to go downstairs and mix with her housemates. She went out on blind dates, but few of the men she went out with called her again. She did not play bridge. Her clothes were not casual enough. Her attitudes were too conventional for her to be a rebel, and too rebellious for her to be part of the mainstream. Her discomfort occurred despite the fact that Haven was less homogeneous than some of the Smith houses, which were conservative and discriminatory. The women in Haven at that time were independent, even idiosyncratic; and most of them were willing to judge their fellow women on merits other than the number of cashmere sweaters they owned.
    Hoping to be bright “unobtrusively,” she worried herself into the customary sinus ailments before she had been at school a month, and in mid-October she was in the infirmary. Buried under tests and papers, a week before her eighteenth birthday, she wrote, “I get a little frightened when I think of life slipping through my fingers like water — so fast that I have little time to stop running. I have to keep on like the White Queen to stay in the same place.” “All I’m trying to do is keep my head above water.... If only I’m good enough to deserve all this!”
    A parallel fear seemed to be her anonymity on the campus of several thousand talented