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dates. Was this the result of a “mother complex”? Like Aurelia, Dick’s mother was a “sweet, subtle matriarch,” but she was also the manipulative mom that Sylvia had been reading about in Philip Wylie’s influential Generation of Vipers. Momism, Wylie argued, was emasculating men and pacifying women into a conformism that would become one of the dominant themes in books about the American family in the 1950s. Mrs. Norton handled the family’s finances and ruled the home, reducing her husband, at times, to a supplicant, the weak father that was also a feature of 1950s situation comedies. Perhaps Dick’s seduction of the Vassar girl he told Sylvia about was his own version of rebelling against Momism, Sylvia speculated. And would he now seek to impose a submissive pattern of behavior on Sylvia, so as to forestall her domination of him? A medical career might well represent the best way to fend off a demanding wife and mother. His not entirely successful bid to achieve supremacy over Sylvia perhaps accounted for their contradictory denial and acceptance of one another. In sum, she believed they were both scared of what they might do to one another—as she would later reveal in her story, “The Fifty-Ninth Bear.”
    Sylvia confessed in her journal that she was not capable of love—at least not then—because she was so entirely dedicated to her art. She wanted the freedom to try on other lives the way she tried on dresses. Nagging at her, though, was the middle-class yearning for security, for settling into the comfortable. Forsaking Dick could mean a lost opportunity. Or, as she put it while summing up her sophomore year, she was now more aware of her limitations. She believed she had a more sober sense of her ambitions to publish and to go abroad as a Fulbrighter, which would entail not merely hard work but campaigning for herself. She would need to get elected to honor board and become involved in Smith’s journalism program, as well as work on the Smith Review. In effect, she acknowledged the politics of excellence, which the more introverted Sylvia of her freshman year had not been prepared to pursue.
    Eddie thought Sylvia was overcomplicating her love life. He bluntly stated that her troubles with Dick and other males had more to do with her superiority than anything else. Usually Eddie found her rather haughty words about her dates off-putting. (Both the number of unworthy suitors and Sylvia’s superior tone are reminiscent of Scarlett O’Hara.) He could see that Sylvia had already destroyed whatever love she had for Dick, and if their relationship continued, that only meant she was not yet ready to relinquish the dependability Dick offered. Of course, Eddie was not a disinterested party. By the spring of 1952, he was openly declaring his love for Sylvia. He admitted his jealousy and his desire for her, especially after Sylvia said that she still felt a strong physical attraction to Dick.
    Throughout Sylvia’s sophomore year she continued to work on her fiction, staying up late at night in the Haven House kitchen typing away. Much of her work met with rejection slips that hardly seemed to dent her determination, which was rewarded in early June when she won Mademoiselle ’s $500 fiction prize for “Sunday at the Mintons.” Plath put her hostile feelings about Dick into the story, transforming him into Elizabeth Minton’s fussy brother, Henry, who chides his sister for daydreaming and for an impractical nature that has left her directionless—barely able, in his view, to perform her duties as a town librarian. She is an aging spinster who has come to live with her brother in his retirement. This, of course, is the fate that Sylvia was determined to avoid: getting stuck with a male companion whose intellectual arteries would harden and in turn ossify her own existence.
    She wondered in a letter to her mother if Dick would recognize