Histoire de la Civilisation Francaise.
SYLVIA PLATH’S
HEAVILY ANNOTATED COLLEGE TEXTBOOK
[Plath, Sylvia]. Leveque, Andre. Histoire de la Civilisation Francaise. Revised edition. New York: Henry Holt and Company, (1949).
8vo.; 615 pp.; illus.; blue cloth stamped in navy and gilt; spine somewhat faded; well-worn. In a specially made slipcase.
Revised edition. Plath’s heavily annotated college textbook; with her signed bookplate – Sylvia Plath / Haven, and lightly next to it, 1950 – to the front endpaper. Plath entered Smith College, in Northampton, Massachusetts, in the class of 1954 and Haven House, reserved for scholarship students, was her dormitory during her freshman and sophomore years. Regarding Plath’s first year at Smith, from whence this text dates, a Plath biographer notes,
That fall, [Plath] took English, Introduction to French Literature, Botany, Art, European History, and gym. She found European History the most challenging of her classes. As a scholarship student, she needed to maintain at least a B overall average, or she risked dismissal. Her struggles in European History made her fearful enough that she began working harder than ever to maintain her academic standing. The workload, made all the harder by the way she pushed herself, along with corresponding with her mother and others while faithfully writing in her journal and trying to write creatively as well (though finding less time for that in those first few weeks), forced her into depression and homesickness as early as mid-October. (Sylvia Plath: A Biography, by Connie Ann Kirk, Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2004; p. 37)
Plath’s journal entries from that autumn reflect these feelings; in part:
God, who am I? I sit in the library tonight, the lights glaring overhead, the fan whirring loudly. Girls, girls everywhere, reading books. Intent faces, flesh pink, white, yellow. And I sit here without identity: faceless. My head aches. There is history to read – centuries to comprehend before I sleep, millions of lives to assimilate before breakfast tomorrow. (#33. Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath, ed. Karen Kukil, New York: Anchor, 2000; p. 26)
And a few days later:
Now I know what loneliness is, I think. Momentary loneliness, anyway. It comes from a vague core of the self – like a disease of the blood, dispersed throughout the body so that one cannot locate the matrix, the spot of contagion. I am back in my room at Haven House after the Thanksgiving Holidays. Homesick is the name they give to that sick feeling which dominates me now. [...] (ibid, #36. p. 29)
Surely as a result of her overwhelming academic anxiety, Plath’s hand is throughout the book. Numbers to the front pastedown appear to calculate her grade point average and project the grades she would need to satisfactorily pass the class – one group tallies 2.9 and the other 3.1, revealing how close she thought she was to losing her scholarship. Her copious (almost compulsive) textual notes, circles, brackets, question marks, asterisks, and underlines, are in blue ink and black and red pencil starting at page v and concluding on page 597; a total of approximately 1,675 words are in her hand. Several of the annotations are quite telling, such as her lengthy discussion of Gargantua and Pantagruel, using almost an entire page for her holograph comments (see page 154).
Plath would learn later in the semester that her scholarship came from the writer Olive Higgins Prouty and that she needn’t fear that it would be revoked – quite the opposite, actually: Kirk notes that Prouty, a popular author, “would go on to help Plath in many more ways than she could ever have expected.”
And ultimately, Plath’s hard work earned her a B+ in English; an A- in French Literature; an A in Botany; an A in Art; an A- in European History; and a B- in Gym (Kirk, p. 38).
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