Plath's real feelings about her mother are no longer cushioned by careful edits that subvert her sharp opinions. It is no longer a matter of Dr. Beuscher giving Plath "permission to hate your mother" or Plath admitting hatred "for ... all mother figures." Plath unhesitatingly states that she hates -- as well as pities and desires the approval of -- her mother, and in turn feels her mother's envy and lack of unconditional love. "What to do with her, with the hostility, undying, which I feel for her? I want, as ever, to grab my life from out under her hot itchy hands. My life, my writing, my husband, my unconceived baby."

Aurelia Plath had no self; she lived for and through her children. From Sylvia Plath's infancy, her primary parent's selflessness gave Plath no model for a self that could maintain its autonomy or exist beyond meeting other people's needs. What Plath had instead was one big boundariless, free-floating ego, a self utterly dependent on the inflation by the selfless parent, and all psychic roads, ultimately, led right back to Sylvia. Plath spent her entire adult life trying to trace the ego boundaries for herself that her mother neglected to impose. "She is, in many ways, like an empty vessel," Perloff said of Plath in an interview with Salon. "It's really no wonder that she erupted with all these strong feelings and reactions, the guilt and the rage and the incredible hatred that comes out, first, in 'The Bell Jar.'"

Plath understood that her mother lived vicariously through her daughter and her daughter's achievements, and that Plath's own 1953 breakdown and suicide attempt was in large part a reaction to her unhealthy "union" with her mother: "I lay in bed when I thought my mind was going blank forever and thought what a luxury it would be to kill her, to strangle her skinny veined throat which could never be big enough to protect me from the world. But I was too nice for murder. I tried to murder myself: to keep from being an embarrassment to the ones I loved and from living myself in a mindless hell ... I'd kill her, so I killed myself."

Not that critics and readers hadn't already suspected as much. In 1979 the literary critic Marjorie Perloff, author of some of the most influential articles on Plath, made the point that the shallow perfection of Plath's early work and her later metamorphosis into the writer of the inimitable "Ariel" poems was traceable to Plath's struggle to shrug off the burden of pleasing her mother, who had forfeited her own life for her two children, Sylvia and Warren. The deal, as Sylvia came to understand it, was that in return for their mother's uncomplaining slave labor -- their mother's life -- the children would feed back accomplishments. Plath became an achievement junkie, living for two and never sure of her mother's love.

Given Plath's awareness of her uncomfortable "osmosis" with her mother, it must have been horrifying for her, as Perloff points out, to realize that during the summer of 1962 "she had become ... a 'widowed' young mother with very slender financial means -- in short, she had become her mother. Even the sex of her two children -- first a girl, then a boy -- repeated the Sylvia-Warren pattern. Only now, one gathers, did Sylvia fully grasp the futility of her former goals. And so she had to destroy the 'Aurelia' in herself ... In the demonic Ariel poems, she could finally vent her anger, her hatred of men, her disappointment in life. 'Dearest Mother' now becomes the dreaded Medusa."

Maya Angelou reads from "The Heart of a Woman"