Daddy by Sylvia Plath Analysis
An Introductory Note :[Daddy by Sylvia Plath Analysis Summary]
“Daddy” is a controversial and highly anthologized poem by the American poet Sylvia Plath. Published posthumously in 1965 as part of the collection Ariel, the poem was originally written in October 1962, a month after Plath’s separation from her husband, the poet Ted Hughes, and four months before her death by suicide. It is a deeply complex poem informed by the poet’s relationship with her deceased father, Otto Plath. Told from the perspective of a woman addressing her father, the memory of whom has an oppressive power over her, the poem details the speaker’s struggle to break free of his influence.
Substance :
“Daddy” is an attempt to combine the personal with the mythical. It’s unsettling, a weird nursery rhyme of the divided self, a controlled blast aimed at a father and a husband (since the two conflate in the 14th stanza). The poem expresses Plath’s terror and pain lyrically and hauntingly. It combines light echoes of a Mother Goose nursery rhyme with much darker resonances of World War II. The father is seen as a black shoe, a bag full of God, a cold marble statue, a Nazi, a swastika, a fascist, a sadistic brute, and a vampire.
The girl (narrator, speaker) is trapped in her idolization of this man. She is a victim trapped in that black tomblike shoe, in the sack that holds the father’s bones, and-in a sense-in the train as it chugs along to Auschwitz. “Daddy” is full of disturbing imagery, and that’s why some have called “Daddy” “the Guernica of modern poetry.”
An Analytical Summary :
I. The speaker begins the poem by addressing the circumstances in which she lives, saying that they are simply no longer adequate. She compares herself to a foot living inside a black shoe. For 30 years she has lived this way, deprived and without color, not even having the courage to breathe or sneeze.
II. The speaker then addresses her father, informing him that she has had to kill him, though she then says that he actually died before she had the chance to do so. She describes her father as being heavy as marble and like “a bag full of God,” as well as like a horrifying statue with one toe that looks like a San Francisco sealhuge and gray.
III. Continuing the image of her father as a statue, the speaker describes his head being located in the bizarre blue-green waters of the Atlantic Ocean, near the beautiful coastal town of Nauset, Massachusetts. The speaker tells her father that she used to pray for his return from the dead, and then in German says, “Oh, you.”
IV. The speaker prayed in the German language, in a town in Poland that was utterly destroyed by endless wars, a town whose name is so common that the speaker’s Polish “friend”-whom she refers to using a derogatory slur-says there must be at least twelve of them.
V. Because of this, she couldn’t tell where her father had been, nor where exactly he came from. She couldn’t talk to him. It felt as though her tongue kept getting caught in her jaw.
VI. It was as though her tongue were stuck in a trap made of barbed wire. The speaker stutters the word “I” in German, demonstrating what it felt like to not be able to speak. She thought every German was her father. She thought the language was offensive and disgusting.
VII. The speaker continues describing the German language, saying that it was like the engine of a train, carrying her off like a Jew to a concentration camp. She
began speaking like a Jew, and then started thinking that she might in fact be a Jew. VIII. The speaker, perhaps still imagining herself on this train, then describes the Austrian state of Tyrol and the beer of Austria’s capital city as being impure and false. She then lists the other things that might make her Jewish: her Romani ancestry, her strange luck, and her tarot cards.
IX. She has always been afraid of her father in particular, whom she associates with the German air force and who spoke words that seemed impressive at first but turned out to be nonsense. She goes on to describe his carefully groomed mustache and his blue, Aryan eyes, and then refers again to his link to the German military, this time invoking the armored vehicles used in WWII. The speaker addresses her father as “Oh, You” again, but this time in English.
X. Again describing her father, the speaker claims that he is not God after all, but rather a swastika-the symbol of the German Nazi regime, so opaque that no light could get through it. She then goes on to say that all women love Fascists, being stepped on brutally by someone who is a monster at heart.
XI. The speaker then recalls a photograph of her father where he is standing in front of a blackboard. In the picture one could see that he has a cleft chin, but the speaker implies that he has the cleft feet of a devil as well. The speaker decides that her father is in fact a devil, as was the wicked man who tore her passionate heart into pieces.
XII. The speaker was 10 years old when her father died. When she was 20, she tried to commit suicide so that she could finally be reunited with him. She thought even being buried with him would be enough.
XIII. The suicide attempt was unsuccessful, however, as she was discovered and forced into recovery. The plan having failed, she came up with another. She made a model of her father, a man in black who, like her father, looked the part of a Nazi.
XIV. This man had a love of torture. She married him. The speaker, directly addressing her father again, claims she’s finally through. The telephone’s unplugged and no one will be getting through to her.
XV. The speaker reckons that if she’s killed one man, she’s in effect killed two. She refers to her husband as a vampire, saying that he drank her blood for a year, no, seven years. She then tells her father he can lie back now.
XVI. There’s a sharp wooden post, the kind used to kill vampires, stuck through her father’s heart. The speaker imagines a village in which the locals never liked her father, and so they are dancing and stomping on his body because they always knew exactly what he was. The speaker deems her father despicable and again tells him that she’s finished.
Title :
Sylvia Plath is most known for her tortured soul. Perhaps that is why readers identify with her works of poetry so well, such as ‘Daddy’. She has an uncanny ability to give meaningful words to some of the most inexpressible emotions. She writes in a way that allows the reader to feel her pain. In this poem, ‘Daddy’, she writes about her father after his death. This is not a typical obituary poem, lamenting the loss of the loved one, wishing for his return, and hoping to see him again. Rather, Plath feels a sense of relief at his departure from her life. She explores the reasons behind this feeling in the lines of this poem.
When speaking about her own work, Plath describes herself (in regards to ‘Daddy’ specifically) as a “girl with an Electra complex. Her father died while she thought he was God“. She adds on to this statement, describing her father as “a Nazi and her mother very possibly part Jewish”. Through the poem, she has to act out the awful little allegory once before she is free of it.”
Background:
“Daddy” employs controversial metaphors of the Holocaust to explain Plath’s complex relationship with her father, Otto Plath, who died shortly after her eighth birthday as a result of undiagnosed diabetes. The poem itself is cryptic, a widely anthologized poem in American literature, and its implications, as well as thematic concerns, have been reviewed academically, with many differing conclusions. Before her publication of Ariel, Plath had been a high academic achiever attending Cambridge University in England.
It was at Cambridge University where she met Ted Hughes, a young Yorkshire poet, and they wed in the summer of June 1956. However, their marriage was short-lived as Hughes had been having an affair with another woman which caused him and Plath to separate. After her separation from Hughes, Plath moved with her two children into a Yeats’ flat in London during December 1962 and where “Daddy” was written. Shortly after, Plath committed suicide by consumption of sleeping pills and gas inhalation by putting her head in a gas oven on February 11, 1963.
However, before Plath’s death, beginning in October 1962, Plath wrote at least 26 of the poems that would be published posthumously in the collection Ariel. In these Plath wrote about anger, including macabre humor, and resistance in “Daddy.” Yet at the same time, she contrasted those mentioned dark subject matters with themes of joy, in hand with a deeper understanding of the numerous hindering functions of women.
“Daddy” included humor and realistic subject matter that would, later on, be known as the “October poems.” The “October poems” were composed of Plath’s anger as a woman who felt oppressed by her parents’ expectations of her, society’s hindering roles in place for women, and by her ex-husband’s unfaithfulness. Plath’s anger had been voiced in her later poems including “Lady Lazarus” and “Daddy.”
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