Daddy by Sylvia Plath
Daddy by Sylvia PlathFor me this poem however shocking, still created a feeling of pity for Plath. Whether she is using the Holocaust imagery to make her poetry relevant and draw the spotlight uppon herself in shock value, or whether she is merely connecting two very traumatic periods in her life in an attempt to understand herself, is IRRELEVANT. The real question here, is what did her father do that was so bad? Was there abuse of the physical kind as well as the psychological? Once again it really doesn’t matter, either way she was deeply wounded by her father’s actions due to an over-sensitivity to man’s inhumanity to man. She was acutely aware of every misfortune or hurt she discovered in life and was always feeling abandonment.
Sylvia could not cope on her own, that is why she committed suicide, from the point of view of someone who knows little about her work. This is partly true but in Sylvia’s eyes, she was not alone. She was permanently ghosted by her father’s ‘living’ memory. She never visited his grave, let alone went to his funeral, for Plath her father was still, in a sense, living. So obsessed was she with his memeory that it began to take control of her life - she accredited every action and event with him, including her marriage to Hughes. This memory became her identity, transferring her hate for her father onto herself and finding suicide the only way to liberate her soul.
Louise
London, UK
Monday, April 30, 2001
Plath’s innate emptiness and emotional constraint comes , I believe, from her lack of male encouragement and her according need for domination. This streams from the untimely death of her father at 9. In this poem Plath alludes to her relationship to her father with an emphasis on his German background and identity. In this way she comments on him in contradicting terms, firstly, as a divine figure: “..A bag full of God”, towering over her in a seemingly totalitarian way. She then transforms her implication with ” No God, but a swatztika” a completely ironic comment in comparison to the first as Nazism is essentially pagan in its nature.
The extended reference to the confusion of her father as Hitler is shown through indications of his “Mein Kampf look” and “neat moustache.” Similarly, Plath confuses herself with the role of a Jew, symbolising the insecurity which lies within her subconsciousness, and the recognition which she has of her victimisation from men.
This victimisation follows on with allusions to her marriage with Hughes, and the similarities Plath associated between her father and husband:
“If I’ve killed one man, I’ve killed two—
The vampire who said he was you”
Hughes himself acknowledged this confusion in his poem THE SHOT:
“Your real target stood behind me
Your Daddy
The man with the smoking gun”
This quote reinforces her father’s role in Plath’s eventual demise as it implies that the ’smoking gun’ once shot Plath’s bullet of fatality. Essentially...
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