BA V Semester American Literature Syllabus.

Gulbraga University , Raichur University, All State University

DADDY

By Sylvia Plath

About the Author :

Sylvia Plath was born in Boston, Massachusetts, on 27 October 1932. Her father, Otto Plath, was a German émigré and her mother, Aurelia Schober, was an American of Australian –Jewish descent. She loved and worshipped her father ardently. He died when she was only eight. The death of her father was a traumatic event of her childhood. It later figured as an obsession in her poetry. She married the British poet Ted Hughes in 1956 and had two children. the couple separated in1962.

Sylvia Plath’s first book of poems “The Colossus” was published in 1960. Her only novel “The Bell Jar” appeared in 1963. “Ariel” (1965), “Crossing the Water” and “Winter Trees” (both1971) were published posthumously.

Summary of the Poem :

The poem daddy is a dramatic monologue in which a daughter verbally assassinates her father. The poem is a phantasy created out of the poet’s obsessive belief that her father’s pure Prussian ancestry could have made him a Nazi and her mother’s Jewish background might have consigned her to a concentration camp. The tension that develops from this situation is the main spring of the poem.

Sylvia Plath’s own note to this poem reads: ‘The poem is spoken by a girl with an Electra Complex. Her father died while she thought he was god. Her case is complicated by the fact that her father was also a Nazi and her mother very possibly part Jewish. In the daughter the two strains merge and paralyze each other. She has to act out the awful allegory once over before she is free of it.

Based on the ‘Electra Complex’ of Freudian psychology, the poem presents a situation in which the daughter is ‘in love’ with the father. She simultaneously hates and admires him and the conflicting emotions restrict and dwarf her life to such an extent that she must get rid of the situation by killing him. But first she tries to join him through suicide, later through marriage to a man who shares many of the father’s qualities.

The suffocation the poetess suffered due to the Electra complex is identified with that of a foot shut up in a black shoe. The colour black and the shoe are emblematic of the Nazi persecution. The poetess says for thirty years she has lived like a foot in the black shoe daring not even to breathe. The poet confesses that she had to kill her father. But she was absolved from the sin of patricide as her father had died before she had time to assassinate him. The poetess’s ambivalent attitude to the father with its mingled admiration and hate is effectively brought out by the images of ‘marble- heavy, a bag full of god’ and ghastly statue with one grey toe’.

Otto Emil Plath, the poetess’ father immigrated to America from a Polish town. The poetess blindly believed that her father’s pure Prussian ancestry could have made him a Nazi. She says: “I never could talk to you/ the tongue stuck in my jaw/ the tongue stuck in barbed wire snare/ Ich. Ich. Ich. / l could hardly speak’. Barbed wire snare is a reference to the concentration camps where Jews were incarcerates by the Nazis during the World War II. The poetess makes a reference to the trains carrying Jewish prisoners to various concentration camps. She had an obsession that every German she met was her father.

The poetess has always been scared of her father- his Germaneness. She has been afraid of the German air force, Luftwaffe, her father’s gobbledygook, his neat moustache, his Aryan eye. She refers to her father as a Panzer-man . The superiority complex and the savagery and violence of the German race are brought out by the sex and such other images as swastika and ‘boot in the face’. The poetess’ mind was complicated with the fact that her father was a brute German with a brute heart.

In the picture she has of her father, he appears to have a cleft in his chin instead of his foot. Sylvia Plath was only eight when her father died. He died while she thought him a God. Yet it was he who tore her pretty red heart into two with his seeming Naziness. At twenty she made an attempt to commit suicide by swallowing a large number of sleeping pills. This attempt of her to join her father ended up in failure. When they rescued her, she tried to join her father by another way: ‘I made a model of you/ A man in black with a Meinkamph look’. The implication is that Sylvia married a man who resembled her father. Thus the poetess obliterates her memories of her father by having a stake driven through the heart of his heartlessness. The verbal assassination of the father by the daughter is complete with the utterance of the words’ Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m through’.

Frequently Asked Questions :-

What is the main idea of the poem Daddy by Sylvia Plath?

Sylvia Plath uses her poem, “Daddy”, to express intense emotions towards her father’s life and death and her disastrous relationship with her husband. The speaker in this poem is Sylvia Plath who has lost her father at age ten, at a time when she still adored him unconditionally.

What is the metaphor in Daddy by Sylvia Plath?

In “Daddy” and “Lady Lazarus” by Sylvia Plath, a persona is widened to a collective metaphor of herself as a Jewish victim of the Holocaust. This is to illustrate her struggle in defining her identity against the consuming male oppression with which she is faced.

What is the analysis of the poem Daddy by Sylvia Plath?

Sylvia Plath’s poem “Daddy” had very dark tones and imagery including death and suicide, in addition to the Holocaust. Plath wrote about her father’s death that occurred when she was eight years old and of her ongoing battle trying to free herself from her father.

What type of poem is Sylvia Plath’s Daddy?

Sylvia Plath’s confessional poem “Daddy” is a disturbing poem about a woman’s relationship with two men: her father and her husband.