Choose one related text (poem/extract/memoir/you tube site etc) and by making close reference to one prescribed Hughes poem, demonstrate how conflicting perspectives of personality are conveyed.

Element Hughes: The Shot

Conveys Hughes rejection of Plath’s description of herself as a victim. Tone Tone is satiric, sarcastic, mocking, bitter, regretful, sad, wistful, cynical, angry, accusing, and trivialising.

Satires Plath’s quest by deflating its seriousness. “jocks”. Use of the Colloquial Language child’s term undermines the serious tone and makes Hughes sound sarcastic and mocking. Devalues her psychosis by

Personification: Daddy as a God

Central extended metaphor builds up a picture of Plath’s one Metaphor: mindedness and ruthlessness.

Accuses Plath of being the exploiter and depicting himself and other males in her life as her victims. Plath used him for her own emotional Accusations: purposes relating to her infatuation with her father. Accuses her of manipulating everyone around her including himself, that she was a phony and an act.

Himself and the other males in Plath’s life that she destroyed in her quest for her father. Sees himself as one of the males sacrificed in the service of Plath’s search for the god-like daddy. Who’s the victim? Plath in a sense, controlled and driven by her relationship with her dead father. “Captives of psychological forces are as much at their mercy as their victims.”

Person: Second, used for intimacy.

• Reduces past lovers to mere objects and illusions • No man will ever be able to replace Plath’s father in her emotions and that she remained obsessed with his memory, unable to accept the human weaknesses of the men she met. • Central concept that Otto Plath’s death set in motion the whole course of events that would inevitably lead to her suicide. • Parody in that Plath wanted to resurrect her father in order to kill him. Return to him and punish him fatally for deserting her. • Conspires against herself by pursuing her father when it will destroy her. • Preoccupied with her appearance, cynical reference to her conformity to female roles and her female helplessness as a disguise.

• She’s a different person under the surface, it’s all acts and performances, manipulation. Perspective on the other: • Challenges and refutes the version of reality presented by Plath in Daddy.

Truth cannot be divulged through literature. Sylvia Plath and ’ poetry makes the truth of their relationship unattainable to the reader, their relationship was in fact, unattainable to the them themselves. Both Plath's poem, "Daddy" and Hughes's work "The Shot" concoct their own caricatures of Otto Plath and themselves throughout their poetry. Both works contain elements of veracity, however both perspectives have been moulded and manipulated by the poet's emotions, sliced and splayed open at the mercy of the reader so that neither of the couples' perspectives can be taken on face value. Both poets make accusations, name enemies, create victims and manipulate the reader to see each character fulfilling their role in the death of Sylvia Plath.

Plath’s poem Daddy presents three fundamental personalities – Plath as a victim of her father’s oppression and both Hughes and Otto Plath as tyrannical, authoritarian oppressors. Plath uses a combination of hyperbole and metaphor to explore these personalities throughout Daddy. The personalities Hughes assigns to each of the characters in the melodrama of Plath’s suicide conflict with those that Plath presents. He counter-attacks the personalities in Daddy by accusing Plath of being both an exploiter as well as and a victim; portraying himself as a victim sacrificed in Plath’s quest for her father and by naming Otto Plath as an instigator and the initiator of Plath’s downfall. Plath, Hughes and Otto are each assigned a disposition by their poets and these personalities are developed throughout both Daddy and The Shot. Otto Plath however, stands as a personality directly removed from the relationship, and also directly responsible. The two poet’s perspectives on his role in Plath’s life and death are explored in both poems.

Hughes’ work The Shot refutes the version of reality presented in Plath’s poem Daddy and responds to her accusations on an autobiographical level – by making accusations of his own. Hughes names Otto Plath as the ‘god’ of Plath’s worship and infatuation and presents the concept that Otto Plath’s death was the trigger to set Plath’s life on the road it took. He also presents that Otto was inevitably to blame for her suicide:

“When his death touched the trigger In that flash You saw your whole life.”

The use of this extended metaphor throughout the poem allows Hughes to represent Plath’s personality as he saw it – a ruthless, high velocity bullet with everything and everyone serving her the ultimate purpose – finding her daddy. Through this metaphor, Hughes also represents Otto as the one responsible for the havoc that Sylvia inflicting on him and everyone in her life. The poem crescendos to culminate in Plath’s paradoxical desire to return to her father and punish him fatally for deserting her. Hughes explores Otto’s role in his wife’s death by assigning him the symbol of Plath’s god, and the man behind the gun that shot her into life and ultimately death:

“Till your real target Hid behind me. Your Daddy. The god with the smoking gun.”

Hughes presents Otto as the motivation of Plath’s psychology through her Electra-like fixation on her father. He indicates that both he and Plath were at the mercy of this pre-determined psychosis – for which Otto was to blame. While he may have died when Sylvia was only at the age of eight,

Hughes explores the personality that Otto Plath left behind to haunt and destroy his daughter; and everyone around her. Hughes determines in The Shot that regardless of the ‘truth’ of Otto Plath’s personality – Plath’s caricature of him is enough for him to be blamed directly for the events of Plath’s life, and therefore indirectly on Hughes. From Hughes’s perspective – Otto Plath is in initiator of Sylvia Plath’s downfall and the continued reason for her psychotic demons.

Plath’s poem Daddy portrays Plath’s simultaneous love and deep hatred for her father – Otto Plath. Her Electra-like fixation on him is evident in lines such as:

“At 20 I tried to die And get back, back, back to you. I thought even the bones would do.”

These lines of confessional, stream of consciousness poetry share with the reader Plath’s deepest desire to return to her father. The autobiographical detail, referring to her suicide attempts and deep depressions allow Plath to construct her own perspective on her father. She has stood him on an alter where he is untouchable by anyone but her. Her use of metaphor throughout the poem allows the paradoxical nature of her emotions to dominate the poem and present the conflicting personality she has assigned to her daddy.

Plath compares Otto to a variety of demons that exist within her own life – a black shoe, a ghastly statue, Hitler, a fascist, the devil and a vampire. Each one of these concepts is explored throughout the poem through the use of personification, however the most prominent of these is the comparison drawn between Otto Plath and Hitler. Plath uses a lexical chain of comparisons to identify her father with the totalitarian oppressor such as swastika, Aryan eye and neat moustache. Through this lexical chain and the use of metaphor she describes herself as a victim of her father’s oppression, like the Jews were victims of Hitler’s persecution. At the same time however, the narrator recognises the paradox of her own emotions – “Every woman adores a Fascist”. The poem represents her infatuation with her father, but unlike Hughes representation of Otto, it emphasises her love and deepest adoration for her daddy and minimises the role he plays in her death.

The tone used by both poets allows for the personalities that each has assigned to Otto Plath to be manipulated and presented to the reader. Hughes initial tone is satiric, sarcastic, mocking and bitter, diminishing the seriousness of Plath’s quest for the true personality of her father. The final stanza however captures the tremendous loss he felt because of Plath’s inability to separate herself from her father’s memory: “I managed A wisp of your hair, your ring, your watch, your nightgown.” Meanwhile, Plath’s tone is more accusatory, passionate and grieving as she explores her own conflicting emotions on the role of her father in her life – as both an oppressor and her own loving daddy. Through the voice of a wavering child, Plath presents her everlasting love and blame to her father in Daddy while Hughes presents the concept of Otto’s role as the sole initiator of Plath’s downfall in The Shot. The reality of Otto Plath’s personality however, died when Sylvia Plath was only 8 and both poets present only their perspectives on an unattainable truth.