"Daddy"

Context Central Argument, Historical

ever controversial modern poems remains one of the most Plath's poem "Daddy" Sylvia and other devices to that uses and at times painful allegory written. It is a dark, surreal, Plath's own words: herself from her father. In of a female victim finally freeing carry the idea she Her father died while a with an Electra complex. Here is a poem spoken by girl also a Nazi the fact that her father was case is complicated by thought he was God. Her strains marry and paralyze Jewish. In the daughter the two and her mother very possibly before she is free of it. awful little allegory once over each other-she has to act out the

from her husband and moved- month after Plath had separated "Daddy" was written in1962, a London. Four months later their home in Devon to a flat in with their two smalil children-from that turbulent period. Plath's usage some of her best poems during Plath was dead, but she wrote Jewish but was in of critical attention. She was not of Holocaust imagery has inspired a plethora with Jewish history and culture. fact German, yet was obsessed It's a weird combine the personal with the mythical. unsettling, Daddy" is an attempt to the aimed at a father and a husband (since divided a controlled blast nursery rhyme of the self, and and The expresses Plath's terror pain lyrically two conflate in the 14th stanza). poem with much darker of a Mother Goose nursery rhyme hauntingly. It combines light echoes full of a cold marble is seen as a black shoe, a bag God, resonances of World War II. The father is sadistic and a . The girl (narrator, speaker) statue, a Nazi, a , a fascist, a brute, that black tomblike shoe, in the man. She is a victim trapped in trapped i her idolization of this the train asit to Auschwitz. sack that holds the father's bones, and--in a sense-in chugs along Guernica of some have called "Daddy" "the "Daddy" is full of disturbing imagery, and that's why identifies herself with the plight of the modern poetry." As the poem progresses, the narrator direct references to in during the Nazi regime in Germany. There are many the poem. The poem is ironically and depersonalized taken beyond mere con fession into archetypal father-daughter pathos. Sylvia Plath has risked all the by introducing holocaust into the poem; only her astute use of rhythm, rhyme and allows her lyric to get away with it. "Daddy" can also be viewed as a poem about the individual trapped between herself and society. Plath weaves a together a - patriarchal figures father, Nazis, vampire, a husband and then holds them all accountable for horrors. history's "Daddy" imagines a larger-than-life patriarchal figure, but here the has a figure distinctly social, political aspect. Even the vampire is discussed in terms of its tyrannical sway over a village. In this interpretation, the speaker comes to understand that she

must killthe father in order to figure break free of the limitations that it places upon her. In particular, these limitations can be understood as patriarchal forces that enforce a strict gender

structure. It has the feel an an of exorcism, act of purification. And yet the journey is not easy. She realizes what she has to do, but it requires a sort of hysteria. In order to succeed, she must have complete control, since she fears she will be destroyed unless she totally annihilates her antagonist.

Plath's "Daddy" offers the glimpses of her real life bubbling up through metaphor and

allegory, but she never makes it fully confessional. Indeed, it is hard to imagine that any of Sylvia Plath's poems could leave the reader unmoved. "Daddy" is evidence of her profound

with her and the talent, part of which rested in her unabashed confrontation personal history write a that both the traumas Qf the age in which she lived. That she could poem encompasses personal and historical is clear in "Daddy."