Abstract
Written in 1963 and categorized as a confessional poem, “Daddy” stands as a true testament to its author’s genius, Sylvia Plath. Although a lot of elements found in the poem refer to the poet’s personal life, its deep psychological insight offers the possibility of such an interpretation found to be in great harmony with the psychological trauma and harsh mental experiences many of us are likely to go through in our lives. Giving an account of a very complicated relationship between a father and his daughter who speaks a childlike language, not only does “Daddy” put the audience through a chilly experience which is in sharp contrast to the intimate tone its title conveys, but it also boasts of its author’s knowledge of Electra complex.
The Poem’s Multilayered Nature
Written in 1963, “Daddy” stands out as the advocate of its gifted author, Sylvia Plath. The poem’s multilayered nature enables the readers to interpret it from various points of view. It is colored with the elements taken from the author’s personal life, but nevertheless offers deep psychological insights applicable to the experiences of many living all around the world. This poem is renowned for its daring portrayal of the Electra complex, which points up Plath’s vast knowledge of the Freudian studies.
“Daddy” relates the account of a very complicated relationship between a father and his daughter. Although the title of the poem bears a positive and intimate connotation, it proves to be highly ironical and tricky. The poem starts with a very simple language, as if it belongs to a child and it also sounds like a nursery rhyme. The use of nursery rhyme, as a poetic device, helps to keep the tone of the poem as complicated as its subject matter. It sounds as if the persona is taking pleasure in her harsh sufferings. But, in reality, the nursery rhyme and the light childish tone become tools for this girl to protect herself from the choking pain and the extreme insufferable mental wounds. In psychoanalytic terms this tool has come to be recognized as ‘manic defense’ through which the persona gains enough power to fully present the sore situation she has been stuck in (Alvarez 46).
“Critics have commented on the poem’s nursery-rhyme-like sound, some believing it marvelously appropriate in light of the childhood reflections, others deeming it a disaster in light of the poem’s horrific rage” (Bloom 41).
The Father Figure and Holocaust Imagery
The persona suggests how she has been terrified of her father, or rather his thoughts, for thirty years. For all this while she has been trapped like a “foot” in a “black shoe”, a phallic symbol representing her father’s oppressive image, not daring to make the smallest sound or give the meekest voice to her thoughts. “[T]he poetic persona celebrates her belated patricide” (Bronfen 56).
She tries to portray the mental picture she has created of her father. Just like a child she clearly seems fascinated by this picture. In fact the speaker is so amazed by it that she starts comparing her father to God. This colossus father who “is larger than life in all senses… [and who has replaced] God” makes her “shrink even into the non-human” (Manners 153).
From the sixth stanza on the speaker bursts out with anger, addresses her father with shocking harsh epithets and describes her relationship with him in gloomy terms. Holocaust imagery begins to pour out. The German language has always disgusted this girl; it has always been a source of oppression. To her this language is similar to the trains the Nazis used for carrying the Jews to the concentration camps like “Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen” in World War II. Thinking of her father’s German nationality as a grim fact and recognizing Germans as sheer cold-blooded and brutal murderers, later on in the poem “she… imagines for herself a Jewish mother, so that, by virtue of an identification with the victim, she can deflect her own guilt about the German ancestry inscribed in her blood” (Bronfen 56).
The Devil Imagery and Marriage
Having done the Holocaust/Nazi imagery, in the eleventh stanza the imagery of a devil is put forth. The repetition of the color black reinforces such an idea. The father is one oppressive dictator teacher. Although his appearance may not exactly match a real devil, nevertheless he is a devilish figure who broke the tender heart of his daughter in half.
The persona tells us that at the age of twenty she committed suicide, but to the reader’s surprise instead of explaining her attempt as getting back at her father to fulfill the long waited revenge, she says: “and get back, back, back to you.” It is as if she thinks that the reunion would heal her wounds. This line may well suggest that deep inside, despite of what she may think, her anger is not pointed at the father himself but at the agent who took her father away from her (Bloom 43).
After her unsuccessful suicide attempt, rescued and brought back to life, the speaker decides to make a model of her father in order to settle her mental issues and get over her gloomy thoughts of him. That is when she agreed to marry a man resembling her Hitler-looking father. The reason for such a choice in marriage can be traced down to psychological studies. According to Freud the tendency to repeat occurs as a result of the incapability to come to terms with one’s own past (Ghasemi, Changizi 86).
Electra Complex and Confessional Poetry
Plath herself stated: “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 marry and paralyze each other — she has to act out the awful little allegory before she is free of it” (qtd. in Ghasemi, Changizi 84).
Some believe that this poem is a confessional one. A poem which “deals with the facts and intimate mental and physical experiences of the poets own life” (Abrams 56). Although Sylvia Plath does not claim that what she describes in “Daddy” refers to her own experiences, one can find some biographical evidences from her life in this poem. But what gives this poem its intensive attractiveness is not its being confessional only. Sylvia Plath has managed to create a poem with universal appeal out of her own private experiences. “Plath mostly uses the father/daughter relation as a smaller model to show the relation between man and woman and, in a wider scope, the position of the woman as an artist in a patriarchal system” (Ghasemi, Changizi 84).
Exorcism Through Authorship
The early death of the father prevented her from communicating her feelings of love and/or anger to him. This lack of fulfillment, which gradually built up during her childhood and extended to her adult life, gave way to an Electra complex not easily removed or gotten rid of. As soon as the defenses break down this anxiety loses disguise and comes out to the surface in the form of a trauma which has to be confronted without any further ado.
Sylvia Plath uses her artistic creation as a curing method to this fixation. To her, writing acts like a filter liberating her from painful memories. As she herself says: “Writing makes me a small god; I recreate the flux and smash of the world through the small ordered word patterns I make. I have powerful physical, intellectual and emotional forces which must have outlets, creative or they turn to destruction or waste” (qtd. in Sharif 9).
Works Cited
- Abrams, Mayer H, and Geoffrey Galt Harpham. A Glossary of Literary Terms. 9th ed. Boston: Wadsworth Cengage Learning, 2009.
- Alvarez, Al. “Sylvia Plath.” Tri-Quarterly 7. 1996: 71-72.
- Bennett, Paula. My Life, a Loaded Gun: Dickinson, Plath, Rich, and Female Creativity. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1986.
- Bloom, Harold. Sylvia Plath. Broomall, PA: Chelsea House Publishers, 2001.
- Bronfen, Elisabeth. Sylvia Plath. Plymouth: Northcote House, 1998.
- Ghasemi, Parvin, and Parisa Changizi. “Sins of the Father Revisited: A Psychoanalytic Reading of Sylvia Plath’s ‘Daddy’.” Ceeol, 22 Feb 2011.
- Gill, Jo. The Cambridge Introduction to Sylvia Plath. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008.
- Manners, Marilyn. “The Doxies of Daughterhood: Plath, Cixous, and the Father.” Jstor, 1996.
- Plath, Sylvia. “Daddy.” Poetryfoundation.
- Sharif, Yasin. “Ambivalence: The Divided Self in Sylvia Plath’s Poetry.” Banglajol, IIUC Studies. 3 Dec 2006.
- Shung, Chu-Hua. “The Electra Complex in Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton’s Poems.” Mrhoyesibwebsite.