Abstract
This paper examines how Sylvia Plath’s confessional poem “Daddy” achieves a radical agency through the power of repressed memories. Drawing on psychoanalytic frameworks from Freud and Lacan, the study investigates how Plath’s poetic expression in “Daddy” betrays a replacement of the understanding of the dominance of reason by another, more readily accessible to our minds. The paper argues that Plath’s poem is a ritualistic enactment of the exorcism of the unconscious, in which the murder of haunting memories reveals a vengeful victory won by a female speaker who is her own agency.
Keywords: Sylvia Plath, Daddy, confessional poetry, psychoanalysis, Freud, Lacan, subjectivity, memory, identity
Confessional Poetry: The Issue of Subjectivity
Theorists and cultural critics, all over the world are highly involved in trying to find out answers to the puzzles of identity and subjectivity. What is identity? Is it the “self” in a monolithic existence? Or does it involve “the forms and traditions that trapped the individual in a cage of ascription?” (Friedman vii-viii).
The inauguration of the high modernist phase of Anglo American literature pushed poets and writers towards a “different way of understanding identities via a questioning of social values and wide critical engagement with a variety of cultural texts. The publication of Robert Lowell’s “Life Studies”, brought forth, the personal subjectivity and agency in literature. Poets like Theodore Roethke, John Berryman, Anne Sexton, W.D. Snodgrass and Sylvia Plath, among others, for this expression as “a symbolic embodiment of national and cultural crises”, have come to be known as confessional poets.
In this paper, I intend to converge on the power of those memories, which psychoanalytically, helped Plath to achieve a radical agency in her own person. If confessional poetry is the expression of repressed memories by “leading the subject to his signifying dependence” (Lacan 77) I shall try to find out in what ways has Plath’s poetic expression in “Daddy”, betrayed a “replacement of the understanding of the dominance of reason by another, more readily accessible to our minds."
"Daddy” as the Haunt of the Unconscious: Freud, Lacan and Plath
Plath begins “Daddy” on a disengaged note and an objectified observation of the “black shoe”, which (the shoe is the symbol of femininity in the Freudian psychology) stands for those “cultural or social injunctions or prescriptions against which the conduct/behaviour of the persons in the poem is measured at both individual and social levels.” In the lines “You do not do, you do not do / Any more black shoe” in which she has lived for thirty years “barely daring to breathe or Achoo”, signify Plath’s revolt against normalization, the Law of the Father or the Symbolic, in which she had remained trapped all these years, silent and suffering.
Plath’s father, Otto Plath, was a German immigrant and a Professor of German and Biology at Boston University. He died in 1940 after the amputation of a gangrenous foot. Sylvia’s mother, Aurelia Schober Plath, writes in her introduction to her daughter’s Letters, that Sylvia’s first reaction on hearing of her father’s death was: “I’ll never speak to God again.”
The Exorcism of Memory
Confessional poetry is more often, than not, therapeutic, in nature. The therapy involves a cleansing and recuperation of one’s subjectivity via a presentation of the personal unconscious through what Jung called the “collective unconscious.” Plath was not really successful in her initial attempts of getting her work published.
In poetically killing her “daddy”, she ritualistically kills her husband who “bit my pretty red heart in two”, and of course a part of herself. By exorcising her memories, Plath becomes linguistically and artistically free and her tongue which was “stuck in (her) jaw”, scared and hateful of the father’s “German”, “Luftwaffe” and “Gobbledygoo”, ultimately “gets back, back, back to you.”
We know that even her excellent artistic manipulations were not life-saving and yet, she was successful in her attempt to “perfect the present historicization of the facts that have already determined a certain number of historical turning points in (her) existence” (Lacan 52). Her poetry, was a ritualistic enactment of the exorcism of the unconscious. The murder of the haunting memories in “Daddy”, reveals a vengeful victory won by female speaker who is her own agency. In the lines “So Daddy, I am finally through / The black Telephone’s off at the root / The voices just can’t worm through”, she celebrates her new Lacanian identity.
Conclusion
“Daddy” is Plath’s “genotext” (Lechte 142), something that is beyond the linguistic and is a process — a process of personal signification, of artistic and linguistic freedom won. A process which was initiated in “Daddy” and had still to be followed in “Lady Lazarus”, via the exorcism of Hughes’ memories. Technical writing apart, “Daddy” veers between the luridly sinister and self-deprecatingly clever. The tone vacillates between the nursery rhyme and the ironic discourse expressing an adult world of evasions and failures. “Daddy” transforms “schizo” into “scherzo” (Raichura 81).