Daddy by Sylvia Plath - some introductory thoughts

SOME THOUGHTS ON DADDY

Below are a few observations on the poem Daddy that you might find helpful to consider.

·         The poem is largely autobiographical. However you should write about the narrative voice of the poem rather than Plath herself. She has adapted and edited the material significantly.

·         So the poetic voice of the poem is that of a woman whose father died when she was very young.

·         The poetic voice we read is that of a woman who has not properly grieved the death of her father. She has been left with a complex and powerful group of emotions that are torturing her. These powerful emotions include anger at being abandoned by him and deep desire to love him and be with him.

·         The subject of the poem is that of the woman attempting to end the damaging influence of the distorted and magnified memory of her father. She wants to be completely and finally separated from him.

·         Every child over years is naturally separated from their parents. This is a healthy part of growing up. But because the father dies when the child was so young she has not had the ability to distance herself from him. She uses shocking lexis to describe this separation as he ‘Daddy I have had to kill you / You died before I had time.’

·         Because she has never properly grieved for him over the years her feelings and memories for him have become magnified and distorted. In her imagination he has become all powerful, he has grown to colossal proportions – a head in the Atlantic, a toe in the Pacific. Because Plath’s father was a German speaking Pole she associates him with the persecuting all powerful Nazi’s and herself as a Jew – a victim of the Nazi’s. In the second half of the poem she has exhausted this holocaust imagery and adopts the supernatural imagery of the vampire.

·         At this point in the poem she introduces a second figure – a husband who also assumes the character of a persecutor an image of evil.

·         The poem ends with a declaration of victory over both men.  However we are aware that this is an apparent victory. We don’t really believe she has really achieved this state of total emotional and mental separation from him. Her use of the informal, slang noun ‘bastard’ still shows her to be angry – thus full of unresolved feelings.