Daddy by Sylvia Plath detailed summary and analysis, theme of Electra complex and Feminism

 

Daddy
BY SYLVIA PLATH

Sylvia Plath (1932-63)

¨ Pseudonym : Victoria Lucas

¨ American poet

¨ Pioneer of confessional poetry

¨ Won Pulitzer prize for

 “the Collected Poems”

Works

¨ Poems :

¨ The Colossus and other poems

¨ Ariel

¨ Crossing the water

¨ Winter trees

¨ COLLECTED PROSE AND NOVEL

¨ The Bell Jar

¨ Letters home: correspondence 1950-1963

¨ Johny Panic and the Bible of Dreams: short stories, prose and Diary excerpts

¨ Children’s Book

¨ The Bed Book

¨ The It doesn’t matter suit

¨ Mrs Cherry Kitchen

Style

¨ Sylvia Plath was one of the most dynamic and admired poets of the twentieth century.

¨ She committed suicide at the age of thirty

¨ Her verse is an attempt to catalogue despair, violent emotion and obsession with death

¨ Her densely autobiographical poems explore her own mental anguish, her troubled marriage with Ted Hughes, her unresolved conflicts with her parents  and her own vision of herself

Last works

¨ During her last three years Plath abandoned the restraints and conventions that had bound much of her early work.

¨ She wrote with great speed producing poems of stark self revelation and confession.

¨  the anxiety and confusion and doubt that haunted her were transmitted into verse of great power and pathos borne on flashes of incisive wit.

Daddy- Introduction

¨ Confessional poem

¨ Written on Oct. 12, 1982, four months before her death and on month after her separation from Ted Hughes.

¨ Published posthumously in Ariel during 1965

¨ The poem employs controversial metaphors of the holocaust to explain Plath’s complex relationship with her father, Otto Plath, who died shortly after her 8^th birthday

¨ Cryptic and widely anthologized poem in American Literature. 

In Plath’s own words

¨ “Here is a poem 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 Jewish. In the daughter, the two streams marry and paralyze each other. She has to act out the awful little allegory once over before she is free of it”

Poetic technique

¨ Juxtaposition is used when two contrasting objects or ideas are placed in conversation with one another in order to emphasize that contrast.

¨ Innocence vs. youthful emotions and pain

¨ Metaphors and similes appear throughout

Themes

¨ Oppressive nature of father/daughter relatioship

¨ Freedom from oppression

¨ Life and Death

Poem

You do not do, you do not do   

Any more, black shoe

In which I have lived like a foot   

For thirty years, poor and white,   

Barely daring to breathe or Achoo.

 

Daddy, I have had to kill you.   

You died before I had time——

Marble-heavy, a bag full of God,   

Ghastly statue with one gray toe   

Big as a Frisco seal

And a head in the freakish Atlantic   

Where it pours bean green over blue   

In the waters off beautiful Nauset.   

I used to pray to recover you.

Ach, du.

In the German tongue, in the Polish town   

Scraped flat by the roller

Of wars, wars, wars.

But the name of the town is common.   

My Polack friend

Says there are a dozen or two.   

So I never could tell where you   

Put your foot, your root,

I never could talk to you.

The tongue stuck in my jaw.

 

It stuck in a barb wire snare.   

Ich, ich, ich, ich,

I could hardly speak.

I thought every German was you.   

And the language obscene

An engine, an engine

Chuffing me off like a Jew.

A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen.   

I began to talk like a Jew.

I think I may well be a Jew.

 

The snows of the Tyrol, the clear beer of Vienna   

Are not very pure or true.

With my gipsy ancestress and my weird luck   

And my Taroc pack and my Taroc pack

I may be a bit of a Jew.

Panzer-man, panzer-man, O You——

I have always been scared of you,

With your Luftwaffe, your gobbledygoo.   

And your neat mustache

And your Aryan eye, bright blue. Not God but a swastika

So black no sky could squeak through.   

Every woman adores a Fascist,   

The boot in the face, the brute   

Brute heart of a brute like you.

You stand at the blackboard, daddy,   

In the picture I have of you,

A cleft in your chin instead of your foot   

But no less a devil for that, no not   

Any less the black man who

 

Bit my pretty red heart in two.

I was ten when they buried you.   

At twenty I tried to die

And get back, back, back to you.

I thought even the bones would do.

But they pulled me out of the sack,   

And they stuck me together with glue.   

And then I knew what to do.

I made a model of you,

A man in black with a Meinkampf look
And a love of the rack and the screw.   

And I said I do, I do.

So daddy, I’m finally through.

The black telephone’s off at the root,   

The voices just can’t worm through.

If I’ve killed one man, I’ve killed two——

The vampire who said he was you   

And drank my blood for a year,

Seven years, if you want to know.

Daddy, you can lie back now.
There’s a stake in your fat black heart   

And the villagers never liked you.

They are dancing and stamping on you.   

They always knew it was you.

Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m through.

Stanza wise summary

1.    The black shoe is a metaphor for the father, she has been trapped for 30 years and the narrator is about to escape

2.    But she can free herself by killing her daddy who does resemble the poet’s father, Otto Plath, who died when Sylvia Plath was 8 years old. His toe had turned black from gangrene. He eventually  had to have his leg amputed due to complications of diabetes. The bizarre surreal image is build up. His toe is as big as a seal, the grotesque image of her father has fallen like a statue.

3.    The statue’s head is in the Atlantic o the coast of Nauset beach, Cape Cod where the family used to holiday.

4.     They moved on to Poland during the second World war. There is a mix of fact and fiction. Poland has been razed in many wars adding strength to the idea that Germany (her father) had demolished many lives.

5.    . The narrator addresses the father as you. Direct address brings the reader closer to the action. Plath is hinting at a lack of communication, of instability and paralysis

6.     The use of wire snare increases the tension. The German ich I is repeated four times as if her self worth is wounded. The father is seen as all powerful icon

7.    The narrator comments that she is on a death train which is taking her to the concentration camps and one of Nazi death factories where millions of Jews were brutally gassed and cremated.

8.    8. Moving to Austria, Plath’s mother’s country, the narrator reinforces her identity. She is a bit of a Jew because she carries a tarot pack of cards and has gypsy blood in her.

9.    One of the aims of Nazi was to breed out unwanted genetic strains to produce thee perfect German. The Luftwaffe is German air force and Panzel is the name of German tank corps

10.  Father is referred to as swastika, the symbol off Nazi. It refers to the air raids over England during the war when Luftwaffe bombed many cities and turned the skies black.

11. The reader is taken to a kind of classroom where daddy stands. He has a cleft chin

12.  Her father tore her apart, reached inside her and left her torn and divided self. When her daddy died he felt a rage against God. She tried to commit suicide when she was 20

13.  The narrator is pulled out of the sack and they stick her back together with glue. The doctors cured her after her failed suicide attempt but never was same again. The girl creates a model which resembles Plath’s father.

14.  Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes are married. She addresses Daddy again, there will be no more communication with the past

15. The speaker has achieved her double killing both father and husband have been displaced. The latter is described as a vampire who has been drinking her blood for years.

16. The father’s demise has them dancing and stamping on him in a jovial way. The girl describes her daddy as a bastard. The exorcism is over and the conflict is resolved.

Electra Complex

¨ Electra Complex is a female version of Freud’s Oedipus complex. Jung posited that a daughter perceives her mother as a rival for the psychosexual energy of her father and wants to posses her father. This unresolved desire sometimes manifests as negative fixation on the father or father figure. 

Daddy’s girl

¨ The speaker is Daddy’s girl and uses childlike endearing term Daddy seven times to describe the man whose memory tortures her.

¨ During the course of the poem the speaker’s goal shifts from reuniting with her father to killing his memory and terminate his domination.

Facts

¨ 16 stanzas of 5 lines each, total 80 lines

¨ Meter : Tetrameter

¨ 37 lines are end stopped and enjambment is used frequently

¨ Metaphor, Simile are present as half rhymes, alliteration and assonance are used

¨ Baby talk: Daddy, achoo, gobbledegov, gets stammery (ich ich ich ich)

¨ Juxtaposes innocence and pain