"Daddy" is one of the poems that Sylvia Plath wrote while finishing The Bell Jar. My class period was barely able to discuss about "Lady Lazarus" so I thought I would take a look at this interesting poem with an interesting title. I can tell you just after first reading the poem that it's quite intense. For some reason, although this poem is about father-daughter relationships and trauma, Sylvia Plath uses Nazism and the Holocaust as imagery, something she also did in "Lady Lazarus". For context, this poem was written a month after Plath was separated from her husband Ted Hughes and just 4 months before Plath passed away. The poem is considered confessional poetry, a 1950s–1960s American literary movement characterized by intense and autobiographical exploration of controversial topics.
In the first stanza, Plath describes and portrays her fathers as a very powerful and influential figure through the image of a black shoe in which she is the foot. The imagery here seems to portray that Plath felt restricted under her father like a foot trapped in a shoe. Not only that, this could also suggest that Plath's identity was perhaps shaped by her father like a foot being forced to conform to the shoe. In the same stanza, Plath mentions that her fathers suffocating influences has lasted for 30 years. Not only does this mean that the father's influence lasted well past Plath's childhood, combining with the fact that Plath's father passed away while she was just 8 years old, it also suggests that this influence could be coming from grief and/or trauma.
The next stanza really shocked me as Plath then goes on to say that her father died before she could kill him and saying that he weighed heavy on her like marbles and "a bag full of God". Plath ends the stanza by describing her father as a statue with a toe that looks like the big and grey San Francisco seal. My shock from reading the first half of the stanza was sharply contrasted by my confusion in the second half as I have no clue why Plath described her father with a big black toe. The next stanza continues the imagery by saying that his head was located in the Atlantic Ocean near Nauset, MA and how Plath used to pray he would come back from the dead. The stanza ends with "Oh you" in German.
The next few stanzas are connected to the German that ended the previous one as Plath now imagines herself praying in German while being inside a Polish town with a name so common that there must be at least 12 of them. It's worth noting here that Plath says her "Polack friend" told her there must be at least 12 towns with this name and that "Polack" is a slur used against people of polish descent. The reason she used this slur here is unclear to me. She continues by saying that she could no longer find where her father was and thought that every German was her father before saying that she thought the German language was both offensive and disgusting. Plath goes so far as to say that the German language is like an engine to a train that carried her off like a Jew to a concentration camp. Next, she begins wondering if she was a jew herself. She expresses her dislike of Austria and begins listing things that might make her Jewish: her luck, her Romani descent, and her Tarot cards.
Plath next says that she has always been afraid of her father (referring to him as "you"). She compares him to the German air force and gobbledygoo (overcomplicated language that doesn't make sense). She denounces her father as a God and instead says he's the swastika and says thats every woman loves a Fascist. Recalling a photograph of her father, she calls him a devil.
Plath then says that her father died when she was 10 (which is inconsistent with Plath's life) and that she tried to take her own life when she was 20. As Plath was forced in to recovery, she married a man like her father, and as she described, had a love of torture. Plath then calls her husband a vampire who has drank her blood for seven years.
Finally, Plath imagines a wooden stake driven through her father's heart with villagers dancing around and stomping on his body and telling him thats she's finished.
This poem is honestly quite complex as it features a lot of imagery and very out of the world storytelling. From the way it was written, it's not hard to tell why this poem was so controversial. The main themes that I've seen from the poem involve oppression based on gender. This was seen both through the father's oppression of the daughter and the husband's oppression of the wife. The poem is definitely not a super easy poem to understand and I had to do a lil research on some of the German words and locations. It's a shame that our class wasn't able to discuss this poem but hopefully you now know more about "Daddy".
- Henry Guan
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ReplyDeleteHi Henry,
I was originally really curious about the context of "Daddy" but struggled to understand the principle of the poem. I think your analysis was super helpful in taking a step to understanding the poem. I didn't know any of the context to any of the Nazi imagery or German language in the poem. I was shocked to know that it was only included due to her dislike of the language. I liked your overall analysis on all the imagery the poem presents. Great Blog!
Hey Henry,
ReplyDeletenice blog! It seems like this poem is very deep and complex, and you did a good job breaking down key themes. I also like that you did some research into the different german references. Some of the imagery definitely was a doozy, like the big black toe, which just makes this poem even more special. Overall, good job!
Nice blog Henry! My first impressions on this poem is just confusion with how complex it is. Your post seems to clear some of the doubts I had when looking at the poem. I like how you simplified the intense imagery in the poem, and how you leveled with us when you are also confused with the content. You connecting it to the Holocaust setting and the trope of oppressions was also very insightful.
ReplyDeleteI'm impressed that you've gone so deep on "Daddy," and I agree that this poem's imagery (like that in "Lady Lazarus") can be shocking at times--the reader wonders just how bad this father-figure must have been, especially since he apparently died when the speaker was ten. Again Plath "goes nuclear" in terms of her imagery. You mention Ted Hughes, whose name I don't think even came up in class (although I alluded to her marriage to a British poet): while this poem is partly "about" Plath's father, the real anger, bitterness, resentment seems to be reserved for that "vampire who said he was you," the "new" Daddy the speaker has recently acquired. This is pretty clearly a bitter reference to Ted Hughes, and she has driven a stake through his heart. Psychoanalytic critics can have a field day with the conflation of Plath's father and husband in the conclusion of this poem, but maybe I'm more interested in the odd tone--how she sounds almost taunting, teasing, flirtatious as she denounces her father and husband as fascists and Nazis. It could have been fun to get into this poem in class--I wish we had more time!
ReplyDeleteHi Henry! Your breakdown of Plath’s poem “Daddy” is very thorough. I like how you explore the purposeful use of Nazi imagery and the unresolved trauma that her father has caused her. Your point about the “black shoe” imagery was particularly insightful, since I hadn’t previously considered the dual meaning. I think the second stanza, which compares her father to a statue with a gray toe as big as a Frisco seal, might indicate how stone-hearted and imposing he was. Good post!
ReplyDeleteHi, Henry! I also talked about this poem in my blog, but really yours goes deep. I too was shocked and confused why Plath described her father with a big black toe. In the examples you listed, it makes me wonder what kind of personality Plath had in real life; was she more Esther or more like the Plath that wrote this poem?
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