Daddy By Sylvia Plath Essay

Sairo Kola
Justin Grant
ENC 1102: Writing about poetry
29 October 2014 Looking at “Daddy” In her poignant memoir, “Daddy”, Sylvia Plath deconstructs her childhood relationship with her father and applies it to her ongoing relationship with controlling, oppressive men. Through powerful metaphorical language and reference to Nazism, machines of war, and a focus on gloomy, dark colors, Plath displays her inability to cope and find structure in her life without the male abuse and mental subordination. Beginning with childlike verses that reappear throughout the stanzas and a determined focus on the subordination of wartime, Plath explores her early life and the effect of her father’s treatment- rather, his apathy and absence- on her psyche.
Her father’s presence, at least the memory of him, confined her and tied her up. She lived “like a foot” (3) in this mental prison for thirty years until finally killing herself after several attempts, possibly seeing suicide as the only way to liberate herself from male oppression. The dank, smelly gloom of her father’s “black shoe” (2) (e.g., her prison) blanketed her entire childhood and prevented her from seeking out new opportunities even on into adulthood, “barely daring to breathe” (5) so as not to disturb the volatile nature of masculinity surrounding her. The simple language of “gobbledygook” (47) and “achoo” (5), both featured in irregular rhyme and structure, reflects the innocent perspective of Plath as a girl, one who wanted to know her father on a deeper level while at the same time wanted nothing more than to escape his influence. Reference to warfare machinery, such as a “Panzerman” (49) written twice to ensure the feeling evoked by the feared German tank, makes a direct connection to Plath’s father: that even in his absence, she could still sense his presence. While the reader can assume the concept of Plath’s father, his total absence from the poem directly relates to Plath’s mental anguish and lack of physical experience of her father, who repressed her capacity as a human being and did not supply her with the tools needed survive in the world. Represented
She “thought every German was [her father]” (29) and this points to his presence as an overarching idea in Plath’s life, rather than an actual person. She evokes inherently terrifying imagery by comparing her father to Nazi Germany, devil’s hooves, and vampires, and these fear-saturated ideas flourish within “Daddy.” She calls him “marble heavy” and a “bag full of God” (8), portraying his influence as its entity, a omniscient presence that weighs upon Plath at every moment and defines her every movement. “Daddy” is ultimately a sentiment directed towards female individuality, or more specifically, the lack of individuality that accompanies a lifelong subordination. Plath attempts to separate herself from the desire to know her father’s “German tongue, Polish town” (16); she has some of the facts, but in the end realizes that it is a vain effort to uncover “where [he] put [his] root, [his] foot” (23) as attempt to relate to him. She “used to pray to recover [her father]” (14) to understand specifically why he did not grace her with love and presence, instead choosing to remain an expressionless monolith in the home. “Ach du” (15) – oh you – is a projection of apathetic frustration, a melancholia towards the loss of her father and simultaneous dissonance about his blunted