Daddy by Sylvia Plath Analysis
Essay
Just like Sylvia Plath tries to illustrate her dislike towards Nazis in a very explicit way by saying “every woman adores a Fascist” as an irony- I think she intends to express another idea rather than the fact that she disliked Nazis or that her father resembled them.
At a first glance, Sylvia Plath could be telling the world that all en have Nazi features in one way or another. The narrator of the poem has obviously had a terrible, severe and authoritarian father, even compared to the devil “A cleft in your chin instead of your foot; but no less a devil for that”-. In spite of this, she loves “Ddaddy” (or used to love him) so much that he was a great part of her life, as we can notice in lines such as “I used to pray to recover you” which I think means that she wants to recover her daddy from hatred and evil, but she was unable to make him change. Better said, she never did anything in order to change him but she was just expecting her father to be kind and poor, so she had to “kill” him. The narrator had to “kill” her father in her mind: she was forced to think that her father did not exist anymore so that he would not hurt her anymore.
If we went deeper into the analysis of the poem we could at least I coul- ask ourselves: where does all this harm come from? What did “daddy” do to make this woman write all this?
As I kept on reading through the lines I had myself a picture of this girl who had an extremely severe father, forced to make up his death in order to be at peace. Suddenly, I started to notice some clues that would led me yo a conclusion:
“the tongue stuck in my jaw...”
“...I could hardly speak...”
“...an engine, an engine
Chuffing me off like a jew.”
There was something more implicit in “Daddy”. Something resembling the Electra complex in which daughters and fathers have sexual and amorous relationships, where they actually feel love and stronger emotions, such as the sense of someone belonging to you.
I think that the
Just like Sylvia Plath tries to illustrate her dislike towards Nazis in a very explicit way by saying “every woman adores a Fascist” as an irony- I think she intends to express another idea rather than the fact that she disliked Nazis or that her father resembled them.
At a first glance, Sylvia Plath could be telling the world that all en have Nazi features in one way or another. The narrator of the poem has obviously had a terrible, severe and authoritarian father, even compared to the devil “A cleft in your chin instead of your foot; but no less a devil for that”-. In spite of this, she loves “Ddaddy” (or used to love him) so much that he was a great part of her life, as we can notice in lines such as “I used to pray to recover you” which I think means that she wants to recover her daddy from hatred and evil, but she was unable to make him change. Better said, she never did anything in order to change him but she was just expecting her father to be kind and poor, so she had to “kill” him. The narrator had to “kill” her father in her mind: she was forced to think that her father did not exist anymore so that he would not hurt her anymore.
If we went deeper into the analysis of the poem we could at least I coul- ask ourselves: where does all this harm come from? What did “daddy” do to make this woman write all this?
As I kept on reading through the lines I had myself a picture of this girl who had an extremely severe father, forced to make up his death in order to be at peace. Suddenly, I started to notice some clues that would led me yo a conclusion:
“the tongue stuck in my jaw...”
“...I could hardly speak...”
“...an engine, an engine
Chuffing me off like a jew.”
There was something more implicit in “Daddy”. Something resembling the Electra complex in which daughters and fathers have sexual and amorous relationships, where they actually feel love and stronger emotions, such as the sense of someone belonging to you.
I think that the