Daddy By Sylvia Plath Essay

In her poem Daddy, Sylvia Plath creates a speaker that embodies a fierce internal struggle embedded with a great fear of her true personal identity. Drawing on themes of persecution, violence, and victimization, the speaker begins to form her identity and battles with her father’s past. Throughout the poem she repeatedly persecutes her father, denying all connection to the Nazi identity he once held. In contrast to her father, the speaker never explicitly mentions her mother, only implying that she was Jewish. The two opposing identities of her parents cause the speaker to struggle in finding her own identity. She is stuck inheriting the brutality of her Nazi father and the helplessness of her Jewish mother. She chooses to adopt her mother’s
The victimized identity that she has adopted for is created directly by claiming to be a victim of her father’s brutality. The speaker choses to inherit everything from her mother, including her pain, while contrastingly refusing any transferal of the guilt caused by her father’s role in the Nazi party. By violently rejecting any connection with the Nazis, the speaker creates a problematic and toxic relationship with the memory of her father. She is stuck between loving him as a father and hating him as a Nazi. In finding her identity, the speaker must be able to understand where her father came from. However, since he is from a town with “too common” of a name she is left with no way to draw back his memory and connect with him. The problem arises because of the shame, guilt, and horror she feels being associated with the actions of Nazi Germany, so that she is unable to properly mourn her loss, forcing her to mourn with the perverted action of self-harm, “At twenty I tried to die; And get back, back, back to you; I thought even the bones would do” (58-60). She is left simultaneously rejecting and identifying with her father. The speaker is left with no ability to completely define herself or form her own identity. She is stuck in an ideological purgatory between her two inherited identities. With no way to recover from the loss of her father and gain some type of closure, the speaker is