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. …show more content…
The irregularity of the rhyme and meter represents Plath’s tumultuous life, and a controversial self-reflection of the Holocaust and treatment of Jews during the war drives the imprisonment experienced by Plath and other women into full focus. Starting as what appears to be strange nursery rhyme, Plath brings the reader into her childhood.
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 …show more content…
by cold machinery, statues, and barb-wire, her father is no more distinguishable from the crowd than the neighborhood Nazi. Being that her father died before Plath could ably understand his motives, her adult life is spent with an iconic image of a man that she would not be able to identify if she saw him on the street.
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
affect. As the poem continues, Plath’s writing becomes more emotionally distraught, in that her language begins to include reference to the Holocaust. Plath knew so little of her father than his characteristics are blurred in her mind, aside from his “language obscene” (30) that imprisoned her. Hitler gained the following he did purely as a result of the language and rhetorical arguments; Plath’s father overpowered her, so much that she feels she “begin[s] to talk like a Jew, [she] may as well be a Jew” (34-35) and thus points to her considering the lifelong mental prison as a concentration camp. Her father’s oppressive actions are similar to the Nazis against the Jews; she’s metaphorically shipped off to “Belsen, Auschwitz, Dascau” (33), which implies her perceived escape from one prison, only to enter another. These are powerful metaphors that evoke the idea of complete mental subordination and imprisonment “in [her father’s] barb-wire snare” (26) and after his death, imprisonment within her husband’s regime. In the face of Germans, Jews were like children, in that they should not be seen nor heard. Plath’s father expected the same of her, and so this metaphorical extremity—being a Jew during the Nazi Germany regime— necessitates Plath’s desire for acceptance and hopeful admonition of her father’s influence. Plath secures the idea of her imprisonment by mention of German war aesthetic and strategy. Men are “not god but a Swastika” (46) and her father is a “man in black with a Meinkampf look” (65), portraying her father as Hitler himself, a man who believed himself a Messiah. The German war machinery used during Nazi Germany’s occupation of Europe (“Panzer-man” (45), “Luftwaffe” (42)) represents his everlasting effect on Plath, a destruction of her future from her very conception. She attempts to dissolve the wall of male power by noting their societal influence only emerges with scare tactics and fear. Hitler’s manifesto “Meinkampf” (65) directly references this all-consuming patriarchal ideology that produces an atmosphere of dread, uncertainty, and “wars, wars, wars” (18), akin to Plath’s childhood and mental frustration as a result of the masculine effort to conquer. Men are cold, unemotional machines, “Panzer-mans” (45), and kill- be it personality, free will, or voice- to meet their end goals. Whether this is real murder or metaphorical, Plath still met her end because “every woman enjoys a fascist” (63); women are unable to find a sense of self in domestic imprisonment, but in the end must rely on the very source of their repression to survive because their fathers refuse to teach them desperately needed life skills. Plath’s reference to “Luftwaffe” (42), the powerful German aeroforce, only further implies the complete and overarching power prison containing women. On the ground and in the air, male oppression occupies every facet of life- there is no way out. She finalizes this metaphorical prison by mention of her body, that “the vampire who said he was you, and drank my blood for a year” (87-88) calls upon the execution of Plath’s sense of self and the draining her self-worth by her husband. These short, outraged jabs at the patriarchal structure create a hopeless dilemma, a childlike fight against something much bigger and much stronger than something she could take on her herself. With the loss of her father, she sought out a husband who resembled him; in doing so, she secured herself within subordination and acknowledged her inescapable fate- that suicide, ultimately, presented itself as her only true liberation from male influence and oppression. The repeated mentions of blackness, macabre imagery of bones, and violent emotional terrorism (“the black man who bit my pretty red heart in two”(110-111) throughout the poem represents domination and suffocation, and Plath’s position in the gender power structure in relation to her father and husband is precisely that- dominating and suffocating. From the very beginning of the poem, blackness surrounds Plath- from “black shoe” (2) to “black man” (110) to “so black sky could not squeak through” (62)- and these images all accompany entrapment in male influence. Depressing, lifeless scenes enable Plath to portray the feeling of anger and desperation in accordance with her mentions of war as a symbol of male monstrosity. Plath’s exploration of the entrapment within male domination represents her anger not only towards her normative role as a submissive female in society, comparing herself to a “gipsy ancestress” (38)- a direct reference to ancient matriarchal society and the idea of mother Earth, but the uncanny ability of masculinity to commit atrocious violence and destruction against fellow humans without a single thought concerning the destruction. “Daddy” takes turns between intellectual language and childlike sobs, “you do not do, you do not do” (1) as if Plath is begging herself to see her father in a different light, despite her knowledge of the world in comparison to the innocent child she used to be. While at first glance “Daddy” appears to be a cry for help, upon deeper analysis a reader finds it to be a declaration of independence – “Daddy, daddy you bastard, I’m through” (160) – that Plath desperately attempted to sustain, but, unfortunately, could not, given her suicide a few weeks after the poem’s publication. Plath experienced her father briefly, but in a short ten years he cemented himself as an unemotional machine, one that would reappear in the form of men all around her later on into adulthood. The poem outright displays Plath as being furious with the state of society, fed up with warfare, and exhausted from constant control of men all around her, and at the same time desperate to understand just why, and how, men have been given such ultimate power again and again, despite their continuous inhumane treatment of their fellow people. “Daddy” works not only as an autobiographical summary of Plath’s neuroses concerning her personal life and treatment on part of men, but the world around her as well.