Daddy Sylvia Plath Analysis

Sylvia Plath was known for not having a good relationship with her father Otto Plath. Otto died when Sylvia was eight years old (“Daddy”). She spent most of her life trying to come to terms with his influence on her life and her work (“Daddy”). The memory of her father haunted her for most of her life. Since she didn’t know much about him, he was a constant search in her mind. The purpose of this paper is to show and explain the idea that “Daddy” is Sylvia Plath’s way of killing the memory of her father.
She starts out in the first line in the first stanza by stating that he does not do anymore. This is just stating that he doesn’t do anything good or anything at all for her, or it could be simply stated he is dead. She, then, states that
for the past thirty years she lived under a strong influence of Otto’s memory like living in his black shoe. She is under so much pressure that she can’t even breathe or sneeze.
In the second stanza, she addresses him as Daddy for the first time in the poem.
She, then, clearly states that she had to kill him. She explains that Otto died before she had time. Time refers to how Otto died before she could really get to know him since she was only eight years old when he died. She takes a complete change of her view on her father by showing her admiration for him. She describes as “Marble-heavy, a bag full of God, Ghastly statue with one gray toe, Big as a Frisco seal” (“Daddy”). She describes him as marble-heavy which can be explained as describing her overweight Caucasian father. The saying “a bag full of God” properly describes her admiration for him since after all he is her creator in the aspects of her genetics, her writing, and her mental state. She means by the gray toe is referring to the leg of her father that became infected and killed him due to his
diabetes.
In the third stanza, she remembers when she would pray for her father to come back to life.
The last two words she says in the stanza, “Ach, du.” It’s German and means oh, you. In the fourth and fifth stanza, she describes how his hometown was involved “wars, wars, wars.” She also describes how it has been laid flat by all these wars. She asks her Polack friend for the name of her father’s hometown, but it has “a dozen or two” names. She was never able to find out where it was or what it was called. She was never able to find out his story which would be her way of talking to him.
In the sixth stanza, she describes a place with barb wire where she is surrounded by Germans. In the seventh stanza, she talks about being on a train “shuffling me off like a Jew.” She describes how she is going to a concentration camp by saying “A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen.” In the seventh stanza, she describes the landscape of Austria in the first two lines, “The snows of the Tyrol, the clear beer of Vienna are not very pure or true” (“Daddy”). She also describes how she has gipsy ancestry which is just a metaphor for how she has a different history then her
father.
In the eighth stanza, she states that she was always scared of him. She then describes Otto as a Luftwaffe and bright blue eyed Aryan which after describing herself as a Jew in the previous stanza, which shows the distance between the father and daughter as well as her disdain for her father. She then realizes that her father was not a father, but a black swastika. She says that “Every woman adores a Fascist, The boot in the face, the brute, brute heart of a brute like you.” These are just references to the brutality of the Nazis and their description of they were just brutes overpowering the Jews. In ninth and tenth stanzas, she describes how her father looks in a picture she has of him. She describes him as a devil that broke her heart. She says she was ten when he was buried when she was actually eight years old in reality. She then tells about her suicide attempts to join her father in death at age twenty. In stanzas 11-14, she states that after her failed attempts that she figured out what she had to do. She looked for a man like a father, “And then I knew what to do. I made a model of you, a man in black with a Mein Kampf look.” She marries a man who looks and acts like her father. She stays married to him for seven years.
In the final stanza, she states that she is finally through with her father after all these years of chasing him, tracing his history, searching for his origin, and trying to get close to him.
In conclusion of this paper, it can be clearly seen through the descriptiveness of this poem, the way the author sees her father, and her story of trying to get close to him that she used this paper as a way to find closure. She searched all her life for a man who wasn’t there anymore. A man that was brutish and stern with the world with no traceable origin. A man that left such an impact on his daughter that she could only best describe him as a Nazi while she curled herself only as a Jew in his eyes. She wrote “Daddy” on October 12, 1962, so she could live out the last five months of her life with closure before her suicide on February 11, 1963(“Sylvia Plath (“Sylvia Plath”). This poem clearly establishes this is her way of killing her father and coming to peace.