Loss and Trauma in Plath’s Daddy
In addition to the anger and violence, 'Daddy' is also pervaded by a strong sense of loss and trauma. The repeated 'You do not do' of the first sentence suggests a speaker that is still battling a truth she only recently has been forced to accept. After all, this is the same persona who in an earlier poem spends her hours attempting to reconstruct the broken pieces of her 'colossus' father. After 30 years of labor she admits to being 'none the wiser' and 'married to shadow', but she remains faithful to her calling. With 'Daddy' not only is the futility of her former efforts acknowledged, but the conditions that forced them upon her are manically denounced. At the same time, and this seems to fire her fury, she admits to her own willing self-deception. The father whom she previously related to the 'Oresteia' and the 'Roman Forum' is now revealed as a panzer man with a Meinkampf look. But she doesn't simply stop at her own complicity. 'Every woman,' she announces 'loves a Fascist/The boot in the face, the brute/Brute heart of ...
Consequently, hatred and hate crimes rise. In tough times people often look for scapegoats. People like to place blame on others because it is difficult to see their own faults. It is argued that the people of the Kensington area of Philadelphia were the hardest whites. Their desperation coupled with competition from minorities and evident crime around them led them to pick all non-whites as their scapegoats. While the race relations before may have been poor, they were about to get significantly
As often claimed that love runs out, this book shows a different story. Love is challenged, but will not run out. In Salvage the Bones, Esch is challenged with the hard decision of keeping her baby or not due to many reasons. Some of these reasons would include, her mother passing away, her age, and lastly, her love for Manny.
Mental health is not the mere absence of illness but it is the sense of harmony and balance for the individual. Aspects associated with the individual include self-worth, sense of accomplishment, and a positive identity (Fontaine, 2009), where as mental illness is the disharmony someone is experiencing. This disharmony affects not only the individual but their friends and family as well as the surrounding community. This disharmony causes the person to be unable to function properly in many aspects of their life (Fontaine, 2009). Disco Di started to display signs of mental illness from the young age of 12. Her behaviours may have been triggered by a traumatic event and have been interfering with her life ever since. I agree with the diagnosis that Disco Di was given which was an Axis I diagnosis of Major Depressive Disorder (MDD) and Axis II diagnosis of Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD). This paper is going to explain why I agree with these diagnoses as well as genetic and cultural factors and treatment method for them.
Feminism and Indigenous women activism is two separate topics although they sound very similar. In indigenous women’s eyes feminism is bashing men, although Indigenous women respect their men and do not want to be a part of a women’s culture who bring their men down. Feminism is defined as “The advocacy of women 's rights on the ground of the equality of the sexes.” In theory feminism sounds delightful despite the approaches most feminists use such as wrong-full speaking of the opposite gender. Supposedly, feminism is not needed as a result of Indigenous women being treated with respect prior to colonization. Thus, any Native woman who calls herself a feminist is often condemned as being “white”. This essay argues that Indigenous women may
To be honest, it still is. Yet, my desire to bond with him mattered more to me. Roethke’s narrator in “My Papa’s Waltz” says, “I hung on like death” (l. 3) while waltzing with the child’s father. Whereas, I ask that my father doesn’t invite my siblings because “Just you and me is better” (l. 6) Both children desperately wanted quality time with their fathers because they knew at the end of the night their father would leave them whether it was because the father “waltzed [the child] off to bed” (l. 15) or because he is leaving for a trip (l. 10). “Daddy’s Girl” portrays my youth and natural tendency to desire my father’s
I have had many ups and downs in my life bringing me right here; to this point in time; right this very moment… I have come to the point in my life where self reflection is my way of life. This right now is who I am; I experienced a troubled childhood with physical and mental abuse from my mentally ill mother. I was molested at age 9 and then experienced the nightmares from it years later. I was challenged with making hard decisions about religion in a very religious family. I was a teenage pregnancy statistic at 17 years old, but with a twist because I also became grieving mother. I had father who was a good man I just did not know him during my childhood. I have a younger brother that I am close to that breaks my heart every day due to his mental demons. I had the talk about homosexuality with my parents at age 20, after the long journey of trying to understand myself. I have lifelong issues with digestive & neurological problems that caused me to visit the emergency room often as a child and still I work on finding answers. I have dyslexia that was not caught right away and caused problems as a child and adult. I had further health issues causing me to have a hysterectomy at a fairly early age, rendering me unable to have a child. I have experienced great loss when my whole world passed away, my whole world was my Nana. My Nana is actually who I give full credit to keeping me on track with being a great person as appose to allowing it all take me down. Although she passed many years ago she shapes my views and values every day. I feel these values again; have led me back to right here and right now, making a reflection paper about myself and my wellness. I have gone down a few unfit paths and had some awful jobs but the experi...
Plath wrote Daddy on October 12, 1962 and if you know about Plath’s life you can almost envision her sitting there one night deep in thought and finally coming to terms with her past and saying “Enough is enough, I will live and will not allow the past define my future!” She pulls out a blank piece of fancy paper and begins to pen Daddy. In an article written by Heather Cam, she says, “Daddy is a brilliant act of exorcism from Plath’...
It is through such poems as “Daddy” that Plath expresses her feelings of malice toward her father and husband for the way that they treated her. Plath felt dominated by both her father and husband. “Daddy” describes these feelings of oppression and her battle to overcome the power imbalance. The intensity of this conflict is made extremely apparent as she uses examples that cannot be ignored. The atrocities of Nazi Germany are used as symbols of the horror of male domination. The constant and crippling manipulation of men, as they introduced oppression and hopelessness into her life, is equated with the twentieth century's worst period. Plath’s father is transformed into a “Panzer-man,” a “Fascist,” and a “bastard.” Words such as Luftwaffe, the aircraft known as the “Angels of Death” used by Adolf Hitler during WWII, and Meinkampf, Hitl...
One of the most prominent groups of images Plath uses to show the turmoil and fear the narrator feels for her father is comparing him with Nazi Germany, the devil's hoofs, and a vampire. Evil, mean-spirited images flourish within "Daddy." The speaker characterizes her father as a Nazi. Phrases like, "With your Luftwaffe" (l. 42), "your neat moustache and your Aryan eye" (l. 43), and "Panzer-man, panzer-man" (l. 45) fill the poem with images of Deuts...
The first impression of Sylvia Plath’s “Daddy” is disturbing and it proves to have fearful twist. The poem’s theme is one of sadness and lack of a paternal bond with one’s parent. The daughter is finding her closure with her father through this poem. This particular theme is portrayed through the use of dark and depressing imagery. Plath is skillful with her use of detail and emotional pull. The imagery brings up personal feelings which makes it easy to visualize the meanings that Plath intends to portray in the poem “Daddy”.
It [penis envy] is to be interpreted as a defensive protecting the woman from the political, economic, social, and cultural condition that is hers at the same time that it prevents from contributing effectively to the transformation of allotted fate. “Penis envy” translates woman’s resentment and jealousy at being deprived the advantages …“autonomy”, “freedom”, “power”, and so on; … it also expresses her resentment at having been largely excluded, as she has been for centuries, from political, social, and cultural responsibilities. (51)
Sylvia Plath, an open minded, free spirited author and poet of a variety of many pieces. All of Plath’s poems are inspired by her personal life and how she viewed it.
Many children have access to the internet and are able to search up anything on Google. As with any type of media, there are positive effects and negative effects. Some of the negative effects of the internet for children are that ,since, children and adolescents are more or less technologically savvy than their parents, they are able to search about just about anything and and talk to just about anyone on the internet, this can lead to some very dangerous situations. According to the Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry, “89% of adolescents report using a computer, 61% report “surfing the net,” and 14% report seeing something that they do not want their parents to know about.” (Villani, 2001) 14% of adolescents reported seeing something that they did not want their parents to know about, this shows how unsupervised the internet is and shows how the internet can lead adolescents to become secretive and , maybe, even violent. Again, this leads to deviant behavior that the child learned from the internet. In addition, according to the Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry, “... a profile of the recent school killers, noted that almost all were computer-savvy and frequented sites where they could obtain violent, anarchist-oriented material.” (Villani, 2001) This shows that websites that have violent material on the
Lady Lazarus repeats the struggle between Nazi and Jew which is used in Daddy, with the Nazi atrocities a background across which the amazing, self-renewing speaker strides. The speaker orchestrates every aspect of her show, attempting to undermine the power an audience would normally have over her. She controls her body, instead of being a passive object of other eyes.
Pope John XXIII once said, “It is easier for a father to have children than for children to have a real father”. It is easy for a father to have children, but a challenge for the father to be in the life of the child. My mother grew up without a father. She did not get to meet him until her late twenties. My father's father lost his life at an early age due to gun violence. I, on the other, hand had both of my biological parents.