As a modern female poet, Sylvia Plath played many roles in her art: she was the fragile feminist, the confessional writer, the literary innovator. As a woman, Plath found herself with one foot in her past and the other in an uncertain future, her present an often uncomfortable combination of the two. She was at once a daughter desperate to make her parents proud and a wife eager to please her husband; an overworked, depressed teenager and a lonely, sick mother; a child who lost her father and an adult who lost her hope. Plath’s confusion between her memories and her fantasies produced the creative inspiration that spawned much of her work; the losses she suffered had the same effect. The death of her father became a theme in her poetry on which Plath would often spin her words. In the poem “Daddy,” Plath uses imagery to compare her father to a shoe, God and a vampire, to establish similarities between her father and her husband and to describe the lack of communication between her and her father.
“You do not do, you do not do/Anymore, black shoe,” proclaims Plath in the opening lines of “Daddy” (222), introducing the world to her father, ominous in the color black and consistent in his inability to “do” anything for Plath “anymore.” This depiction of the father as an shoe instead of a man also presents Plath’s deft use of imagery to color the character of her father, this time with the shade of a black shoe. This image makes the father sound “stifling” (“Slayer” 1).
The imagery of the black shoe is also powerful in explaining the nature of Plath’s posthumous relationship with her father. Shoes usually protect the foot, provide warmth for it (Goelzhaeuser 1). Shoes in the poem, however, do not invoke the sheltering, caring ...
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...ountry. However, it seems likely that she died as she lived, haunted by a combination of the two, her deceased father pointing out her failures from far away in her childhood and her substitute husband becoming another one of those failures from another woman’s apartment. The imagery of “Daddy,” of her father and her husband, each her protector and her abuser in one, stands a testament of words to just that.
Works Cited
Barnard, Caroline King. Sylvia Plath. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1978.
Goelzhauser, Nicola. “Imagery in Sylvia Plath’s ‘Daddy.’” Online.
http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/Studios/8984/daddy.htm.
“Oedipus Complex.” Merriam Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary. 10th ed. 1993.
Plath, Sylvia. The Collected Poems. Ed. Ted Hughes. NewYork: Harper Perennial, 1972.
“Sylvia the Vampire Slayer.” Online. http://members.aol.com/raisans/plath.htm.
“She cried out, she cried for her mother, she felt her breath start jerking back and forth in her lungs as if it were something Arnold Friend was stabbing her with again and again with no tenderness. A noisy sorrowful wailing rose all about her and she was locked inside it the way she was locked inside this house” (Oates
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Sylvia Plath a highly acclaimed twentieth century American poet whose writings were mostly influenced by her life experiences. Her father died shortly after her eighth birthday and her first documented attempt at suicide was in her early twenties. She was married at age twenty-three and when she discovered her husband was having an affair she left him with their two children. Her depression and the abandonment she felt as a child and as a woman is what inspires most of her works. Daddy is a major decision point where Plath decides to overcome her father’s death by telling him she will no longer allow his memory to control her.
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Sylvia Plath’s jarring poem ‘Daddy’, is not only the exploration of her bitter and tumultuous relationship with her father, husband and perhaps the male species in general but is also a strong expression of resentment against the oppression of women by men and the violence and tyranny men can and have been held accountable for. Within the piece, the speaker creates a figurative image of her father by using metaphors to describe her relationship with him: “Not God but a Swastika” , he is a “… brute” , even likening him to leader of the Nazi Party; Adolf Hitler: “A man in black with a Meinkampf look .” Overall, the text is a telling recount of her hatred towards her father and her husband of “Seven years” and the tolling affect it has had on
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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...
In the poem, “Daddy,” Sylvia Plath shows her character to have a love for her father as well as an obvious sense of resentment and anger towards him. She sets the tone through the structure of the poem along with her use of certain diction, imagery, and metaphors/similes. The author, Sylvia Plath, chooses words that demonstrate the characters hatred and bitterness towards the oppression she is living with under the control of her father and later, her husband. Plath’s word choice includes many words that a child might use. There is also an integration of German words which help set the tone as well. She creates imagery through her use of metaphors and similes which allow the reader to connect certain ideas and convey the dark, depressing tone of the poem.
Daddy was written on October 12, 1962 by Sylvia Plath, shortly before her death, and published posthumously in Ariel in 1963. Throughout the poem it could be viewed from a feminist perspective, drawing attention to the misogynistic opinions and behaviours of the time it was written. Misonogy is A person who dislikes, despises, or is strongly prejudiced against women. It can be manifested in numerous ways, including sexual discrimination, denigration of women, violence against women, and sexual objectification of women.
Sylvia Plath has brought the attention of many Women’s studies supporters while being recognized as a great American poet. Most of her attention has come as a result of her tragic suicide at age thirty, but many of her poems reflect actual events throughout her life, transformed into psychoanalytical readings. One of Plath’s most renowned poems is “Daddy”. In this poem there are ideas about a woman’s relationship with men, a possible insight on aspects of Plath’s life, and possible influences from the theories of Sigmund Freud.