An Analysis Of Sylvia Plath's 'Daddy'

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Could Sylvia Plath’s poem “Daddy” simply be a form of self-therapy or is it instead an artist who is remarkable at calling up the emotions of her personae and characters? In addition to this quandary, is the examination of the persona herself and matching her actions to the Freudian theory of ‘Family’ and Jung’s theory of ‘Electra.’ Sylvia Plath’s psyche could be screaming out in her poem “Daddy,” on the other hand, it could be a fully developed character creation with a few artists’ liberties being taken. An analysis of the poem “Daddy” reveals an underlying carnal desire to be both consumed by and yet destroyed by the male figures in Plath’s life. Carl Gustav Jung, a Swiss psychiatrist, who has also been called the founder of Analytical De Nervaux believes this the second instance of the Plath and persona being one in the same. Further speaking of the persona in the poem Plath says, “In the daughter the two strains marry and paralyses each other—she has to act out the awful little allegory once over before she is free of it.” (De Nervaux, 2007) De Nervaux describes the poem “Daddy” as Sylvia Plath’s version of self-therapy and a way to purge her own thoughts or psychoanalysis of relationships with her family. Since one could argue that Plath herself married her father, incarnate with her divorced husband and failed attempt at a ‘normal’ family (Gerisch, 1998, p. 740) Her relationships with both her father and her mother, as told through the autobiographies, showed a stunted personal growth due to her father dying so early in her life. “In Plath’s poetry, her ‘Electra’ persona grapples with the loss of a father (an Agamemnon-like charter) by attempting to digest him and then expel him from her system. Plath’s speaker is active in her pursuit to overcome her father’s looming presence.” (Whelan-Stewart, 2007, p. 217) “I was ten when they buried you.” both women’s fathers died when they were very young; Plath’s at age 8 and the persona’s at age 10, pointing towards Plath and the persona being one in the same. This left Plath with an inability to separate her own self-image from that of her mother’s and is what led to the poem showing the female persona falling into the repetitious mistakes of her

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