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.
Plath uses the reversal of gender stereotypes/roles within Daddy, which could be interpreted as an attempt to empower women. In 1962 when the poem had been written women could not achieve any equality within the work place; Kennedy 's Commission on the Status of Women produced a report in 1963 that revealed, among other things, that women earned 59 cents for every dollar that men earned and were kept out of the more lucrative professional positions. When the 1964 Civil Rights Act
Even though women’s rights were progressing they had not progressed enough and women were still being dominated by males. She uses the phrase ‘any more back shoe, in which I lived like a foot’, the use of the word ‘foot’ could be referring to men as the shoe then women being the foot therefore the men have persue the needs of women rather than it being the other way around which was a general ideology at the time. The foot is also located at the lower of the body which could be interpreted as Plath saying that men are bellow women, which could link into gender hierarchy of women being above men, predominantly giving them more power and control, empowering women rather victimising them. As well as this it could be seen as the speaker declaring that she will no longer put up with the black shoe that she lived in. She could be comparing this shoe to men in which she’s
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 ...
Although, they are different style in the writing, one poem rhymes and the other simply not, Gwendolyn Brooks’ “First Fight. Then Fiddle” and Sylvia Plath’s “Lady Lazarus” share some common ideas. Both poems talk about death and survival and about the darkness of evil that lurks inside the snatched lives. In “First Fight. Then Fiddle”, Brooks addresses although life can be intimidating with many turns, enjoyment of it can be captivating. Brooks also embraces the fact that love can be hurting and music can be tasteless. When the heart becomes empty and life has no thrill, there is always something worth fighting for. “Be deaf to music and to beauty blind/ Wherein to play your violin with grace” proposes
The short story “Initiation”, by Sylvia Plath, is a short story about a girl who is struggling to feel like she fits in with everybody else. At first, she is invited to join her high school’s sorority. Then, after completing multiple initiation tasks, she realizes that the sorority girls aren't who she thought they were. After that, during one of the initiation tasks, she meets a unique person riding a bus, who tells her about heather birds, mythological birds that are free. Finally, she decides that she should leave the sorority. In the end, she realizes that being part of the sorority will constrain her, and that she would rather be a heather bird than a tame
Throughout the poem, Plath contradicts herself, saying, ‘I was seven, I knew nothing’ yet she constantly talks of the past, remembering. Her tone is very dark and imposing, she uses many images of blindness, deafness and a severe lack of communication, ‘So the deaf and dumb/signal the blind, and are ignored’. Her use of enjambment shows her feelings and pain in some places, in other places it covers up her emotional state. She talks of her father being a German, a Nazi. Whilst her father may have originated from Germany, he was in no way a Nazi, or a fascist. He was a simple man who made sausages. ‘Lopping the sausages!’ However she used this against her father, who died when she was but eight, saying that she still had night mares, ‘They color1 my sleep,’ she also brings her father’s supposed Nazism up again, ‘Red, mottled, like cut necks./There was a silence!’. Plath also talks of her father being somewhat of a general in the militia, ‘A yew hedge of orders,’ also with this image she brings back her supposed vulnerability as a child, talking as if her father was going to send her away, ‘I am guilty of nothing.’ For all her claims of being vul...
The poem Daddy by Sylvia Plath is about the author and her feelings towards being in a male dominant world. To demonstrate these feelings to the reader, Plath uses multiple examples of allusions throughout the poem. To start, the entire poem refers to WWII and the actions of the Nazis. Plath is describing how she was abused as a child and the way her father treated her as a prisoner. She compares this experience to being a “Jew” during the times of WWII and her father being a “Nazi”. Throughout the poem, Plath refers to various concentration camps and the German Air Force to demonstrate what she feels about how her father treated her. This allusion is very powerful, as the events that occurred during WWII are well known allowing the reader
There is no shortage of media encouraging adolescents to ‘be themselves’, promoting self-worth regardless as to what others think. While many may be fed this message throughout music and film, rarely ever is it conveyed to actually have a lasting effect on one’s personal views quite like Sylvia Plath’s “Initiation”. Although formulaic, Plath’s uniquely optimistic short story warns against an obsession with belonging, and explores the importance of individuality through the protagonist Millicent Arnold’s gradual character development, from a self-conscious teenage girl to a stronger and more confident individual.
...icture perfect family schematics. There is such a diversification within this melting pot of a country that we live in that, with the early workings of Women’s rights activists, amendments to the constitution, and the multitude of nationalities, that the normal “gender roles” are a complete thing of the pass. I, along with my three siblings, were raised by my Mother, who took on both roles. It is completely normal for you to see this now a day, being that the divorce rate is approximately fifty percent. I think it is quite astonishing, and magnificent, to see women leaders in the work force and throughout our government. It goes to show how our country has evolved and is getting closer and closer to complete equality.
Plath does not come out clearly as a feminist in this poem, but she does express feelings that many women can relate to. She probably did not hate all men or blame them all for her pain, as some have suggested. She simply had to deal emotionally with her adulterous husband and absent father, so she uses this poem to curse the two as co-conspirators in her misery. Nowhere in the poem does Plath negatively group all men together. She does say in line 48 that "Every woman adores a Fascist," trying to explain her early admiration for her German father. But that is not a sarcastic stab at men, as it may seem. Rather, she is referring to a destructive reality: brutal men do tend to attract women, especially those women who are looking for a strong man to compen...
First of all, it should be decided who is the speaker in poem "Daddy". This issue as well as the controversial use of Holocaust imagery by Sylvia Plath may be resolved with quoting here her own words, which explain who the speaker is :
Confessional poetry of women poets of the then 1950s and 1960s opens a new vista for them to express their ‘self’ and to foreground their identity. These poets feel the need for self-affirmation because of their experience of marginalization in society. They found all the experiences are gendered in the 1950s and 1960s patriarchal society and so they also develop a gendered image of their ‘self’ in their confessional poetry. At the time when Sexton and Plath were children, the authoritarian figure within the nuclear family was the father and so he was the representative of society’s rule. Hence, the delineation of the Electra complex in their confessional poetry is one of the approaches of scratching their gendered ‘self’ because through the Electra complex the poets inscribe the female sexuality into the text. So, “with their autobiographical works, they write themselves into the canon and represent and deconstruct cultural images and linguistic codes of ‘woman’ and suggest alternative modes of self and identity” (Carmen
Known for her distinctive voice and exploration of dark, violent emotions, Sylvia Plath was one of the most acclaimed poets of the twentieth century. In her poems she discusses many common themes such as family relations, marriage, self-image and death in unique ways. Among these topics, she expresses a particularly original perspective on motherhood and its effect on the individual that often deviates completely from the traditional view of child rearing. In her poems “Moonrise,” “Heavy Woman” and “Morning Song,” Plath conveys the idea that motherhood, although necessary, is a personal as well as physical sacrifice that involves much pain and suffering.
Sylvia Plath?s poem "Daddy" describes her feelings of oppression from her childhood and conjures the struggle many women face in a male-dominated society. The conflict of this poem is male authority versus the right of a female to control her own life and be free of male domination. Plath?s conflicts begin with her father and continue into the relationship between her and her husband. This conflict is examined in lines 71-80 of "Daddy" in which Plath compares the damage her father caused to that of her husband.
Male and female were treated differently in terms of gender still in the year 1955, when this story first publish. People were living with the mentality where male were given a high position in society. Perhaps this was the cause of same mentality, male characters in the story don’t treat women as their equal. Gender discrimination has deep roots in history and was still exist in 1955. In this regard, there was an article published in New York Times dated February 16, 2013 by Stephanie Coontz named “Why Gender Equality Stalled”; she writes, “In 1963, most Americans did not yet believe that gender equality was possible or even desirable”. For this reason, one can conclude that gender discrimination was present in 1955 when women were consider as the one who should always look after children, do household stuff and were powerless regarding their social position. Men, on the other hand, held a high social and economic statu...
The poetry of Sylvia Plath can be interpreted psychoanalytically. Sigmund Freud believed that the majority of all art was a controlled expression of the unconscious. However, this does not mean that the creation of art is effortless; on the contrary it requires a high degree of sophistication. Works of art like dreams have both a manifest content (what is on the surface) and latent content (the true meaning). Both dreams and art use symbolism and metaphor and thus need to be interpreted to understand the latent content. It is important to maintain that analyzing Plaths poetry is not the same as analyzing Plath; her works stand by themselves and create their own fictional world. In the poems Lady Lazarus, Daddy and Electra on Azalea Path the psychoanalytic motifs of sadomasochism, regression and oral fixation, reperesnet the desire to return to the incestuous love object.
Sylvia wrote “Daddy” in 1963 about a girl’s emotional struggle with her German father who died and was like a monster. This father represents Sylvia’s own father who died when she was young. She wants to destroy him but he cannot come back to life. His death has caused Sylvia to have problems with all the men in her future including her former husband Ted, who she also refers to in the poem. This is the first type of literary criticism that stands out, feminist ...