"Daddy" is a poem written by American poet Sylvia Plath. It was written on October 12, 1962, shortly before her death, and published posthumously in Ariel in 1965.[1] The poem's implications and thematic concerns have been discussed academically with differing conclusions.[2] The relative popularity of "Daddy" can be attributed to Plath's vivid use of imagery[1] and controversial use of the Holocaust[2] as a metaphor. Critics have also viewed "Daddy" as a response to Plath's complex relationship with her father, Otto Plath,[3] who died shortly after her eighth birthday as a result of undiagnosed diabetes.[4]
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The poem repeats in 5-line stanzas with meter and rhyme scheme resembling the style and structure of a nursery-rhyme:
You do not do, you do not do
Any more, black shoe
In which I have lived like a foot
For thirty years, poor and white,
Barely daring to breathe or Achoo.
Sylvia Plath, introducing the poem for a BBC radio reading shortly before her suicide, famously described the poem as about "a girl with an Electra complex. Her father died while she thought he was God.".[5] Coupled with morbid imagery, the narrator's childlike intonation evokes a keen state of unease in the reader throughout the poem, climaxing in the final line "Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I'm through".
"Daddy" deals with a girl's deep attachment to the memory of her father and the unhappiness it caused in her life. It can also be seen as an outlet for Plath to deal with her father's death or her husband's betrayal. She does this through reinventing the relationship as one between a Nazi and a Jew, creating an "oppressor-oppressed" dynamic.[6]
The poem "Daddy" can be interpreted along with other poems by Plath as semi-autobiographical regarding her own relationship with her father or her husband, Ted Hughes. Plath's poems "Full Fathom Five"[6] and "The Colossus" also explore the relationship between a girl and a dominant father figure. The writer Theodore Dalrymple has written critically about evoking the holocaust in this context.[7]
Marble-heavy, a bag full of God,
Ghastly statue with one grey toe
[...]
And a head in the freakish Atlantic
In all three of these lines, her father is portrayed differently. In "Full Fathom Five", he is portrayed as the god of the sea; surfacing only on occasion. He is portrayed as ancient, ethereal, mysterious, and powerful. Quite differently, in "The Colossus", he is portrayed as a massive fallen statue, who Plath has spent her life trying to reassemble, and in so doing, resurrect. In "Daddy", Plath continues in the same vein as "The Colossus", portraying her father in the same manner. However, "Daddy" differs from the others in that it shows an attempt to change the situation. Plath states: "Daddy, I have had to kill you." By this, she of course means her unhealthy relationship with the memory of her father. The extent to which her father's memory affected her is obvious; especially from the twelfth stanza on. She states
At twenty I tried to die
And get back, back, back to you.
I thought even the bones would do.
Here Plath refers to an attempted suicide by overdose of sleeping pills, stating that it was an attempt to get back to her father, to be with him in death. She continues by stating that:
But they pulled me out of the sack,
And they stuck me together with glue.
And then I knew what to do.
I made a model of you,
A man in black with a Meinkampf look
And a love of the rack and the screw.
And I said I do, I do.
The 'man in black with a Meinkampf look' is a reference to her husband, Ted Hughes (who dressed head to toe in black), from whom she had recently separated. She portrays their relationship as a manifestation of her Electra complex, that she was attracted to Hughes because he reminded her of her father. In the next stanza, Plath describes the outcome of this relationship.
If I've killed one man, I've killed two-
The vampire who said he was you
And drank my blood for a year,
The two men she refers to are her father and Hughes. Killed here means that she has moved on, and forgotten about them. Although from the portrayal of both of them as vampires, it is obvious that this was not done easily, that Plath endured seven years of marriage to this 'vampire'. But, as she says in the poem "So Daddy, I'm finally through." In stating this she means that she has overcome the memory of her father, and has moved on. This could also mean that Plath is through with dealing with these painful memories and living with these thoughts going through her mind since she commits suicide a mere 4 months after writing this poem.
Sylvia Plath's rejection of religion is also a potential theme in "Daddy".[8] Plath explicitly compares her father to God and later to a devil, prompting some to suggest that she was openly attacking her own religious beliefs. (She was raised as a Unitarian.)
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