Explication of Sylvia Plath\'s Daddy

Daddy by Sylvia Plath: An Explication

At first glance, Sylvia Plath's "Daddy" seems like the ranting of an adolescent breaking away from an oppressive parent.

In fact, on one level, this poem is a poetic tirade directed at a father who is the source of considerable pain, but Plath has loftier goals than adolescent angst for this poem. The narrator in "Daddy" is actually a 30-year-old woman and presumably the voice of Sylvia Plath. This poem, like much of Plath's poetry, is autobiographical. In fact, Ariel,1 the collection that includes "Daddy," is an autobiographical collection of poetry that describes Plath's life leading up to her suicide. In "Daddy" she attempts to connect the intensely personal suffering of a woman (Plath) who never recovered from the death of her father to a more universal suffering, whether it's between father and daughter, husband and wife or tyrant and captive.

The poem opens with the narrator addressing her father:

You do not do, you do not do

Anymore black shoe,

In which I have lived like a foot

For thirty years, poor and white

Barely daring to breathe or Achoo (Muller 320).

Plath is expressing a near hysterical need to extricate herself from her father's suffocating grip, a vice she has been held in for her entire life. Indeed, the only way she can sever her tie to her father is to recognize what he actually was to her (a brute and a tyrant) and to figuratively kill him. "Daddy, I have had to kill you. You died before I had time" (Muller 320).

By the third stanza the poem shifts from the very personal conflict of a tormented daughter to a broader focus. German phrases, "ich, ich, ich" and "ach, du" (Muller 320) begin to appear. (Plath's father spoke with a German accent.)

By drawing on her memory of her father's speech cadence the narrator begins to link those memories and his voice to horrific images of Nazi Germany:

could never talk to you.

Plath 2

The tongue stuck in my jaw

It stuck in a barb wire snare

Ich, ich, ich, ich (Muller 321)

The gutteral language and the metaphor of a barb wire snare spark images of brutality and captivity. The father, "Daddy," becomes more than an oppressive parent; he is a tyrannical figure as cruel as a Nazi tormenter:

thought every German was you.

And the language obscene

An engine, an engine

Chuffing me off like a Jew (Muller 321)

In Plath's Incarnation: Woman And The Creative Process, Bundtzen describes Plath's metaphor of men as fascist as a larger feminine issue. "Plath is not concerned primarily with personal afflictions, except as they represent a wider feminine condition. As she puts it in 'Daddy,' 'Every woman adores a fascist (30)." Or, every woman adores God-like men who represent power.

To post-feminist women, such a statement might seems incredibly dated or exagerrated.

Daddy" was published in 1961, and this type of relationship was very real to Plath. In fact, she focused extensively on the oppressive relationships in her life in her autobiographical novel The Bell Jar2

In "Daddy" Plath alludes to her own suicide attempt as a futile way of recovering her lost relationship with her father. "At twenty I tried to die / And get back, back, back to you / I thought even the bones would do." (Muller 322).

After her failed suicide attempt, she describes what she sees as another failed solution: to marry a man whom she sees as a father replacement. However, in "Daddy" the husband becomes just another tormentor:

made a model of you, man in black with a Meinkampf look

And a love of the rack and the screw

And I said I do, I do (Muller 322)

At this point in the poem exactly who "Daddy" is becomes confusing. He is not just her father; he is her husband.

The two men become one. In The Other Ariel, Bundtzen reminds us of the "freudian and Plath 3 psychoanalytic exploration of identity in Plath's work and the effort in many ways to write an emphatic conclusion to this story and to include Ted Hughes [Plath's husband] and their marriage in its catastrophe.

If I've killed one man, I've killed two

The vampire who said he was you

And drank my blood for a year,

Seven years, if you want to know.

Not surprisingly, the seven years correspond to the years of her marriage. When she says, 'Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I'm through, it ends a masochistic relationship not only to her father but to her husband as well." (23).

In the closing lines of "Daddy," the narrator recognizes her father / husband as monstrous. Their demise and her final break from them is portrayed as a sort of exorcism, a rite, accomplished with a "stake in your fat black heart and villagers dancing on your grave." (Muller 322).