Woman Loves Her Father, Every Woman Loves

¶ … Woman Loves her Father, Every Woman Loves a Fascist:

The Politics and Poetics of Despair in Plath's "Daddy"

Sylvia Plath is one of the most famous poets to emerge in the late 20th century. Partially due to the success of her autobiographical novel The Bell Jar, which details her partial recovery from suicidal depression, Plath's poetry has been frequently analyzed through the lens of her clinical mental problems. "Dying is An Art," the critic George Steiner titles of his essay on Plath, referring not only to a line from her poem "Lady Lazarus" but the critical elision of the poet's personal suicidal depression with the source of her confessional poetic gift. For instance, Plath's masterpiece, "Daddy," is a dramatic monologue in the voice of a German woman whose father was a Nazi. Yet despite the 'assumed' nature of "Daddy's" voice and the apparent divergence of poet from the speaker, the poem is still often interpreted as a poem in a lyric, confessional voice.

There is some justice to this approach. Plath's own German heritage and her difficult relationship with her own father, who died at an early age, makes the highly personal interpretation of this poem often given by critics seem more justified. The poem is more complex than a pure confessional, however. "Daddy" does attempt to create an analogy between the personal depression and despair of the poet that has caused her to embark upon unfulfilling and controlling relationships with men and a larger historical injustice of violence inflicted upon oppressed people and women. Ultimately, however, the end of the poem locates the work in the individual speaker's unique personal despair and inner, rather than outer political conflicts.

Every woman loves a fascist," writes the speaker of "Daddy." (Line 48) The poet chronicles the physical details she remembers of her father, the boots, the uniform, and speaks of herself as a disappointment to him. She states that she must be a "bit of a Jew," both allying herself with the individuals whom her father killed, yet also stating that she seeks out her father again and again in the men whom she becomes involved with. (Line 40) "I thought even the bones would do." (Line 60) The historical oppression that the speaker of "Daddy's" father inflicted upon others the speaker now inflicts upon her own sense of self, through her own relationships with men. The physical suffering endured by Jews is now replicated in the speaker's own, personal life through her own hands and the hands of other men instead of at the hands of a paternal jailer.

However, one must be careful of bestowing a "fatal" and purely personal "glamour" to use the words of Irving Howe, upon these parallels with Plath's own life and her poetry. The choice of an assumed Nazi confessional rather than a purely personal confessional suggests that Plath is aware that the prison she has created has roots in a larger social structure of oppression against women. Even Plath's own autobiographical fiction begins with an analogy between the speaker's depression and eventual treatment with electroshock therapy and the hotness of the summer Ethel and Julius Rosenberg were executed. The shocks that kill the couple also assault the mind of the sensitive, confused poet Esther. Plath draws parallels from a highly personal experience, namely the loss of her father and her seeking out relationships with powerful and controlling men such as Ted Hughes with a historical phenomenon, namely the destruction of an entire people's physical and social existence because of the glamour of fascism.

The fatal attraction of fascism is made explicit in "Daddy" with the statement "I used to pray to recover you," (Line 14) as well as the poem's detailing of the horrible beauty of German things such as "Where it pours bean green over blue / In the waters off beautiful Nauset." (Line 11-12) Yet the speaker also states as early as Line 6, "Daddy, I have had to kill you." She avows her hated of the German language as well. Unfortunately, despite her identification with the Jews, the nature of her father is also a part of the speaker's emotional makeup. Thus, she is unlike the peasants at the end of the poem who can destroy and in an uncomplicated fashion, who can wreck havoc against the physicality and the memory of the man with the "neat moustache," and the "cleft chin." The speaker must come to terms with evilness that it also part of herself. (Line 43 & Line 53) Judith Kroll calls this attempt a kind of failed exorcism on the part of the poet that is not purely familial, but also psychological in nature. The poet's father of "Daddy" is not simply all men, not even Ted Hughes, but a part of the poet that the poet is attempting to utilize for the art of making poetry, rather than the art of destruction as her father did. In Line 70 and Line 71, the speaker of "Daddy" explicitly calls herself a man-killer. This desire for murder allies herself with her father as well as her father's victims. The depression and anger that her father's Nazi brutality has caused has not simply rendered the speaker a passive victim, instead it has also caused her to lash out at society in a similarly angry fashion. This anger is the source of the speaker's poetic gift and her relationships as well as a fraught part of her existence.

The inability to reconcile with the self that is both a Jew-like victim and an Aryan, German fascist drives the speaker to attempt suicide. The metaphor of a victim's simultaneous identification and hatred of his or her captor and the strange status of a woman who both loves her Nazi father yet despises all he stands for becomes a metaphorical parallel for the poet's own feelings about herself. The speaker both seeks out violence in others and causes it. The speaker hates violence, yet inflicts it. The speaker hates her father, yet loves him and seeks out men who resemble him. The speaker sees herself as a victim of her father's atrocities yet cannot help feeling culpable with them, no matter how much she may see herself and align herself with the magical, with the Polish and Jewish, for instance.