Sylvia Plath Daddy
... B Yeats) – An analysis on Sylvia Plath’s “Daddy” I didn’t choose this quotation by accident. Sylvia Plath did look at her life as a tragedy: her illness, her father, her mother, her husband- all of which she cleverly masked in her works. Plath took this quotation in her writing, using strong images and symbols to represent her personal tragedy and to convey herself through her writing. On this essay I would like to discuss about several main issues that are being dealt with in “Daddy”: – The poem as life -“Daddy” as a narrative poem. ... – Sylvia the vampire slayer. “Daddy” as a narrative poem – an overlook on “Daddy” Sylvia Plath’s works are known for their extremes. Much of the influence of her poems came from the males in her life that had the most effect on her: her father, Otto Plath and Ted Hughes, who she married and later it fell apart when Ted began having an affair. ... In “Daddy” Plath is writing about her fears of her father and how he treated her. ... In the first stanza the reader realizes that Sylvia Plath is scared of her father. ... “Daddy, I have had to kill you, you died before I had time”- this portrays the extent of her hatred towards him- a strong need to hurt the one who hurts her so terribly , a childish reaction that perpetuates through her life. ... In this stanza, Plath uses an explicit image, namely a statue in order t metaphorically describe her father. ... However, the one grey toe, which was injured, and allowed for sickness to set in, brought him to nothing (in 1940 Otto Plath developed a sore on his toe and ignored the condition until gangrene overtook the toe and he was hospitalized, doctors performed a surgery, but it was too late, ad eventually he passed away). In the forth stanza Plath describing her difficulties to discover where her father came from “so I never could tell where you put your foot, your root” – she doesn’t exactly know where he was raised or what was his background, therefore, she is unable to understand his upbringing, which developed his coldhearted character. In the fifth stanza there is a hint to Plath’s failing efforts to study the German language. ... In stanzas 6,7 and 8 Plath compares herself to a Jew and her father to a Nazi. ... on one hand, Plath is wishing to be free from her authoritarian father, but at the same time she feels attracted to this fascist figure, and deciding to marry one. Here, Plath is referring to a destructive reality : brutal men do tend to attract women, especially those women who are looking for a strong man to compensate for a fatherless childhood. In fact, Plath once admitted that she was attracted to Ted Hughes, because he was “string enough to be equal with”. ... Therefore, in stanza 9 Plath is clearly moving to speak about her unfaithful husband. ... A demon is considered to have a cleft in a foot , by using this image and addressing to her daddy in the beginning of the stanza, she again mixing up the father-husband image. ... ” Plath was indeed found after 3 days at her basement, and spent six months in a mental institution. ... Plath’s conflict begins with her father and continues into the relationships between her and her husband. This conflict is examined in lines 71-80 of “Daddy” in which she compares the damage her father caused her to that of her husband. They are both vampires (though the vampire she mentions here is certainly her husband), trying to drink her blood – “ vampire who said he was you, and drank my blood for a year, seven years if you want to know” – Plath was married to Hughes for seven years before their marriage fell apart. ... The last line of the poem is the most shocking and the most ironic one: “Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m through”- Plath wrote this poem 4 months before her suicide, leaving a young daughter and a young boy behind her. we can look at this line as some kind of a prophet – Sylvia Plath was indeed through – through with trying to overcome her distress, through loving her husband, through fighting with the memory of her father, through with living- the abandoned daughter abandoned her own daughter and son. ... The emphasis of each rhyme is with the word “you” , meaning Daddy. ... The intent of the poem is to emphasize to her reader that the poem is about Daddy and the constant rhyme throughout is a reminder. ... Apostrophe give more power to the poem :”Daddy, daddy, you bastard”, has more effect on the audience than “Daddy was a bastard”. ... Born in Boston in 1932 of German and Austrian parents, Sylvia Plath had no personal, immediate contact with the world of the concentration camps, and there was nothing Jewish in her background.