Daddy

Sylvia Plath said that “Daddy” was about a girl with an Electra complex, but it is clearly much more than a straightforward Freudian allegory. The poem leaps off the page, opening with an insistent and incantatory rhythm, which the poem sustains. The repetition and rhyme of the opening lines, which are made up of punchy monosyllables, give the poem a nursery-rhyme quality entirely at odds with the subject matter and tone, which is frequently angry. “Daddy” crackles with energy, startling the reader with its force. The speaker in the poem jeers, mocks, and hurls abuse as she lashes out at her father. Reckless and rebellious, she puts on a magnificent performance.

To begin with, the language suggests that the speaker is scolding her father. The poem is written in the form of a monologue, with the daughter addressing the father directly as “You”, a word that comes to have an unparalleled power. It suggests ritual, catharsis, as if the daughter is exorcising her past. The image of the black shoe suggests that the daughter has outgrown the parent and now wishes to cast him off. Initially the speaker seems powerful;’ she has decided that he will “not do” “Any more”. The stark simplicity of these words makes the speaker sound very determined. However, her power to reject is threatened by the images the poet invokes in the remaining lines of the first stanza, where the father figure becomes increasingly sinister and brutish (the word brute is repeated forcefully in the tenth stanza, as if one accusation is not enough). We become aware that there is a power struggle going on; father and daughter are locked in combat.

The black shoe is clearly restricting. All the way through the poem Sylvia Plath keeps coming back to this deadly colour, and its associations are always negative and masculine, as this first metaphor for the father is: there are also references to the SS, the husband with the “Meinkampf look”, the devil, the vampire, the telephone that the speaker has to rip out. This young woman is surrounded by terrible blackness. By way of contrast she sees herself as “poor and white”, suffocating, too scared to breathe or sneeze. There is a horrifying black comedy in these opening lines, especially if we recall the nursery rhyme about the old woman who lived in a shoe. Here, instead of reciting a harmless children’s tale, Sylvia Plath is recounting a story of acute suffering, made more appalling by the poet’s use of slangy vocabulary and precise images. A foot trapped inside a shoe for thirty years would be a crippled, painful, distorted stump. Is the poet encouraging us to sympathise with the speaker?

The opening of the second stanza is dramatic – some would say melodramatic – as the speaker confesses to, even proudly proclaims murder. She confronts and taunts her father for the first line. But no, again she is contradicted. She could not kill the oppressor herself because he eluded her by dying “before I had time”. These words indicate that the father’s death somehow cut the daughter off, preventing her from having her own life. Sylvia Plath introduces further metaphors that add to the reader’s understanding of just how oppressive the father has been; he is compared to God, to a huge “Ghastly” statue. These images inspire awe and terror. They suggest the enormous shadow that this father has cast over his daughter’s life.

But in the third stanza the mood changes. These as a sad, intimate tenderness in the “Ach, du” (the vowel sound suggests regret and woe), and we now see that the speaker has – or had – mixed feelings: she used to pray to “recover” her father, suggesting the loss she felt when he died. The verbs in this line suggest longing. We begin to understand that the speaker is attempting to lay the ghost of her father to rest so that she can get on with forging her own life. There is perhaps an ambiguity in the choice of “recover”; having been shattered by the hunt for her father, the daughter now needs to recover. There is also the idea of “re-covering” something, of covering something up again. It is as if the daughter has had to dig up her father metaphorically, in order to come to terms with his death and her memories. When Sylvia Plath refers to Nauset and its beautiful seascape she is making allusions to her childhood, to the place she lived before her father died and her family moved inland. We sense her love of this area, but it has ominous connotations. Because the sea is clearly linked to her father (he has “a head in the freakish Atlantic”), we might feel that this is a reference to death by drowning, an idea that Sylvia Plath returns to a number of times in her work. Did the speaker wish to die herself, so that she could be reunited with her terrible father? The masochism in this idea is added to later in the poem.

The German language propels us into the fourth stanza, and a weariness creeps in with the mention of “wars, wars, wars”. Now there is destruction of a different less personal kind; a Polish town has been “Scraped flat”. Poland suffered greatly in the Second World War and it seems that Sylvia Plath is now invoking images of mass oppression to add to the intensity of the daughter’s suffering. The poet is using history to explore her speaker’s state of mind and victim hood. The daughter is linked with the defeated Poles; she has a “Polack friend”. Later she will become a “bit of a Jew”, casting herself firmly in the role of the persecuted. We might also feel that the speaker is still engaged in the process of recovery – she explores her family’s origins and is looking back when she recalls the lack of communication that clouded her relationship with her father. But again she insists on rejection: the German language is “obscene”. Perhaps the last two lines of the fifth stanza are resentful. The speaker is clearly in pain again; now her tongue is stuck in her jaw, in a “barb wire snare”. The harsh onomatopoeia of “Ich, Ich, Ich, Ich” sounds like choking. Now the father is turning into a torturer, specifically a Nazi.

Sylvia Plath’s use of Holocaust imagery in the next four stanzas has made critics uncomfortable. The poet said that she has a “uniquely intense” concern with the concentration camps because of her German and Austrian ancestry. But this has not saved her from some harsh criticism. Sylvia Plath has been accused of hysteria, blasphemy and outrageous egotism for appropriating images of Dachau and Auschwitz to explore the daughter’s or her own – if we choose to read this poem as confessional autobiography – suffering. However we respond to the imagery, it certainly conveys the speaker’s fear and agony. In the tenth stanza she seems to be engulfed when the black of the swastika fills up the sky. She is again in danger of suffocating, as the Jews choked and died in the gas chambers. Here Sylvia Plath brilliantly evokes what could be called a psychological landscape, something she does successfully throughout “Daddy”.

But in spite of her disgust at her father’s Nazi features, the speaker feels attracted to her oppressor. There is a disturbing erotic charge in the shocking line, “Every woman adores a Fascist”, which is reinforced by the masochistic pleasure she seems to gain from receiving a “boot in the face”. Again, the babyish rhyming gives the lines a powerful energy. Their masochism is echoed later when the speaker tells us that she chose a husband who resembled her father, quite deliberately. It is becoming difficult not to feel that the speaker is colluding in her victim hood. This idea seems clearer if we consider the eagerness of the line, “And I said I do, I do”, a chilling inclusion of words from a marriage service. It could be argued that Sylvia Plath is creating deliberately repellent images in order to demonstrate just how hard the girl has to fight to sustain herself.

In some ways, the husband is every bit as terrifying as the father figure: Sylvia Plath links the two incontrovertibly by switching between them in the lines of stanzas 11-14, and by using the same imagery to describe them. The husband has bitten the speaker’s heart in two, making him every bit as vampiric and devilish as Daddy. The daughter views her marriage as a repetition of the oppression and torture she suffered at her father’s hands. The yearning that she feels for these men – father and husband – is conveyed by another destructive, but deeply masochistic, reference to a suicide attempt in the twelfth stanza, which was designed to “get back, back, back to you” (her father). The use of direct address reminds us that this is an intimate monologue. Altogether, “you” appears twenty-two times in this poem, and there is significant repetition of “your” too, suggesting, perhaps, that what the daughter really wants is a dialogue. It is as if she is trying to force her monstrous, dead daddy to react. Is this why she is so extreme, so venomous, and so dramatic? “You” can seem desperate or disgusted, depending on its context. To reinforce its power, Sylvia Plath rhymes it with another italicised word, “knew2, in the final stanza. Do these emphasised words force us to read “Daddy2 as a poem about a daughter trying to get to know – as well as destroy – her father? This seems plausible if we consider the many references to his ancestry, and to her inability to talk. She wants to have a conversation that death denied her. But what will the daughter do when she has achieved enlightenment, when she has finally “got to know” her father?

Having established herself as an angry victim, the speaker reasserts herself in the last three stanzas of the poem. She tells her father he can lie back now: she is done with him, she has finished haranguing him. “I’m through” she announces twice. The first time the speaker says these words they anticipate the young woman’s act of destruction, the cutting off of the telephone, which she wrenches out “at the root”. After this, we return to the drama of death, and the body count. Now the speaker insists that she did kill her father, and she also murdered his model, her husband. It is possible to feel that the speaker is finally triumphant when we read of the stamping and dancing that occur when the vampires are defeated, although, as critics have noted, Sylvia Plath does not describe the daughter plunging the stake into her father’s heart. Does the young woman not have the courage to destroy him with her own hands?

After the death, she remains angry: “you bastard” she cries. There is spite in the final lines too. The daughter still taunts her father, and she is dismissive; “the villagers never liked you”, “if you want to knew”. However, it is possible to feel that the daughter has come to the end of the line herself. “I’m through” sounds exhausted. It sounds suicidal. Perhaps the speaker has been so tormented, so worn down by her experiences with her male oppressors, and her attempts to make sense of her dark memories that she no longer has the energy to live. She has expended it all in this raging poem. There are enough self destructive moments in “Daddy” to endorse a reading of this kind. Or perhaps Sylvia Plath wishes us to understand that the speaker has simply finished with her past and the monologue – she’s got nothing more to say and wishes to get on with her own life. Unfortunately, the men in black who have dominated this poem are difficult to dismiss. Sylvia Plath’s use of metaphor has made them monumental figures, terrible legends of destruction that live on in the memory. After years of having the blood drained out of her, it would be surprising if the speaker had the strength to go on. It seems to me that the use of arresting, colloquial swearword in the last line of the poem suggests that the speaker has run out of language, as well as rage. She is literally and mentally “through”. It is significant that the last sound in the poem is the vowel sound of pain that has echoed so insistently throughout “Daddy”. Ultimately, it is to decide whether this is a fantasy of destruction or of self-immolation.

Class trip....

Ok, so you are a bunch of bullies and have made it quite clear that you would like to go away somewhere as a class. If we were to do something we would need to go in the first week of the Easter holiday. So baring that in mind I am open to suggestions. Let's see what ideas you have in those minds of yours!!!

Anna Politkovskaya

I was really shocked to hear about the murder of Anna Politkovskaya, a Russian journalist, who was perhaps more famous for her campaigning for human rights in Russia, and in Chechnya to be more specific. To any of you interested in living in a fair world, where people should be given equality and the freedom of speech I suggest that you find out more about this incredibly inspirational woman. There will be a protest of some of Scotland's most influential writers and journalists at the Russian Consulate on the 24th October to demand an inquiry into her brutal death.

For more information on Anna, please use the following link. I would be interested to hear your views on this.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna_Politkovskaya

Specialist Studies

Just a wee reminder that the spec. study deadline is October 27th. You should be working on these over the holiday. If you need any help I'll be doing daily checks on here and you all have my school email address which I can access at home. Don't get stuck.