Sylvia Plath's Daddy - Poem Exploration - Research Paper Example

Father Fixation: Sylvia Plath’s Colossal Daddy One of Sylvia Plath’s most famous, most read, and most quoted poems is Daddy, which she wrote in October 1962. It was a period of intense and prolific creation, when she wrote in the early hours of each morning, whether she was feeling well or not (Alexander 4). Here, an attempt will be made to find links in this poem to aspects of Plath’s life, and her attachment to the memory of her father. First, a close look will be taken at the poem, when the links to biographical details will be made, and a summarizing conclusion will contain this student’s views. The poem is written in allegorical or nursery-rhyme style, which is deceptive, because the form does not fit the content. Readers are used to light subjects when the meter and rhythm of a poem are light, and the kind of words used seem easy and jovial. Plath uses a lot of light words, and the ‘oo’ sound, which is naturally associated with childish talk, occurs often: “I have always been scared of you, With your Luftwaffe, your gobbledygoo. And your neat mustache And your Aryan eye, bright blue. Panzer-man, panzer-man, O You--” (Plath 2008, 191) There is no doubt she was writing about her own father, who died when she was ten years old. It is not a case of fiction. And perhaps her choice of language indicates she wanted to create a young girl’s impressions, caught the awe and confusion of having a German father in middle America during the war years (Kirk 23). “I never could talk to you. The tongue stuck in my jaw. It stuck in a barb wire snare. Ich, ich, ich, ich, I could hardly speak. I thought every German was you.” In this telling section, which straddles two stanzas, the clever phrasing, and the clever deception of a stammer disguises the fact ‘Ich’ is German for ‘I’. By all accounts, Otto Plath was extremely self-obsessed, and a bit of a hypochondriac who insisted he had cancer, like a dead friend (Alexander 28), when in fact it was gangrene from undiagnosed diabetes that sent him to an early grave. Recognition of her father’s weakness, sustained no doubt by family memory as well as her own personal recollection, must have shown Plath she was similarly afflicted with egotism. She was no fool, and if she ever read her own journals (Plath & Kukil 430), would have immediately realized how self-absorbed her own writing made her seem, even if diaries are supposed to be all about the writer. Her difficulties with young men stemmed from a teenage awkwardness with sex and intimacy, and her inability to relate to males, which is not unusual with girls who do not have a male role-model at home, until she mixed with an older set. Finding someone like Ted Hughes was a double-edged sword: she could relate to him, but for probably all the wrong reasons. Her torment, when she wrote this poem, during a period of separation from him, is obvious. She laments the fact that “Daddy, I have had to kill you. / You died before I had time--”. This means that she thought she got rid of her father by marrying someone she thought would understand her, because she never had time to outgrow the childish worship of her father in a normal fashion, so it stayed with her (Butscher 11). It was not a difficult thing for biographers to ascribe Sylvia Plath’s problems to a pathological ‘father fixation’, as her estranged husband Ted Hughes is known to have done. Edward Butscher (2003) starts his book with this sentence: “For Sylvia Plath, as even the most casual reading of her poetry demonstrates, the central obsession from the beginning to the end of her life and career was her father, Professor Otto Emile Plath.”(p 1). It is there in her journals, and it is there in her poetry: all the signs of an unresolved psychological mystery that girls have when they cannot relate to a difficult father, which Otto Plath was, which was compounded by his absence after he died. Sometimes, little girls can supplant their father with another male figure, and thus outgrow the obsession normally, but for Plath this was not to be. Instead, she fell in love with Ted Hughes at a time when he was vulnerable. When he fell in love with someone else, it brought their marriage, and their artistic companionship and compatibility, to a devastating end (Middlebrook xvi). And Plath had no father to run to. This shows in Daddy: “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.” (Plath 2008 191) She is pronouncing her realization here, that she fooled herself in to a situation that had let her down. And just like any little girl who cannot run to her Daddy, she gets angry at him for the mistakes she made. It is not an uncommon thing for adult children to blame their parents for failed marriages. If he were alive, she would have shaken her fist at Otto, and he might have understood. All Plath could do was shake her fist in a metaphorical sense, and call him a bastard at the end. The unexpressed anger at her father, at Hughes, and possibly at all other male figures in her life overflows here (Kirk 99). Her sense of helplessness is very vivid in this poem. She talks of her age when he died, and her age when she attempted her first suicide, in simple lines that are raw and exposed. The last memories of a family member who dies are the most powerful, and Otto Plath was a moody man before he died, suffering from mood swings that gave him a volatile temper. His exhaustion and vile disposition moved his wife to separate the family into ‘upstairs and downstairs’ (Alexander 27), which meant Sylvia Plath only saw her father for brief periods that were stage managed by her mother and to all accounts must have been very unsatisfactory. He changed from a knowledgeable teacher and family man to a kind of tyrant, which Plath expresses in a number of metaphors including Nazi suggestions and: “... the villagers never liked you. They are dancing and stamping on you.” These are lines that suggest the relief of dancing on someone’s grave when the oppression is over. They are born from real experience: perhaps Plath was cursed with perfect recall. Certainly, her journals attest to the clear way she remembered incidents and events from her youth and childhood. Her account of the way she was told of her father’s death is simply but emotionally told: “She came home crying like an angel one night and woke me up and told me Daddy was gone, he was what they call dead, and we’d never see him again, but the three of us would stick together and have a jolly life anyhow, to spite his face.” (Plath and Kukil 430). This depiction tells the reader a number of things: she describes her grieving but relieved mother, fresh from under the heel of tyranny, who may or may not have expressed herself in those exact words. It also shows the adult poet’s anger at a childhood truncated prematurely, leaving so many unresolved issues. They were a mother and a daughter caught in grief, and 20 years later, the words come out: “Every woman adores a Fascist,/ The boot in the face, the brute / Brute heart of a brute like you.” (Plath 2008, 191). Unresolved anger and a bereavement never properly mourned stayed with Plath throughout her life, bubbling up at the most unexpected moments, leaving her as puzzled with her own mind as Ted Hughes probably found himself as well. It is not only biographers who find Hughes in this poem. Plath never hid him: he is plainly there. “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.” What a great deal of sadness is in these lines, what a lot of unfulfilled expectation. The fact Plath writes who said he was you is a stark indication of her mind-set. It was she who saw Hughes as a strong figure who was ahead of her at every stage, from whom she wanted to learn, and who had ultimately disappointed her. Although Hughes is known to have said it was destiny that brought them together (Kirk 76), he must have been dissatisfied with the way she associated their love, and sex in particular, with food, eating, and ordinary domestic tasks, even on their honeymoon, whose intimacy is left out of her journals. He had the distinct impression her aspiration was to marry a man who would be a figure of comfort: “Husband, father, lover and son, all at once.” (Middlebrook 94). This poem is not the only place Plath elicits the memory of her father. A whole collection of poems called Colossus seems to indicate how she managed - over her whole life - to inflate the memories, impressions and vivid recollections to the point where they became gigantic in her make-up (Kirk 111). Memories of childhood have a habit of becoming larger than life, since in a child’s mind things always seem much bigger than reality. In Daddy, Plath remembers her father, and crystallizes him in a description that is graphic in quality. “Marble-heavy, a bag full of God, / Ghastly statue with one gray toe / Big as a Frisco seal...” As heavy as a slab of stone, tyrannical and temperamental, he must have seemed, under the bed clothes, and fearful, with a gangrenous foot, swollen and awfully colored. Fear of abandonment is not a monopoly of Plath’s, but her fears came true. Her father did go away, for whatever reason. The fact it was death must have been terrifying to a child who so desperately wanted to please him and have him acknowledge her presence and her love. Writing such poems as Daddy was, in Plath’s own words, ‘an intense breakthrough into a very serious, very personal, emotional experience.” (Gill 73). She herself called Daddy a gruesome poem (Gill 82), but considered it an allegory. The reader, however, senses the raw rage that comes through: rage at how her life had turned out, for which she wanted to find a scapegoat. In summary, the unmistakable references in this much-studied poem of Sylvia Plath’s indicate her state of mind and her fixation on an absent father on whom she drove the brunt of her frustration and misery. The documented opinions of biographers and scholars seem to concur. This student’s impression is that despite being multi-talented, exceptionally intelligent, attractive, and well-schooled, Sylvia Plath never learned the most vital and life-saving skills of personal management that would have helped her out of the series of quandaries that proved too hard at last. Her journals show an element of self-doubt that is quite surprising from the stand-point of the observer, who also reads her inspired poetry. Crafted with striking power, her words jump from the page to impress generation after generation of students, who remain overwhelmed by the emotion, and amazed at the despair and unhappiness from which they originated. Sources cited Alexander, Paul. Rough Magic: A Biography of Sylvia Plath Da Capo Press, 2003 Butscher, Edward. Sylvia Plath: Method and Madness: A Biography Schaffner Press 2003 Gill, Jo. The Cambridge Companion to Sylvia Plath Cambridge University Press, 2006 Kirk, Connie Ann. Sylvia Plath: A Biography Greenwood, 2004 Middlebrook, D. Her Husband: Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath, A Marriage. London, Penguin: 2003. Plath, Sylvia, and Kukil, Karen V. The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath Anchor Books, 2000 ------- The Collected Poems Everyman’s Library Pocket Poets 2008 Read More