"Daddy" by Sylvia Plath

First published: 1965, in Ariel

Type of work: Dramatic monologue; confessional poetry

Overview

Written on October 12, 1962, four months before her suicide, Sylvia Plath’s “Daddy” is a “confessional” poem of eighty lines divided into sixteen five-line stanzas. The persona, a daughter speaking in the first person, seeks to resolve the manifold conflicts with her father and paternal authority that have dogged her life. Her readiness for the task is unambiguously evident in the first stanza’s opening lines: “You do not do, You do not do/ Anymore.”

“Daddy,” begins the second stanza, “I have had to kill you.” The deceased, titanic patriarch, first represented as “Marble-heavy, a bag full of God,” has his godliness immediately modified when he is referred to as a “Ghastly statue,” with that phrase’s related intimations of corpses and ghosts. The death of her father, an awesome figure with “one gray toe/ Big as a Frisco seal” and “A head in the freakish Atlantic,” had not daunted the speaker’s hopes of reunion; as she puts it in the third stanza, “I used to pray to recover you./ Ach du.” Her belief in the power of prayer is, however, a thing of the past, no longer tenable.

The father’s European roots—he is imaged as a Nazi in the fourth stanza—prove elusive to the speaker, a relatively unimportant handicap, given the significant affliction she discovers in the fifth stanza: “I never could talk to you./ The tongue stuck in my jaw.” A less circumscribed and more dire speechlessness emerges in the sixth stanza.

In the seventh stanza, the Holocaust is introduced, and the speaker recovers her powers of speech in the context—if not as a result—of having pointedly established herself as a Jew. A couple of overworked Nazi emblems are demythologized in stanza 8: “The snows of Tyrol, the clear beer of Vienna/ Are not very pure or true,” while she identifies herself with Gypsies, another group much hated by the Nazis. In stanza 9, she brazenly mocks fascist discourse as “gobbledygoo,” and does much the same to her father’s Nazi image: “And your neat mustache/ And your Aryan eye, bright blue./ Panzer-man, panzer-man, O You—.” When, in stanza 10, one reads “Not God but a swastika/ So black no sky could squeak through,” one is confronted with a profoundly potent evil capable of overwhelming the heavens.

The penultimate patriarchal image appears in stanza 11: father as teacher-cum-devil. Although, she recalls, “You stand at the blackboard, daddy,/ In the picture I have of you,” the innocuous snapshot of a pedagogue does not distract her from perceiving the father’s demoniac nature. The hauntingly sadistic image, in the twelfth stanza, of the father who, before dying, “Bit my pretty red heart in two,” is juxtaposed with her vain pursuit of him ten years hence, in an attempted suicide. Failing at that, she tries, in stanzas 13 and 14, a more effective, somewhat less self-destructive tactic: “I made a model of you/ A man in black with a Meinkampf look/ And a love of the rack and the screw,” and marries the surrogate.

Predatory and erotic, the ruinous, eerie image of the father as vampire in stanza 15 anticipates the speaker’s ritualistic solution. “There’s a stake in your fat black heart/ And the villagers never liked you,” begins the poem’s sixteenth and final stanza. The speaker’s decisive, triumphant patricide permits her to say, “Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m through,” and, for the first time, call her life her own.

Given the emotionally damaged speaker’s mercurial discourse and her father’s protean nature, Plath’s characterizations of the two and their interrelations—particularly the series of continually modulating images of the father—are among the most psychologically sound, aesthetically impeccable, and effective formal accomplishments in “Daddy.”

There is a significant conceptual corollary to the poem’s frequent nursery-rhyme rhythms when, in the first stanza, the speaker echoes, with wit and irony, the nursery rhyme about the “old woman who lived in a shoe . . . [who] didn’t know what to do.” This character, however, is a woman who knows exactly what to do in order to end her thirty-year habitation in her old man’s shoe and to exorcize the related intimidation, control, passivity, and entrapment: She must commit a symbolic patricide.

For all the speaker’s strident declamations, however, there is nothing to obscure the fact that hers is an ambivalent discourse. Savior and tormentor, the object of nostalgic affection and vituperation—these are the conflicting dualisms that form her troubled attachment to the first man in her life (and to his reincarnation, her husband), dualisms that have set the terms of her persecution and imprisonment. Although she “used to pray to recover [her father],” her present goal, transformed by experience, no longer aimed at recovering, is to uncover—to lay bare the inventory of her heart’s wounds, which shaped and dogged the future, all father-inflicted during childhood. The resulting narrative, awash with untrammeled emotion, produces an intricately wrought compound image of the father.

The permutations that produce the compound image of the father follow a devolving trajectory. In broad terms, the father, first imaged as a god of titanic proportions (stanza 2), is transformed in short order into a sadistic devil (stanza 11) before being finally described as a vampire (stanza 15). Introduced as a worshiped and scorned god-cadaver-statue, the paternal image is modulated and degenerated into the image of a viciously racist, sadistically misogynistic Nazi. When, with bitter irony, the speaker says, “Every woman adores a Fascist,” the statement is cast as an affront to feminist sensibilities, so typical is it of male presumptions about what “every woman” wants. The feminist theme continues into the succeeding image of the father as teacher-devil, as traditional gender roles would typically represent, as complementary images, male tutors and untutored females. The semantically dense imagery and characterization that occur here are typical of Plath’s poetry.

In the poem’s final degenerative permutation, the speaker integrates her father and husband into a single ghastly image of a vampire, a parasitic male who has been drinking her lifeblood. The father’s precipitous fall from deity to evil incarnate, conveyed in the serial pattern of paternal imagery, sets up the poem’s denouement: a ritual killing of evil, the one necessary prerequisite for the speaker to regain a life worthy of the name.

In the course of discussing Sylvia Plath’s poetry, Joyce Carol Oates has contended that the poet did not like other people because she doubted “that they existed in the way that she did, as pulsating, breathing, suffering individuals.” The ostensible subject of “Daddy” is the speaker’s somewhat belated acknowledgment of her unhealthy attachment to and anger toward her father and her eagerness to explode the Oedipal prisonhouse in which she has been captive so that she might have a life that is truly her own. Accordingly, it could be said that “Daddy” is about individual freedom and two of its principal prerequisites: self-knowledge and courage.

Like all good poetry, “Daddy” raises many questions. In the case of “Daddy,” among the most compelling of these questions is, What is the speaker’s understanding of the predicament from which she seeks to escape? Certainly, the sincerity of her testimony is as apparent as her anguish and rage. She speaks as if she were the victim of an error that her current insights empower her to rectify. Herein lies a major source of the poem’s pathos: Plath’s speaker fails to detect the resemblance between her situation and that of the Greek hero for whom Sigmund Freud named her presumed psychopathology, Oedipus. She suffers from the intractable consequences of fate.

The speaker’s account also implies a subscription to a bizarre mutation of the doctrine of Original Sin, the central postulate of which is that all errors are the result of unconscious guilt. This moral drama entails two shaky assumptions: that the world is just and that, despite all contrary evidence, people who suffer have only themselves to blame. As Dorothy Van Ghent, however, once pointedly asked about tragic heroes, “Is one guilty for circumstances?” One must deal tactfully if not compassionately with human fictions—while under one’s breath lamenting their folly—and Plath’s speaker surely deserves such consideration. Unfortunately, redefining herself and reclaiming her life by assuming full responsibility for her dilemma offer the same prospects for complete success as railing at the world for not being just. Perhaps Plath understood the speaker’s inadequate sense of her situation sufficiently for suicide to emerge in her life as the more decisive, if unhappy, alternative.

Sources for Further Study

Alexander, Paul. Rough Magic: A Biography of Sylvia Plath. New York: Da Capo Press, 1999.

Bassnett, Susan. Sylvia Plath: An Introduction to the Poetry. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005.

Gill, Joe, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Sylvia Plath. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006.

Hungerford, Amy. The Holocaust of Texts: Genocide, Literature, and Personification. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003.

Kendall, Tim. Sylvia Plath: A Critical Study. London: Faber, 2001.

Kirk, Connie Ann. Sylvia Plath: A Biography. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2004.

Rowland, Anthony. Holocaust Poetry: Awkward Poetics in the Work of Sylvia Plath, Geoffrey Hill, Tony Harrison, and Ted Hughes. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005.

Swiontkowski, Gale. Imagining Incest: Sexton, Plath, Rich, and Olds on Life with Daddy. Selinsgrove, Pa.: Susquehanna University Press, 2003.

Wagner-Martin, Linda. Sylvia Plath: A Literary Life. 2d ed. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003.