Power In Sylvia Plath's Daddy

Superior Essays
In her poem “Daddy,” Sylvia Plath illustrates the struggle between a victimized daughter and a towering, menacing father. Written at the end of her life, this work of art shines out among Plath’s other poems while still relating to her previous works. Throughout her life, Plath experienced many life changing events, taking what she learned from them and amplifying the knowledge by writing it down into a beautiful piece of art. The resulting poems and novels reflects the deep wounds embedded in Plath, and they express her power as a writer just for this reason. After reading Plath’s “Daddy,” inquiries of Plath’s personal life drives the reader to question how Plath’s heritage, father, ex-husband, and mentality influenced the poem. Daughter of a German-born father and an American mother of Austrian heritage, Plath grew up in a household of foreign custom. Plath’s German heritage built a poetic foundation that created a native way of thinking within her, changing the way she perceived the world. Plath felt a strong emotional connection with her German/Austrian heritage in the beginning of her life, allowing it to influence her personality. In Jeffrey Meyers’s “The German Plath,” he explains that Plath’s “orderly and repressive German traits…accentuated the horrors and self-pity of her work, as well as the negative side of her personality: her unrelenting egoism, naked ambition, and aggressive quest for perfection” (78). According to Luke Ferretter, Plath did have a strong sense of these traits, relating them back to her German and Austrian heritage (110). Apparent throughout most of the poem, Plath’s negative personality shines out of her word choice while the speaker addresses her dead father. Plath compares her father to a “brute” and a “bastard,” relaying the negativity present in her life (291-292). It is inferred that Plath received these attributes from her father, a man proud of his German heritage (Ferretter 112-113). Plath addresses this earlier part of her life in “Daddy,” playing off her youthful admiration of her heritage by labeling it as “gobbledygoo” (291). As inferred from “Daddy,” Plath later came to distance herself from her German heritage in order to cut herself off from her father. In an interview, Plath explained that it was her German and Austrian heritage that inspired the imagery of “concentration camps and so on” in “Daddy” (Ferretter 112). A majority of this poem’s imagery alludes to German history, and Plath immerses herself within the racial conflict. She compares the speaker to a Jewish victim of Nazi oppression, and she imagines the dad as the Fascist (291). Meyers comments “By gassing herself when she was thirty, Plath exorcised her German qualities and authenticated her role as daughter of a Nazi father and vicarious Jewish victim” (80). This “Germanic barbarism” lies at the core of “Daddy,” the very means of the speaker’s oppression (Rietz 428). The looming Fascist overlord of the father quite literally controlled the speaker in life, and she has just uncovered his evil ego. As a result, Plath chastised Otto for bringing her “emotional deprivation and financial insecurity,” and she explained that “she had to kill her father [in order] to kill the German in herself” (Meyers 80). The speaker in “Daddy” reflects this idea, eventually illustrating a sacrificial-like ritual to rid herself of her father. Plath’s German personality and behavior was ultimately drilled into her by her father, …show more content…
Meyers notes, “Otto’s spectral and menacing figure — always dead, not alive — recurs throughout Sylvia’s poems” (78). In “Daddy,” Plath admits to being afraid of her father with by alluding with “I have always been scared of you” (291). Fear of a superior power definitely presents itself within this poem, but the speaker is not the only one affected by victimization. By referring to the Jews and their oppression by the Germans during the Holocaust, “personal as well as historical victimization and attempted vindication are dramatized in Plath’s poem” (Platizky 106). Plath demonstrates the combination of these two victimizations with “[a]n engine, an engine / [c]huffing me off like a Jew” (291). In these lines, Plath relates the speaker’s victimization with a Jew who fell victim to the Nazi war machine. Nevertheless, victimization shares a spotlight in the poem with another attribute: death and the reluctance to let

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