Joshi 2

Rashmi Joshi

B.A. (Hons.) English

282

Women’s Writing

28 August 2018

Ms. Sakshi Wason

Contextualize and comment:

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——

Sylvia Plath’s poems have always been read as an autobiographical poetic expression

of her life. Even Sylvia Plath in her interview with Peter Orr acknowledged it when she was

asked about the things she would like to write about, “I've been very excited by what I feel is

the new breakthrough that came with, say, Robert Lowell's Life Studies, this intense

breakthrough into very serious, very personal, emotional experience which I feel has been

partly taboo” (169). Plath’s “Daddy” is clearly influenced by and written in the tradition of

this breakthrough for the speaker’s similarity to Plath’s relationship with her father and the

domain of intimate it dwells into. This poetry of the personal is termed as “Confessional” by

M. L. Rosenthal.

Plath’s assimilation of the private and historic is not only reflected in “Daddy” but

several of her other confessional poems. Plath believed that “personal experience is very

important, but certainly it shouldn’t be a kind of shut-box and mirror looking narcissistic

experience. I believe it should be relevant, and relevant to larger things, the bigger things
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such as Hiroshima and Dachau and so on” (Orr 169-70). In “Daddy” she makes the personal

experience relevant by aligning the speaker, her “semifictive self”(Ramazani 1142), to the

Jews and her father to Nazis using metonymy and reducing him to “neat moustache”, “Aryan

eye”; the very symbols of oppression. (“Daddy” 43-44) Many critics argue that by bringing

the symbols of Holocaust to the domain of personal, Plath either trivializes the Nazi

oppression or accentuates her grief, making a personal myth out of it. To counter it

Jacqueline Rose writes, “The argument that she uses the Holocaust to aggrandise her personal

difficulties seems completely beside the point. Who can say that these were not difficulties

which she experienced in her very person?” (984).

In “Daddy” the use of the word “Gobbledygoo” between the symbols of Nazi

oppression, “Luftwaffe”, “Panzer”, “Swastika”, etc. can be seen as an attempt on Plath’s part

to not only depict the shallowness of these symbols but also deflate the

Plath’s use of personal history as a language tool to transgress the patriarchal

convention of writing. Plath’s confessional poetry is not “vindictive or exhibitionist”

(Smith )in nature but is a “blurring of what is public and private” for personal and “historical

emancipation” (Helle 997, Rose 981) (Helen Cixous link. Write)

“Daddy” has also been read by critics as an Elegy not in the traditional sense but as a

modern variation of it. “The foremost obstacle to reading Plath’s poem as elegies is probably

their harsh ambivalence; but this is precisely her most important contribution to the genre-her

enlargement of the elegy’s affective parameters beyond the traditional pathos, love,

reverence, and competitive camaraderie” (Ramazani 1143). In “Daddy” Plath makes a final

attempt to get rid of the grip of her dead father, perpetually alive in her psyche. She hints at

this presence in “All the Dead Dears” when she writes, “How they grip us through think and
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thick, / These barnacle dead” (17-18). The tone of “Daddy” is different from the earlier

poems she wrote about her father because of the immediate and striking necessity of taking

revenge. A break from the traditional roles assigned to the female mourner in an elegy, “she

insists on her power as a wrathful mourner instead of effacing it, defaces the name of the

dead father instead of revering it” (Ramazani 1145).

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Bibliography