QUESTION: "Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I'm through.

" critically analyse Plath's poem,

'Daddy, in the context of its final statement.
ANSWER: Sylvia Plath [1932-1963], one of the best-known women poets of the twentieth
century, wrote a poem 'Daddy' on 12 October 1962, later published in a volume called Ariel
in 1965. She wrote between the first two waves of modern feminism, where women were
deprived of the cultural, political, aesthetic framework and were offered fewer opportunities
to women writers than to men.
''Daddy'', is an autobiographical poem. It is written in confessional mode {direct and personal
style of ‘breakthrough’ in disrupting earlier orthodoxies} consisting of metaphor, assonance,
allusion, and imaginary about the holocaust and Nazi, taken from the cultural memory of her
time to articulate the personal feeling of victimization. Confessional poetry allowed women
such as Plath and Anne Sexton a means to express personal feelings and emotions that
patriarchal society denied. Plath's writings are consistently drawn from her personal
experiences and her personae are usually related to herself. In the 1962 interview, Plath said
that ''I think 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 to the
larger things, the bigger things such as Hiroshima and Dachau and so on''.
'Daddy' is written in a powerful nursery rhyme, with an irregular pattern but with one
dominant rhyme throughout. Forty-one of the 80 lines repeat the same rhyme:
you/do/shoe/Jew/blue/screw and so on along with the use of other devices – broken and
incomplete sentences, without main verbs, repetition of certain words, use of German words
['ich' and ach']. The figurative language, incantatory rhythm, and obsessively repeated words
of daddy articulate a marked irruption of semeiotic within the poem's language.
The term ''Daddy'' is an intimate term associated with love which becomes symbolic of the
way women suffer patriarchy, suggesting that women experience patriarchy in the private
domain too, their most oppressive form of experience comes from a family. Daddy represents
the power of destruction, oppression, and claustrophobic ways where the daughter is not
allowed to live self, independent being.
In ''Daddy'', there is a little gap created poetically between the poet and the “I” of the poem.
The poem is spoken by a girl with an Electra complex. Her father died while she thought he
was God. She uses the metaphor of her father as a Nazi and herself as his victim, both as a
Jew and as a "gipsy"—another group the Nazis
persecuted.
The reference to the authoritarian father is unveiled through the use of images like marble-
heavy, a bag full of god, comparing him with the Nazi, teacher, devil, and vampire, and black
shoe, which is once again proposed in the poem through the metaphor of the “black
swastika”. The use of these images is powerful in explaining Plath’s posthumous relationship
with her father. Using a gloomy depressive tone, she blames him for not doing “anymore,
black shoe / in which she has lived like a foot”. Black shoe [associated with negativity]
suggests that her life was captivated by her father like a foot, never allowed to be free, which
turned her life into claustrophobic for 30 years and didn't allow her to journey anywhere. It
also refers to the foot which Nazi used to wear, associated with fascism]. In the middle she
states herself as Jew, ‘I think I may be a Jew’. Jacqueline Rose, said ‘the Jew with whom she
identifies were victim of something worse than ‘weird luck’. Whatever her father did to her,
it could not have been what the German did to Jews. The metaphor is inappropriate’. She
wasn't allowed to breath and speak her jaw became like a barbed-wire snare [image of ghettos
and concentration camp].
Susan Gubar in an article Prosopopoeia and Holocaust Poetry in English said ''Daddy
deploys all the regalia of the fascist father against those robbed of selfhood, citizenship, and
language, for the speaker's stuttering tongue is "stuck in a barb wire snare. / Ich, ich, ich, ich,
/ I could hardly speak." The relationship between her and daddy is premised on fear, dialogue
is absent. She is oppressed by the patriarchy. The repetition of the word 'ich' in the poem
suggests difficulty in freeing from the oppressive fascist system [proto type of patriarchy]
which comes from the loss of self. Both fascism and patriarchy, associated with the muting of
reach other. Plath sees her relations political because she is part of a larger oppressive
systematic structure which is patriarchy and fascism. This dominant system is shown in the
poem by the use of images like ‘The foot’ and ‘The shoe’ words like-
MeinKampf look, blue eyes, a swastika, childlike word - “gobbledygook”. The rapid meter
and clanging rhymes (‘do’, ‘you’, ‘blue’, ‘du’, ‘two’, ‘Jew’, ‘goo’, ‘who’ and so on) circle
round and round in a claustrophobic movement which embodies the entrapment of the
daughter.
Plath’s German-born father died when she was young. She confesses, “I was ten when they
buried you”. Because at ten he left her, “at twenty [she] tried to die /And get back, back, back
to [him]”. The constructed persona expresses her readiness and eagerness to die because only
death would reunite her with her father.
Later on, the girl marries the image of her father, the ‘man in black with a Meinkampf look /
and a love of the rack and the screw;’. The vivid imagery of the vampire has been used both
for 'Father' and 'Husband' to suggest how her husband is a model of her father; As both of
them “have stripped [her] of her sense of self. Here Plath associates him with the black colour
that is attributed to the father in the first stanza. Husband and father, two in one, are the
vampire which has drunk her blood for seven years [Sylvia Plath had married Ted Hughes in
June 1956].
“[D]addy, I have had to kill you”. It may connote the idea that the daughter does not want to
kill her father, but to exterminate the memories associated with him that are haunting her. But
later on, she asserts that “[she] used to pray to recover [him]”; which means that she wishes
he was still alive. So here we see ambiguity associated with the father.
'Daddy, 'I have to kill you': Plath's rage & the modern elegy.
Jahan Ramazani published in 1993
''The daughter's elegy for the father became, with Plath's help one of the sub-genres that
enable women writers to voice anti-patriarchal in the poetry - anger initially focused on the
familial embodiment of masculine authority''
In a deeply ambiguous closing line, the speaker declares ‘I’m through’. ‘I’m through’ might
mean that, at last, the barriers to communication have been breached and the speaker can now
establish a dialogue with the father. Alternatively, ‘I’m through’ connotes a final declaration
of despair. Suggesting that she has presumably had enough and is ready to abandon the
struggle. Thus, at last ‘poem’ ends with the freedom from the autocratic father and husband
figure.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
• Women's Writing: An Anthology, published 2017
• The Cambridge introduction to Sylvia Plath by Jo Gill published 2008
• Class notes