Right from the very beginning the speaker employs a tone of command to the person who has dominated

her life with

his cruel, dictatorial ego, forcing her to live for thirty years a cruelly confined life, compared to the life of The old woman
who lived in a shoe‟(about whom there is an actual nursery rhyme). The paired adjectives „poor and white‟ have a
double function, referring to the condition of the foot when it is taken out of a shoe after a long time and also associating
the speaker with the poorer classes among white people. So oppressive was the male tyrant‟s rule that the speaker did
not even dare to breathe easily or express feellings of arrogance or anger. (Plath‟s father died when she was below ten
and therefore the reference to „thirty years‟can only mean, for those who seek biographical accuracy, that the figures of
the father and the husband are merged in Plath‟s consciousness). Ultimately the tortured, repressed victim had to kill
the oppressive father. It would be wrong to interpret this statement as a suggestion of patricide: what the speaker wants
to suggest is that she had to reject the idealised, god-like image of the father she had constructed as a child. But there
is a note of ambivalence too in the description of the child‟s image of the father as a heary, ghastly statue. The following
five lines (10-15) are tender and lyrical, visualising the state of the father as huge (the one gray toe is as big as a seal of
San Francisco), with the head extending over the Atlantic ocean. (The reference to one gray toe‟ may again remind the
biographically minded of the poet‟s actual father, Otto Plath, one of whose legs had to be amputated because of
diabetes). But the image of the patriarchal statue associated with God by the child, gives way to a terrible Nazi figure.
Even if the memory of Otto Plath inspired the earlier lines, the father figure is now being associated with a symbolic
figure of wider and darker associations. From the tender touch of „I used to pray to recover you‟ followed by the German
words „Ach, du, meaning, „oh, you‟, the speaker moves to a vision of whole towns devasted by the war started by Nazi
Germany (The Second World War). The German words make the transition appear natural and Polish towns are
mentioned because Poland was one of the first countries to feel the destructive fury of the Nazi forces. The friend who
speaks of many towns devastated by the war is deliberately describe as „Polack‟, usually a disparaging term, to
heighten the arrogance and superior attitude of the Nazis.The identification of the father with a Nazi tyrant begins and
the father figure now takes on an allegorical shape, terrorising the speaker to such an extent that she could not speak to
him. The image of the tongue sticking in the jaw as the speaker makes an effort to speak immediately calls forth the
image of „a barb wire snare‟ suggestive of war, captivity and repression. The relapse into German („Ich‟ means „I‟)
reinforces the sense of terror as the speaker continues her identification of the father with „every German‟. Even his
language, commanding and authoritarian, appeared obscence, propelling the speaker, who is now explicitly identified
with a Jew. This identification has the effect of enlarging the personal tragedy of the speaker into a much greater and
more widely experienced tragedy experienced in the massacre of the Jews by Nazi Germany during the Second World
War. It is also possible to glimpse in the speaker‟s identification with a Jew an attempt to equate the suffering of women
with the persecution of Jews.Thus the personal history of the speaker, and possibly of the poet too, is linked to a
historical experience of much greater significance. (Dachau, Auschuritz and Belsen were sites of concentration camps
during World War II; thousands of Jews were tortured and massacred in these camps).
The speaker elaborates upon her fictional Jewish identity : just as the snows of the Tyrol, an alpine region in Austria,
and the beer of Vienna, are not very true or pure, she too, what with her gypsy ancestress and gypsy characteristics,
may well have something of the Jew in her;(Taroc or tarot, from Italian, tarocco, is a pack of cards used for fortune-
telling and naturally follows „gypsy ancestress‟ by association since gypsies practise fortune-telliing). By contrast, the
tyrannical father is again and more strongly associated with the German war machine. (Luftwaffe‟ is German for Air
Force, while „Panzer‟, means „armour‟— the soldiers who manned German armoured tanks during World War II were
called Panzer‟ troops.) The German military terms as well as physical traits like neat moustache and Aryan eye reinforce
the father figure‟s German identity (The Nazi Germans, proud of their Aryan ancestry believed in themselves as a
superior race;) for them „Aryan‟ meant a non-Jewish Caucasion.) The -God-like image of the father, earlier conjured up
by the speaker, is now completely discarded and replaced by the „swastika‟, the official emblem of the Nazi Party, which
is imagined as huge and black enough to cover the sky, its oppressive actuality enveloping the consciousness of the
terrified victim, to whom the speech of the Nazi tormentor appears to be „gobbledygoo‟ that is, a difficult and pompous
language. The power and awe of the father are further consolidated in the image of him as a teacher standing at the
blackboard, while his cleft chin suggests his devlish character, though devils were supposed to have cleft feet. But there
is also a disturbing hint of the adoration and fascination felt by macsochistic women for their tormentors. (Masochism,
named after Sacher-Masoch who described it, refers to gratification derived from one‟s own pain and deprivation.) The
father is called a „black man‟ in the sense of having a black, cruel mind, which broke the daugher‟s heart. Yet the
daughter‟s lovehate bond with the father is so strong that her attempted suicide when she was twenty is seen as an
attempt to be reunited with the father, whom she lost at the age of ten (eight ?). However, she was pulled back from the
brink of death and made fit to live again. But she could not get rid of her father-fixation, since she chose to live with
another man who may be called a surrogate father, another dictator on the model of the lost father. This man too had a
black mind and his look was as dictatorial and domineering as that of Hitler. (Mein kampf, „My campaign‟ is the title of
Hitler‟s book about his life and political aims.) Besides, he too took a perverse delight in torturing the speaker, the „rack‟
and the „screw‟ symbolising one of the most excruciating forms of torture. The speaker‟s submission to this tormentor
also suggest, however, an element of thrill and fascination derived force the violence inflicted on her, leading to her
desire to give herself to death, for that is what the black telephone being rooted out and the blocking off of the voices
suggest.
The transfer made by the speaker from the father to the husband also leads her to purge herself of the oppressive
power of the tyrannical male, who in the last four stanzas of the poem adopts the identity of the tormentor. (Another
relevant biographical details is that Sylvia‟s husband, Ted Hughes, liked to dress in black.) Thus in killing the surrogate
father the speaker has actually killed the two male oppressors in her life. The father-husband figure is now imagined as
a vampire who sucked her blood for all her married life and the act of killing him has finally exorcised the daughter‟s
love-hate bond with the father. The act of killing is of course symbolic and it is given a ritualistic character. The vampire
of folklore has to be killed by driving a stake through its heart. As the speaker gets rid of the blood sucking vampire, the
villagers show their approval and relief by dancing and stamping the body. The last line of the poem is equivocal,
suggesting not only the death of the tormentor but also perhaps the speaker‟s „final self-annihilation.
Thus „Daddy‟ is one of Plath‟s most complex poems, deliberately written in a manner strongly reminiscent of nursery
rhyme, which is in ironic contrast to the theme of violence. The raw material the poem can be found in Plath‟s life,
especially in her love-harted relationship with her father and her husband. However, the poem goes beyond the merely
personal by presenting the speaker‟s personal history of torment in terms of the torture and persecution suffered by
Jews in the worst act of genocide in twentieth-century history. There is also an implied parallel between Jews
persecuted through the ages and women often sufferring passively in the hands of arrogant and domineering values.
Plath herself suggested that the poem should be read as a case study of a girl suffering from an Electra complex and
the speaker‟s submission to the violence inflicted on her by the father-figure as well as the explicit hint that women
adore fascists makes such a reading possible. Moreover, the poem strongly suggests that the speaker‟s elimination of
the vampire—like figure of father— husband also leads to her own annihilation. The Electra complex is also revealed in
the speaker‟s attraction for the husband because he was a „model of you‟, that is, the father. Thus the poem has many
layers of meaning matching the range of the speaker‟s mixed feelings for her father and also matching the stylistic
variety acheived by incantatory rhythm, broken sentences, repetition, use of German words and the recurrent rhyme
with the sound „u‟ The imagery is similarly varied and striking, as pointed out in the analysis. “Daddy” operates by
generating a duplicate of Plath‟s presumed psychic state in the reader, so that we re-experience her grief, rage,
masochism, and revenge, whether or not, these fit the facts. You should now be able to determine for yourselves which
of the many aspects of the poem appeals to you most, or whether you are able to respond to all of them simultaneously.