Daddy

Relationships between family members can be tricky to describe in many instances, as one can see in Sylvia Plath’s poem “Daddy”. A single event that ruins a relationship can happen, and within the poem, the reader can sense that such might have happened, as one can see through the speaker’s choice to call the father “bastard”. Abuse happens that can change the attitude of the speaker’s view of the said father. Is the death of the father in the poem “Daddy” a literal death or a figurative cry for help towards her father in which she lost a relationship with?

Throughout the poem, the speaker speaks of her father as if he was dead, but what if there were another scenario that might have happened? The tone of the poem is clearly angry but also comes across as a cry for attention that might be seen from the view of the reader. Because many readers tend to read poems in a biographical way, the fact that Sylvia Plath’s actual father passed away when she was young is a good reason to assume that the father is actually dead, but stepping away from this view, one might insinuate that the death was simply, or not so simply, figurative. The poem suggests several instances where the speaker reveals conflict that she had with her father. Lack of communication seemed to be the biggest issue that the speaker had with her father, which can be seen in the lines, “I never could talk to you./ The tongue stuck in my jaw./ It stuck in a barb wire snare” (Plath 24-26). Lack of communication in relationships, especially in child-parent relationships, tend to scar the children and teaches them to fear their parent to a certain extent. Fear is a great component of the poem because she compares her father to a Nazi, which, at the time, was rather extreme because of how recent the Holocaust had been.

At a point in the poem, the speaker refers to the fact that she married a man just like her father, “I made a model of you,/ A man in black with a Meinkampf look/ And a love of the rack and the screw./ And I said I do, I do” (Plath 64-67). When a girl marries a man who is just like her father, it is thought to be an Elektra complex, which insinuates that she has some sort of unresolved issue with her father. When the speaker states, “If I’ve killed one man, I’ve killed two-/ The vampire who said he was you/ And drank my blood for a year,/ Seven years, if you want to know./ Daddy, you can lie back now./” (Plath 68-70), is it truly possible that she killed people? Probably not, but speaking metaphorically, she might have cut them out of her life. This leads to the idea that her father isn’t actually dead, but rather figuratively dead to the speaker at the moment. This leads to another idea that quite possibly the speaker is trying to make amends with her father, but at the end of the poem, the speaker says, “Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m through” (Plath 80), offering the idea that she has simply given up hope on redeeming the relationship that was held between the two.