Sylvia Plath's "Daddy" Analysis

The poem is about a girl with an Electra complex. Her father died when she thought he was God. Her case is complicated by the fact that her father was also a Nazi and her mother very possibly part-Jewish. In the daughter, the two strains marry and paralyze each other – she has to act out the awful little allegory once over before she is free of it.                               
                                                                                                  - Sylvia Plath 

 

Whether explicit, like in the statement above, or woven into her poetry, Sylvia Plath’s many attempts to separate herself from her art has resulted in a reoccurring debate amongst critics and readers about whether it is “right” to consider her life when picking apart her work. While I think there is merit to the objective perspective, I also think it’s silly to reject the other approach altogether, for there is just so much of Sylvia Plath in her work. Recognizing these autobiographical elements brings many otherwise invisible features in her writing to light. However, we must be reminded of the fact that an artist’s life is not their work. Sylvia Plath did not have an Electra complex (that we know of), her father, Otto Plath, was not a Nazi (that we know of), and her mother, Aurelia Plath, was not “very possibly part-Jewish” (that we know of). While not a mirror, art is a brilliant lens into its creator’s inner and outer worlds. Therefore, I will be taking Sylvia Plath’s life (rather, what I know of it) into consideration throughout my analysis:

 

Daddy
[full poem uninterrupted linked above]

You do not do, you do not
Any more, black shoe
In which I have lived like a foot
For thirty years, poor and white,
Barely daring to breathe or Achoo. 

The speaker begins by addressing someone we might assume is her father until she names the “black shoe”. This shoe that has been her home for thirty years no longer suits her.  The living conditions have made her sick – “poor and white” – and have even hindered her ability “to breathe or Achoo”. 

When Sylvia Plath was eight years old, her father died of diabetes. Plath addresses her father as a “black shoe” in which she has lived her whole life. This shoe may be symbolic of her father’s authority as well as his overbearing presence which had remained with and haunted her. The black shoe perpetuates her father’s grandiosity. His shoe is so enormous she has made a home in it. The subjugation is emphasized by the tension created by the last line. Plath does not say she is barely able to breathe but that she barely dares to. In her father’s presence, she walks on eggshells. Moreover, her father has made her apologetic for her mere existence, as she feels timid about involuntary functions like breathing or sneezing. Perhaps in his live presence, she felt like an inconvenience to him. Conclusively, in his lingering shadow, she felt suffocated. “Achoo” highlights the poem’s juvenile tone and structure along with the reiteration of oo throughout. “Daddy” is a wounded child’s nursery rhyme. 

 

Daddy, I have had to kill you.
You died before I had time ––
Marble heavy, a bag full of God,
Ghastly statue with one gray toe
Big as a Frisco seal 

The speaker addresses her father directly for the first time. “I have had to kill you” implies that the killing is an ongoing process, and then the audience finds out that the speaker’s father is dead. This is confusing because murder is not an act one may pause and later return to, and one cannot kill what is already dead. She then describes what we might imagine is her father’s corpse, stiff as marbles. She compares him to God and his casket to a bag that contains him, a reminder of Plath’s description of this poem as spoken by a girl whose “father died when she thought he was God”.

Throughout her life, Plath has felt the weight of her father’s ghost. She has had to gradually work to eradicate his presence which is what “Daddy, I have had to kill you” means, and what this entire poem attempts to do. He “died before [she] had time” to draw any satisfaction from their relationship. Instead, he remained an elusive figure, and she is left without closure. By comparing her father to God, she compares herself to a mortal. In other words, he is superior and she inferior. This difference of complexes becomes increasingly prevalent throughout the poem. What is most difficult to comprehend is the idea that God has died and that any “bag” can contain Him. Her description of her father as a horrific statue reinforces the image of him as this cold figure, looming largely above her.  

 

And a head in the freakish Atlantic
Where it pours bean green over blue
In the waters off beautiful Nauset.
I used to pray to recover you.
Ach, du. 

The speaker’s description of Nauset is the only time such beautiful imagery occurs in the poem, which may suggest that she has a particular affinity to Nauset beach. She used to pray to bring her father back to life. “Ach, du” is German for oh, you.

Her father was not only the asphyxiating shoe that Plath lived in, but the country too. He reached the Atlantic, Nauset, he was America. This could also mean that her father’s ghost followed her wherever she went. Nauset was where she spent her honeymoon with Ted Hughes. She felt extraordinarily at peace there, according to letters written for her mother. So, it does make sense that it is for Nauset that Plath takes the time to paint such a picture. Plath turned to God to “recover” her father from his illness. After his death, she resented faith. “Ach, du” could be out of desperation and/or defeat towards God and about her father. More specifically, about her failure to get God to save him.

 

In the German tongue, in the Polish town
Scraped flat by the roller
Of wars, wars, wars.
But the name of the town is common.
By Polack friend 

Says there are a dozen or two.
So I never could tell where you
Put your foot, your root,
I never could talk to you.
The tongue stuck in my jaw.

It stuck in a barb wire snare.

The speaker describes a town in Poland that has been hit with more than a couple wars, wiping it off the map. The town also shared its name with more than a dozen others, making it harder to trace. We learn that this unnamed town is where her father was from, and these obstacles have prevented her from learning about his roots. Speaking to her father was impossible with her tongue “stuck in a barb wire snare” and therefore, asking anything about him or his past was equally implausible.

From the public’s understanding, Plath’s father was ethnically German although from a Polish town, according to her. He was born in Grabow, Germany. Plath says she could never find her father’s exact birth town which added to his mystery. She “could never talk to” him because she was so intimidated by him. She wanted to impress the man she saw as God, but his aloofness was impenetrable. Her inability to talk to him is emphasized when she describes her tongue to be “stuck in [her] jaw” before moving on to the poem’s first – but not last! – disturbing image, one of her “tongue stuck in a barb wire snare”. Speaking to her father was not only difficult but painful.

Ich, ich, ich, ich,
I could hardly speak.
I thought every German was you.
And the language obscene 

“Ich” is German for I. On this personal pronoun, the speaker stutters in her attempt to communicate with her father. Still, she “could hardly speak” to him, perhaps not only due to intimidation but to a language barrier. “I thought every German was you” emphasizes the speaker’s estrangement from her father. German was all her father was to her; at least, all she understood about him. The speaker sees her father’s Germanness as a barrier that stood between them. This resentment appears in the last line when she calls “the language obscene”.  

In Ted Hughes’s poem “God Help the Wolf after Whom the Dogs do not Bark” from his collection of poetry addressed to Sylvia Plath called Birthday Letters, he writes:

“Just as you had danced for your father
In the home of anger – gifts of your life
To sweeten his slow death and mix yourself in it
Where he lay propped on the couch,
To sugar the bitterness of his raging death.”

Perhaps Otto Plath’s “slow death” amplified his emotional explosivity. In this “home of anger” the “gifts of [..] life” Plath presented her father with amidst his illness, were not received well. The “bitterness of his raging death” dismissed her sweet offerings. One might say he crushed her spirit. If her young life juxtaposed the end of his, just as it does in this excerpt of Hughes’s poem, then perhaps Plath was indeed made to feel apologetic for her existence. This excerpt also brings to light Plath’s childhood attempts at involving herself in her father’s life to form a connection with him. Instead, their relationship was cold and detached – something this stanza places into perspective.

 

An engine, an engine
Chuffing me off like a Jew.
A Jew in Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen.
I began to talk like a Jew.
I think I may well be a Jew. 

The snows of the Tyrol, the clear beer of Vienna
Are not very pure or true.
With my gypsy ancestress and my weird luck
And my Taroc pack and my taroc pack
I may be a bit of a Jew. 

With Plath’s father’s Germanness as an “obscene” barrier between them – perhaps also associating it with the obscenity of Germany’s recent history and with her father’s own cruelty – the language was a trigger like train engines might be to Holocaust survivors. It is for this analogy of her father as a Nazi and her as a Holocaust survivor that “Daddy” begins its controversy.

The speaker moves from Germany to Austria when she says, “The snows of the Tyrol, the clear beer of Vienna/ Are not very pure or true”. Considering the next few lines in which the speaker describes her “gypsy ancestress”, this may imply that her blood is “not very pure or true” which is why she “may be a bit of Jew”; she would have been prosecuted like Jews during the Nazi regime. These references to Jewish identity reiterate Plath’s statement about the speaker’s potential Jewish heritage from her mother, which ties into her “Electra complex”. It is because of her mother that her lineage is “impure”, and it is due to this impurity that she cannot connect with her father. This manifests into the hatred-for-the-mother aspect of the Electra complex, where the speaker blames her mother for the failed relationship with her father who she admires divinely.  

Her descriptions of Austria also allude to Plath’s mother who was of Austrian decent. This would make sense considering this stanza’s connection to Plath’s fictional speaker’s mother.

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 –—

Not God but a swastika
So black no sky could squeak through.

The speaker is finally explicit about her fear of her father. Her fear is justified by his association with the Luftwaffe – the air force in Nazi Germany– and panzer-men – tank drivers in Nazi Germany. The purpose of both the Luftwaffe and the panzer-men was to terrorize. His “neat mustache” is reminiscent of Hitler’s and his “Aryan eye” reasserts his power by being of the purest race, which contrast to the speaker’s own gypsy/Jewish heritage. Not only do his authority and German sophistication secure his position of dominance, but superiority runs in his blood.

The cruel man that Plath has been building throughout “Daddy “comes into full swing in this stanza. His association with the Luftwaffe and panzer-men implies that he made a point to instill fear within her for the sake of asserting dominance and power. His mustache reinforces the image of him as a Nazi, and his Aryan status makes him the definition of purity to the Nazi perspective. There was no meeting her father’s standards; he was innately superior, and she was innately inferior. His single, bright blue eye serves an eerie image of a cold glare, perhaps an expression her father often bestowed on her. Like “Achoo”, “gobbledygoo” reiterates the poem’s childish tone and is symbolic to the gibberish that the German language was to her ears. “[O] You” echoes the desperate and defeated Ach, du from the third stanza, after “I used to pray to recover you”. This time, she uses the archaic “o” and a capitalized “You” which is again reminiscent of how one might address God. The “o You” is almost in horror, disgust, or perhaps mock-endearment. The capital “You” reiterates her father’s godliness. The swastika, what became symbolic of Nazism, takes God’s place in the clouds. Its darkness is so severe “no sky could squeak through”.  Her father’s presence has overshadowed her life so completely that there is nothing – not even the sky – beyond her oppression. She is utterly trapped.

 

Every woman adores a Fascist,
The boot in the face, the brute
Brute heart of a brute like you.

This is the most confessional and controversial part in “Daddy”, Plath’s most confessional and controversial poem. “Every woman adores a Fascist” is a very bold claim. Fascism is associated with hatred, violence, and oppression. The idea that women adore fascists is outrageous not only for its objective vileness, but because a group like women (marginalized; often undermined and mistreated) would presumably be of the groups most disgusted by such a doctrine. Until the end of the stanza, the speaker continues to build on the intensity of this claim. The imagery of the “boot in the face” is not only violent but degrading: the object of assault is a boot (self-explanatory) and for a face to be kicked or stepped on, it would likely end up on the ground. When one’s shoe is kissed, they’ve asserted power and dominance. Kicking is far more forcible and therefore more suitable to the fascist. “Boot in the face” is also an expression to describe a look of disapproval. This would suit what has already been established about the father’s attitude towards the speaker. The repetition of b – boot, brute, brute, brute – brings the stanza’s harshness to the audience’s ears. In this same line, she reintroduces her father by addressing him. The fascist, the boot, the brute, create an architype he suits. In other words, “Every woman adores a man like you, daddy” as though to remind him, “everything comes back to you”.

The word adore in this context, deters from love, or even need or seek. In this case, to adore is to desire, lust, even worship. With this, Plath introduces sexuality to her poem. However, the fascist that Plath suggests is desirable is not a fascist at all, just as Otto Plath is not a Nazi and Sylvia Plath is not a Holocaust survivor. These extreme comparisons are what makes "Daddy" so controversial and brilliantly powerful. The fascist is representative narcissism, dominance, malice. “The boot in the face, the brute/ Brute heart of a brute” introduces direct cruelty. With the confession of desire that the first line serves, and the almost sadomasochistic implications of the following two lines, the stanza carries undeniable sexual tones. Regardless of its subtlety, I think the fact that Plath draws the juxtaposition of sexual pleasure and torture back to her father – “[the] heart of a brute like you” – is another aspect of this quote where people find offense. Indirectly, she calls her father desirable. This would suit Plath’s characterization of the speaker as having an Electra complex. The speaker resents her mom for making her unworthy, and she idolizes the father and even views his cruelty as sexually attractive.

The idea that women seek or are attracted to men that resemble their fathers is common. However, Plath’s situation – and those of many women like her – differed slightly in that she may not have been seeking her father in adult relationships because he was her male role model. Rather, she had been desperate to find the role model she lost. Her father left a void in her not only because he died when she was only eight, but because of their skewed relationship. Plath simultaneously feared and admired her father. She sought his validation and was met only with disapproval and neglect. The only real emotional response she ever received from her father, was anger. “Daddy” is written by Plath’s inner child; the one whose father never gave her an “okay”. It makes sense that in her adult relationships, she seeks a similar man. If she gets validation from the same sort of “fascist”– again, narcissistic, dominant, and one she both admires and fears – perhaps she can imagine that eventually, she could have gotten that “okay” from her father.

But that is Plath’s life, and not all women have poor or short relationships with their fathers. So, what does this generalization mean, and what truth is there to it if any at all? To a (much) lesser degree, I would wholeheartedly agree with Plath’s statement. The first time she heard Ted Hughes speak, she described “a voice like the thunder of God”. Women who are attracted to men, like men who are strong. This strength has nothing to do with hypermasculinity. This strength is in a character. A strong man is a reliable man. It makes sense that this is an attractive trait. However, Plath takes it much further with this stanza, as the strength she refers to is oppressive and even abusive. Additionally, she says nothing about what women seek, want, or need. The fascist is only adored. This desire has little to do with real strength. She alludes to some sort of innate female masochism, that women derive pleasure from pain.

I would disagree that every woman is a masochist, and I don’t think this was Plath’s suggestion either. Beyond the psychoanalytical perspective – which is an appropriate approach considering Plath was an avid reader of Freud as were most intellectuals of her time – I think there are a few satirical layers to this stanza.  For one, I think she might be darkly poking fun at herself by admitting having actively sought a man who dominated her for the male validation she missed from her father. It is as though she is confessing to her internalized misogyny. Perhaps she is also laughing at the truth of the idea that modern women – some – still seek oppression, but perhaps in “controlled” environments. Or Plath might be suggesting that to love a man – who she concludes are brutes – a woman must learn to be submissive. This last one is a theory I am not so keen to believe.

Another way to look at this would be to chuck the legitimacy of Plath’s generalization out the window, and instead consider that she may be speaking to a particular audience. “Every woman” might be every woman who was raised by a father who only offered them rage, criticism, or perhaps nothing at all. Perhaps the women she is speaking to are those who, like Plath, still search for their father’s validation or fulfill the inadequacy through self-destructive means. Maybe the answer to the question of why some women adore the “Fascist” might be rather simple: they were raised by them.  

In Nazi Germany, Hitler had a massive female “fanbase” much like what musicians, for example, have today. In “‘Every woman adores a Fascist’: Feminist visions of fascism from Three Guineas to Fear of Flying”, Laura Frost goes into depth about the supposed sexual appeal of the fascist with historical and political context, all while connecting this theme to this very stanza and the works of other female writers, like Virginia Woolf.

I could go on and on about this stanza, but I think I’ve played favourites enough. Those three lines carry more than I think Plath intended. I don’t think there is a conclusion to come to when analyzing “Every woman adores a Fascist […]”. It can only be endlessly explored and vigorously discussed by those of us who are keen to engage in doing so.

 

You stand at the blackboard, daddy,
In the picture I have of you,
A cleft in your chin instead of your foot
But no less a devil for that, no not
Any less the black man who

Bit my pretty red heart in two.

For the first time, the speaker draws our attention to a believable moment. In this photograph of her father, we narrow in on his cleft chin. When she brings up the devil, we are pulled back to the imaginary world “Daddy” takes place in. The cleft in the foot references the hooves the devil is often depicted with. This inconsistency is the only difference between her father and the archetypical devil. Rest assured, he is still the “black man who/ Bit [her] pretty red heart in two”. This could could represent “the two strains” in the speaker that Plath explains “paralyze each other”.

Plath moves away from WWII allusions except for a later reference to Meinkampf. Now, she compares her father to the devil, the complete oppose of God. In the beginning of “Daddy”, Plath grieves her father and reminisces what she lost. Then, she introduces a strong sense of fear alongside admiration. With the WWII references, Plath focuses on an emphasis of her father’s cruel and cold character, before the tone becomes gradually bitter as she identifies the (negative) impact he has had on her adult life. First, he was God, then a Nazi, and now he is the devil. The splitting of the heart could indicate heartbreak, but it could also allude to the polarizing identity – explained in conflicting wants and feelings – that Plath seemed to have struggled with for so much of her life. In her semi-autobiographical novel, The Bell Jar, she writes, "If neurotic is wanting two mutually exclusive things at once and at the same time, then I'm neurotic as hell. I'll be flying back and forth between one mutually exclusive thing and another for the rest of my days”. This represents the splitting of her heart’s desires. In The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath, she writes “I have the choice of being constantly active and happy or introspectively passive and sad. Or I can go mad by ricocheting in between”. This is one of many descriptions of her extreme, opposing emotions.

I was ten when they buried you.
At twenty I tried to die
And get back, back, back to you.
I thought even the bones would do.

But they pulled me out of the sack,
And they stuck me together with glue.

Plath’s father died when she was eight years old but the speaker says she was ten when her father was buried. This might be another element she incorporated to separate herself from the poem. It might also somehow reference her suicide attempt at age ten. In another famous poem of hers called “Lady Lazarus”, she briefly recalls two times she kissed death. She calls her near-death experience at ten “an accident”. However, a childhood friend of hers claims that when she was ten, she tried to slit her own throat. Plath’s depression began when her father died. Perhaps, then, his dark presence is also her mental illness. It makes sense that she explains her suicide attempt at twenty as an effort to reconcile with her father. Plath was rescued from death’s grasp and “they stuck [her] together with glue”. This line describes a weak attempt at restoration. Even with glue, a broken vase will never look the same. She may have been alive, but she had not healed.

 

And then I knew what to do.
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.
So daddy, I’m finally through.
The black telephone’s off at the root,
The voices just can’t worm through.

Since she couldn’t reunite with him in death, she makes a replica of her father to take his place. This new man suits her father’s cruel characteristics. She marries this replica of him eagerly – “I do, I do” – and now that she has satisfied the void her father left her with, she can let him go – “So daddy, I’m finally through” – and cuts communication with him – “The voices just can’t worm through”.

Sylvia Plath’s marriage to Ted Hughes is infamous. Her poems in Ariel are riddled with references to her husband’s affair as well as his abuse. Ted Hughes was the model she “made” of her father; he was her fascist, her boot in the face, her brute. The “Meinkampf look” might refer to their shared air of superiority– the Nazi arrogance, or fascist narcissism. The “love of the rack and the screw” might refer to medieval torture instruments, hinting at his sadism. The black telephone could be a reference to the phone she answered that lead to her discovery of Ted Hughes’s affair.

What’s interesting is how Plath says she has made a model of her father with these callous characteristics, rather than found the model. Ted Hughes’s poem “The Shot” opens with this stanza:

                "Your worship needed a god. 
                 Where it lacked one, it found one. 
                 Ordinary jocks became gods - 
                 Deified by your infatuation 
                That seemed to have been designed at birth for a god.
                 It was a god-seeker. A god-finder. 
                 Your Daddy had been aiming you at God
                 When his death touched the trigger." 

Throughout Birthday Letters, Ted Hughes suggests that he was somehow coerced into substituting for Plath’s father which was what ultimately brought their relationship’s demise. While this comes across as self-victimizing in many of his poems, there seems to be truth to the idea. Hughes’s treatment of Plath is not at all justifiable, but with lines like “I made a model of you”, I don’t think the suggestion that Plath may have subconsciously forced Hughes into filling her father’s shoes, is at all outlandish. Perhaps she was particularly attracted to the traits he shared with her father and lead him to the old pedestal on which she would try knocking down her father’s ghost to replace him with a live man. As her father became the devil, Ted Hughes became her new god:

              "Till your real target 
                Hid behind me. Your Daddy 
                The god with the smoking gun. 
                For a long time 
                Vague as mist, I did not even know
                I had been hit, 
                Or that you had gone clean through me - 
                To bury yourself at last in the heart of the god." 

Out of frustration, Ted Hughes reacted with the same brutality – abuse – and entitlement – the affair – as Plath may have expected from someone like her father. Perhaps, as the excerpt above suggests, through her marriage, she was trying to relive her relationship with her father and kill him once and for all. Inevitably, Hughes also got hurt. This would connect with Plath’s statement of “Daddy” being a poem in which the girl must “act out the awful little allegory once over before she is free of it”.

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 of you want to know.
Daddy, you can lie back now.

The speaker states that if she’s killed her father, she’s killed his replica as well. She refers to the model as a “vampire” who, for seven years, the duration of her relationship with Ted Hughes, drained the life out of her. With the deaths of her father’s ghost and his impersonator, the speaker tells her father that he can finally rest. “Daddy, you can lie back now” is reassuring, although it follows a sarcastic “Seven years if you want to know”. She knows that her father is indifferent towards her, but explains to him the extent to which his death and his lingering shadow have impacted her life anyway. 

 

There’s a stake in your fat black heart
And the villagers never liked you.
They are dancing and stamping on you.
They always knew it was you.
Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m through.

The trace of sweetness in “Daddy, you can lie back now” is invalidated by the hostility of this final stanza. “There’s a stake in your fat black heart” conjures, for me, the image of a tarnished and swollen human heart, and a stake impaled in her father’s chest with black blood sputtering out. His heart is black because it’s rotten. Here, her father and his imposter are joined into one being. The stake is what is used to "kill" vampires, sending them back to the dead. “Daddy, you can lie back now” was the speaker telling her father that because she has killed him, he must return to his grave. Perhaps she is also realizing that the version of her father she has fixated on for most of her life, is the imposter. There is no difference between him and the vampire who claimed his identity.

For the first time, other characters are introduced to the poem. The “villagers” are like the speaker’s cheering audience before which she can kill her father. Perhaps they are there in her defense – they always knew it was him who was the vampire, sabotaging her life.  

“Daddy, daddy, you bastard I’m through” is the final nail to the coffin. Throughout “Daddy”, Plath has relived her grief and abuse to return to her father’s dead body once more. Her father is not God or the devil. He is merely a bastard, a bully which she must finally put to rest. In fact, her father is hardly even that. He is a ghost, a creature she has conjured in her mind. He is a shadow in the corner of her eye. With this line, she finally escapes the shoe that made her "poor and white" and cleared the black skies that trapped and oppressed her. She’s killed him, he’s dead, and there’s nothing left to say.

“Daddy, daddy, you bastard I’m through” is her mic-drop if you will.

Conclusion:

"Daddy" is a poem about overcoming grief and how the death of a stranger can sometimes be more permanently tormenting than that of someone close. Plath creates an image of her father in her mind that is hardly a person at all, and for this reason she finds it impossible to fulfill the void she's made her entire life about filling. This poem is an attempt at getting rid of his ghost as well as this need to satisfy whatever his ghost pretends to fill. 

Although I wouldn’t have the final stanza to “Daddy” any other way, the conclusion is extremely unconvincing. Plath does not seem at all "through" with her father. The speaker’s temper is hot and with this in-depth characterization of her father as horrible man, she can relive and reflect on how she has allowed his mythological presence dictate her life. But even after dropping the microphone, after putting her pen and paper away, how far was she able to walk from her father’s grave? 

Sylvia Plath wrote “Daddy” in October on1962 and in February of 1963, she committed suicide. I wonder where Otto Plath’s ghost was on that day.