University:
Ohio University
Course:
ENG 503 | English Language
Academic year:

2022
Views:

119

Pages:

1
Author:

5prinzg1s

Daddy By: Sylvia Plath Sylvia Plath’s poem titled Daddy is often interpreted as a message of hate towards her father. Perhaps that is not the case and she desperately loves and misses him. According to a test took in 1944 by Plath, she scored a genius-level IQ of 166. Imagine what life would have been like for someone so smart. They do not normally fit in. If her dad was her anchor and he passed, then who was to help her through? Lines 7 and 14 in this poem suggest she really did want more time with her dad, Otto Plath. When Plath starts to show a correlation between her being a Jew and her father a Nazi, she is saying how she hates him for leaving her. She is still grieving him for leaving her defenseless on her own. Line 70 says, “The voices just can’t worm through”, meaning she cannot talk because even if she did, he would not be able to hear her. The distance is too great. When she mentions in line 72 about how it was a vampire who lied about his identity claiming to be you and drained her for years until she was dry. Theory behind that is because daughters marry men like their fathers. Plath could never stop grieving her father. She had a great relationship with him, however she did not with her mother. So, what if in a abnormal deep sense this poem is not just about how she misses her daddy, but really detestations her mother. There is a beautiful article written by Katie Roiphe which includes, “Daddy” is remarkable for its startling rage, its mad fury. One critic described it as “assault and battery.” But if one delves into Plath’s violent or murderous fantasies over time, they seem to be centered around her mother, rather than her father. For instance she wrote a short story, “Tongues of Stone,” in 1955 about a girl who wants to strangle her mother, and throughout her life, she reports dreams or visions like one of her mother with her eyes cut out, and another of biting her mother’s arm. In her journals she writes succinctly: “An almost exact description of my feelings and reasons for suicide: a transferred murderous impulse from my mother onto myself” (Roiphe). It is not a far jump from hatred between Jews and Nazi’s and her hate for her mother. She hid her story the “Bell Jar” and when you hide something that intense, its going to be true because its private. Privacy can let one be oneself and not hide feelings. Her poems were secret but now the world has access to her inner most thoughts.