Daddy Summary

THEME & CRITICAL APPRECIATION OF “DADDY”

On the hand “DADDY” is strongly autobiographical, a story of suppressed soul having the natural desire to be loved on the extreme level. On the other hand “DADDY” is the representative of the collective identity of crushed femininity by male-dominated society. Moreover “DADDY” is an unrestrained outburst of a woman who after unending suffering decides to end her life with her own hands uttering.

“I’m through.”

From very beginning of the poem, SYLVIA PLATH confesses that not only in her childhood when her father was alive but also she haunted by her father’s personality even for her whole life. Her father had completely overpowered her for her whole life though she died when she was eight.

“For thirty years, poor and white

   Barely daring to breath or Achoo.”

Stunning enough in the second stanza of the poem, SYLVIA PLATH expresses her hatred towards her father as:

“DADDY”, I have had to kill you

                                               You died before I had time….

But as the poem proceeds, complex attitude of SYLVIA PLATH is suicide to be with dead father.

I was ten when they buried you.

                                               At twenty I tried to die

                                               And get back, back, back to you

To present her utter hate to her father, SYLVIA PLATH uses allusion of Holocaust Jews, Swastika & Fascism to emphasise the idea of the oppressor and the oppressed. She is quite successful in presenting the oppression of her father but that is not enough, she admits her ambivalent nature as:

Every woman adores a Fascist

The boot in the face, the brute

Brute heart of a brute like you

Not that alone, SYLVIA PLATH’s life afterward became more frustrated when her own choice, her most violently loved husband, Ted Hughes left her for a woman. It is very important to note that SYLVIA PLATH has suicidal death as well as the woman did the same thing for whom Ted Hughes left SYLVIA PLATH. It was not a coincidence that SYLVIA established relation with a person who was like her father in appearance. As the time passed, their relationship became more and more hopeless and SYLVIA had to say:

If I’ve killed one woman, I’ve killed two…

                                     The VAMPIRE who said he was you

The images of her father and husband merge into each other and at last in concluding stanza hate overpower SYLVIA. Her conscience becomes the villagers as:

                                                  And the villagers never liked you

                                                 They are dancing and stamping on you….

DADDY, DADDY, you bastard, I’m through

One of the most notable features of S. Plath’s poetry is her use of colour. Her images of “black shoe”, “grey toe”, “black man”, “black telephone”, “Daddy’s black fat heart”, all serve the purpose dark and morbid things while speaker’s own pretty red heart represents purity and passion which is obviously in contrast with the former.

To conclude, we can say unhesitatingly that “DADDY” is truly a haunting poem because it basically explains SYLVIA PLATH’s descent into depression and then suicide. A prominent critic rightly observes the poem “DADDY” as:

        “Graphically macabre, hallucinatory in their imagery, but

          full  of  ironic  wit,  technical  brilliance  and   tremendous

                               emotional power, poetry of this order is a murderous art”

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