A Summary and Analysis of Sylvia Plath’s ‘Daddy’

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

‘Daddy’ is undoubtedly Sylvia Plath’s most widely studied poem, and it is probably her most famous too. It is also her most controversial. But is ‘Daddy’ a searingly honest exploration of Plath’s own relationship with her father, or something closer to the dramatic monologue in which an invented speaker talks to us about her father?

Similarly, is ‘Daddy’ a serious, tragic, and heartfelt poem about a daughter’s troubled attitudes to her dead father, or is it a work of dark comedy? Many readers may opt for the first assessment of Plath’s poem, but in doing so, they would disagree with Plath herself as to the meaning of her poem.

Let’s take a closer look at this difficult and surprising poem, first by summarising its content and then by turning to an analysis of its broader meaning. Plath wrote ‘Daddy’ in a single day, on 12 October 1962, just four months before she took her own life.

Summary

When she introduced the poem for a BBC radio reading, Sylvia Plath herself described ‘Daddy’ as a poem about ‘a girl with an Electra complex’ whose ‘father died while she thought he was God.’ Plath goes on to state that the father in the poem was a ‘Nazi’ and the speaker’s mother probably part Jewish.

So, ‘Daddy’ is spoken by a female speaker who is the offspring of bully and victim, oppressor and oppressed. Plath’s use of the Holocaust in this poem is one of the key reasons for ‘Daddy’ being regarded as a highly controversial poem.

Plath also tells us that the daughter in the poem ‘has to act out the awful little allegory once over before she is free of it.’ So, ‘Daddy’ is a ‘performance’ on two levels: both by Plath herself, and by the (fictional) speaker within the poem.

The poem begins with its speaker acknowledging that the way she has been living will no longer ‘do’ or suffice. It is like living in a black shoe, feeling restricted and oppressed, like a shoe fitting tightly within the shoe. She can barely breathe or sneeze, so tightly constrained is she within her life.

In the second stanza, the speaker addresses her father. She tells him she has had to kill him, even though he actually died long before she could do so. He is as heavy as marble, almost divine, like a grotesque and large statue whose toe is as big (and as grey) as a seal found in San Francisco bay.

Meanwhile, her father’s head is in the Atlantic: he is so vast he literally spans the whole of the continent of North America from one side to the other. (‘Nauset’ is in Massachusetts, on the east coast; ‘Ach, du’ is German for ‘Oh, you’.) She tells her father she used to pray that he would come back from the dead.

In the next couple of stanzas, Plath’s speaker discusses a Polish town whose name is so common there could be many towns with the same name. She would pray for her father’s return in German, but she could not locate his roots, where he came from, because she didn’t know which Polish town with that name was the one he was from.

As a result, she could never talk to him, as if her tongue were caught in barbed-wire trap, and she would simply stammer the word ‘Ich’ (‘I’ in German) over and over. Her father was the same as every other German: she couldn’t distinguish him.

As for the German language he spoken, it was ‘obscene’, putting her in mind of the train engines which carried Jewish people to the concentration camps at Dachau, Auschwitz, and Belsen, where they would be killed. Instead of talking like her father, the speaker began to talk like ‘a Jew’, and started to think of herself as Jewish.

After all, she has little in common with the Austrian city of Vienna, either its snows or the beer they drink there. But her Romani ancestry and her strange luck, as well as her fondness for using Tarot cards, suggest to the speaker that she might be ‘a bit’ Jewish.

She tells her father she has always been afraid of him, because of his association with the German air force or ‘Luftwaffe’ and the nonsense he spoke (which perhaps sounded impressive to the speaker when she was a child). His neat moustache and blue eyes, linking him to the ‘Aryan’ race which the Nazis regarded as the pure race, meant that she associated him with the ‘panzer’ division of the German army (‘panzers’ were tanks used by the Germans during the Second World War).

Her father, she has come to realise, was not God (despite her initial assumption, as expressed in Plath’s BBC note to the poem mentioned above) but was instead like the swastika, that symbol of the Nazi regime: a symbol so dark (in every sense) that no light could get through. She then declares that every woman really loves a fascist because they enjoy a ‘boot in the face’ and being brutalised by strong, violent men like her father.#

Next, the speaker contemplates a photograph of her father that she has. In the photograph he is standing in front of a blackboard (implying he is a teacher: Plath’s own father was an academic) with a cleft chin, although she also imagines he has a cleft foot like the devil, and like the evil man who broke the speaker’s heart.

She was ten years old when her father died (Plath’s father died when she was eight). Ten years later, she attempted to take her own life in order to be reunited with her father in the afterlife (Plath’s first attempt to take her own life was when she was twenty years old, too), or even just being dead and a pile of ‘bones’ next to him.

But the speaker’s attempt was thwarted and she was ‘fixed’ and put back together, like a broken object being stuck together with glue. So as she couldn’t reach her father through dying, the speaker made a model of him – a figure of a man in black who looked like a Nazi (Hitler’s memoir outlining his ambitions was titled Mein Kampf, or ‘my struggle’) who loved torturing people.

The speaker then ‘married’ herself symbolically to this model which represented her father, saying the marriage vow (‘I do’). And now she’s ‘finally through’ or done with him. It’s like a telephone which has been pulled out, so the voices can’t get through to her (the voices inside her head?).

In the penultimate stanza, Plath’s speaker declares that, in ‘killing’ her father, she’s effectively killed two, since her husband (the model she symbolically ‘married’, or her actual husband? it’s a cliché that many women marry men who resemble their fathers in some way) who vampirically fed on her blood for seven years has also been ‘killed’ through this act of exorcising the demons from her past.

And in the final stanza, the speaker’s ‘daddy’ is like the vampire, vanquished with a stake through his heart like a vampire whom the people of the village never liked. They are dancing on his grave and stamping on his body, because they always knew that he was also a vampire, feeding on the living.

The speaker tells her father that she’s ‘through’, supposedly meaning she is over and done with him and can finally lay his memory to rest, letting go of the hold he has had over her. However, as critics have pointed out, ‘I’m through’ is ambiguous here, and could also suggest that the speaker is ‘worn out’, ‘done with life’, and ‘finally defeated’. How triumphant the speaker is at the end of the poem remains open to interpretation.

Analysis

In many ways, Plath’s ‘Daddy’ can best be understood as a poem about somebody struggling to come to terms with infant trauma. This is Tim Kendall’s interpretation of the poem in his insightful AMAZON, in which he links the poem to Plath’s interest in the psychoanalytic theories of Sigmund Freud.

As Kendall points out, the poem’s title (‘Daddy’, not ‘Dad’ or the more formal ‘Father’), as well as its repeated use of simple, babyish ‘oo’ rhymes, suggest a speaker who has reverted to – or perhaps never successfully moved beyond – an infantile understanding of her father. (The form of the poem is, like many of Plath’s mature poems, a balance between formal restraint and something freer: all stanzas contain five lines and those ‘oo’ sounds permeate the poem throughout, but there is no fixed rhyme scheme beyond this.)

He links the poem to Freud’s account, in his Beyond the Pleasure Principle, of the ‘fort-da’ game in which an young child throws a cotton reel outside of his cot and yells ‘fort’ (‘gone’ in German), whereupon the child’s mother retrieves it for him and the child says ‘da!’ (‘there!’ in German; ‘da’, of course, is also the beginnings of ‘daddy’).

Inscribed within this game is what Freud identifies as the compulsion to repeat: a habit which involves doing the same thing over and over again, and which Freud links to the death drive, or compulsion to annihilate oneself. The biographical links with Plath here are too obvious to need spelling out, and ‘Daddy’, we should note, is a poem containing many repetitions.

It is also, in Kendall’s words, a poem containing ‘transgressive humour’: he cites the poet Anne Stevenson, who reports Plath reading aloud ‘Daddy’ to a friend, whereupon both women fell about with laughter. Indeed, Plath herself categorised ‘Daddy’, somewhat surprisingly, as ‘light verse’.

Plath as Confessional Poet

Sylvia Plath is often categorised as one of the Confessional Poets, along with fellow American poets Robert Lowell (from whose writing classes she learnt so much), Anne Sexton, and W. D. Snodgrass. Confessional poetry often explores or unearths the role that trauma in early childhood has played in forming, and wounding, the adult poet, who is often beset by dark thoughts and family struggles.

But in some ways, ‘Daddy’ – probably Plath’s best-known and certainly most widely studied poem – offers an object lesson in why the ‘confessional’ label is too narrow and restrictive for Plath’s work. This is something Philip Larkin understood, when reviewing Plath’s poetry and identifying a ‘jauntily impersonal’ tone to much of her writing.

As Plath herself said in the prefatory note she added to the poem when recording it, ‘Daddy’ is about a woman, but although the woman shares some features with Plath herself (a German father), other elements – such as that father being a Nazi and the speaker’s mother being Jewish – are clearly fictional and do not relate to Plath’s own life.

We might then analyse ‘Daddy’, following Tim Kendall’s own suggestion, as a kind of hybrid of the traditional lyric poem and the dramatic monologue. In the latter, an invented speaker, who is not the poet herself, speaks to us, their audience; the speaker of ‘Daddy’ is a fictional persona who nevertheless shares much with Plath herself, but who does not share everything with her.