Daddy is a narrative by a girl perplexed by her strange thoughts
regarding her father, the narrative shows that she idolizes her father and to
some extend suffers from Electra complex but as she grows up she realizes that
the relationship with her father is not exactly the healthiest. The narrator
uses symbols of dominance, like “a bag full of god”, “a brute”, “a fascist”,
all these symbols show that he was an overpowering dominant figure in the
narrator's life, to an extent that she felt as if she was been chocked and
could not even utter a single word or “Achoo”.
As the poem progresses we see Plath’s strange fascination towards
death as the narrator goes on to say that she would’ve killed him if he wasn’t
already dead, clearly depicting that the only way to be free was the death of
her German Nazi father but we see that the more she tries to run away the more
she gets entangled into her past as she sees every German man as a resemblance
of her father and even marries a man similar to her father who drank her blood
for seven years. This mention of the husband in the poem is an autobiographical
element as Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes were married for seven years before he
ran off with his lover to London.
The woman seems to be in a tug of war with her feelings she is at
one end repulsed by her father and how he treated her but at the same time, she
low-key idolizes him and tries to return to him by killing herself. The
back-and-forth feeling has left her flabbergasted and the poem beautifully depicts
the struggle of breaking free from a highly damaging relationship.
Sylvia Plath has outdone herself because she combined not just the
narrator’s story but also her feelings regarding the men in her life she
depicts her troubled thoughts of how every man she has ever known eventually
leaves her stranded with thoughts of hurting herself. The poem masters the act
of confessional poetry and truly leaves its readers just as perplexed as the
narrator.
This article is written by Fatima Zoaib, one of the contributors at the School of Literature.
