When Plath is writing about her own parents and her relationship with them the tone of the writing is very dark, depressing and full of anger. Possibly the most interesting poem tackling this matter is “Daddy” which she wrote in 1962. In this poem Plath lays bare the tortured relationship between her and her father. She talks of having to live in a “black shoe” for thirty years, cowering, “poor and white/Barely daring to breathe or Achoo.” By describing herself as “poor and white”, she creates a stark contrast to the “black shoe”. It is as if she has been stifled, starved of nutrition and sunlight by her all enveloping father. She is “poor”, not in the sense of material value, but spiritually. She has had all feeling and emotion sapped from her by the presence of her father.
The strange childhood imagery in the echo of the well-known nursery rhyme (“The Old Woman Who Lived in a Shoe”) is carried on throughout the rest of the poem. For example the repetitions (“You do not do, you do not do”) and the rigid assonances (“Barely daring”) sound like another nursery rhyme, albeit a rather twisted one. This kind of imagery suggests that she is in some way rooted in her childhood past. We then learn that this is due to the overbearing influence her “Daddy” had, and still has, on her. He is described as huge, “marble heavy”, even his toe is as “Big as a Frisco seal”. This imagery would suggest that her father represented to her a big and rather threatening presence. This is backed up by Plath’s comparison of her father to a Nazi oppressor, “With your Luftwaffe…”, “And your Aryan eye, bright blue./Panzer man, panzer man, O you”
This is interesting as we know that her father, although Austrian was not actually a Nazi, so even a tenuous racial link is enough to cast him as a Nazi murderer in her eyes. To her, he is obviously so close to a Nazi in his actions, that she sees him as one. She then casts herself as the oppressed Jew being “chuffed off…to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen. Her usage of “chuffed” obviously refers to the Nazi’s transport of the Jews to the death camps by train, but it also harks back to the childhood imagery, in that it is a very childish word with associations childhood games.
Despite all this anger, Plath still voices a wish to rejoin him. She was “ten when they buried (him)”, and mentions that “at twenty (she) tried to die/ To get back, back, back to (him)”. This shows that although her father was an overbearing, dominant, almost stifling presence in her life, he was also a very important one. Even in death he retains his power over her life and the only way in which she can escape him is to die and join him. The poem ends with threats of another suicide attempt. She cuts herself off so she can be left alone to die. The last line of the poem; “Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m through”, is a kind of severance from a turbulent love affair.
Such reference to her father appears in Plath’s other work, such as “Little Fugue”. In this case the poem is not exclusively about her father, but does contain references which back up the ideas in “Daddy”. For example, Plath’s use of threatening language when describing her father. She again describes him as Nazi figure. Although not such a prominent figure in her work, Plath does mention her mother in some of her poems. The best example of this is in “The Moon and the Yew Tree”. In this poem we see her mother as presented in a guise of being out of reach and distant.
However, the dominant tone of Plath’s poems tackling the matter of the narrator as the “child” talking about her own relationship with her parents is a dark one. This has much to do with her own experiences. The language used in these poems is abrasive and violent and this used in conjunction with the threatening and somewhat disturbing imagery produces poetry of immense power and feeling.
In conclusion, it can be said that Plath’s presentation of parent-child relationships is full of conflicting emotions and different viewpoints. One cannot make a rule into which all her poetry fits because they are all so varied and conflicting. However, if one takes the two types of parent child poetry discussed separately, one can divide them into two general types.The first, which tackles Plath’s relationship with her own parents all seem to be dark and malevolent and full of anger. The second type seem to be far more lighthearted, indeed by far the most lighthearted of all Plath’s work. Despite the existence of a darker, more threatening side to her presentation of this kind of relationship it does not quite counterbalance the overall impression of happiness present in her poems of this kind.
