Dodo Ip
In the poem “Daddy”, Sylvia Plath expressed her fear and hatred toward her subject “daddy.” Is it her father, or somebody else, that she really hates?
Plath expressed a feminist point of view in her poems, She was not a very radical feminist, but she did show her rage against men in her works. In “Daddy”, Plath expresses her feelings about her family, and the prominent male figures in her life: Sylvia Plath’s father Otto Emil Plath, and her husband Ted Hughes. The title itself sounds feminine. This poem is divided into two parts. The first part, which lasts from the first to the ninth stanza, is a brief memorandum of Plath’s father, and her gradual acceptance of his death. There are many German/Nazi imageries in the poem, which indicate his German origin. In the second part (tenth to eleventh stanzas) Sylvia Plath mixes up her father and husband as one “daddy”, and expresses her fear and hatred to the two important men in her life. Besides fear and hatred, this poem also reveals Plath’s insecurity in her mind.
At the beginning of the poem Plath talks directly to her subject, “You do not do, you do not do/Any more, Black shoe/In which I have lived like a foot/For thirty years, poor and white, /Barely daring to breathe or Achoo.” The uselessness of the black shoe is a reference to her father’s amputated leg due to undiagnosed diabetes: Years earlier Otto Plath was convinced of his self-diagnosis of lung cancer. He refused to seek medical care due to a lack of efficient treatment at that time. It was later that he decided to go see a doctor for an infection in his foot. His death became a loss that Sylvia Plath would always feel. Foot, the bearer of weight of the body, is a metaphor of the feelings that weighs down Sylvia Plath’s mind, being unable to express her anxieties. “Daddy, I have had to kill you. /You died before I had time--/Marble-heavy, a bag full of God, /Ghastly statue with one grey toe/Big as a Frisco seal” Here, she wanted to forget her father, to “kill” his memories in her mind. The third line of the second stanza reveals Sylvia Plath’s admiration of her father as a god—she is a daughter who still thinks her father as an all-powerful, omnipotent, godlike figure. The gray toe is the second reference to his father’s amputation—his right toe turned black from gangrene, a complication of diabetes. The third stanza “And a head in the freakish Atlantic/Where it pours bean green over blue/In the waters off beautiful Nauset. /I used to pray to recover you. Ach, du.” The Atlantic can be an implication of his father’s immigrant status, he emigrated from Germany, crossing the Atlantic ocean, to the United States. Nauset is a Massachusetts beach: after his father’s death, Sylvia Plath’s family moved from Winthrop, a Massachusetts seaside town near Boston, to inland Wellesley. If we read from line 8 to line 13 as one sentence we can see a colossus stretching across America from the Atlantic to the Pacific. “Marble-heavy, a bag full of God, /Ghastly statue with one grey toe/Big as a Frisco seal//And a head in the freakish Atlantic/Where it pours bean green over blue/In the water off beautiful Nauset.” “Ach, du” is German, which means “ah, you.” It is the first reference to her father’s German origin in the poem. Plath digs deeper into her father’s life in the next stanzas: “In the German tongue, in the Polish town/Scraped flat by the roller/Of wars, wars, wars. /But the name of the town is common. /My Polack friend//Says there are a dozen or two. So I never could tell where you/Put your foot, your root, /I never could talk to you. /The tongue stuck in my jaw. //It stuck in a barb wire snare. Ich, ich, ich, ich, /I could hardly speak. /I thought every German was you. /And the language obscene”. Though Plath’s father was of German descent, he was born in Grabow, Poland. After his death, Sylvia Plath gradually forgot how to speak German, and she mourned for not being able to communicate to her father. “Ich” means “I” in German. In the sixth stanza Plath tries to sort out her emotions concerning her father’s ethnic race. As a small child, she grouped all Germans, including Nazis, together, as she thought “every German was you.” The Jew imageries appear first in the seventh stanza, “An engine, an engine/Chuffing me off like a Jew. /A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen. /I began to talk like a Jew, /I think I may well be a Jew.” A Jew has no homeland. Plath’s comparison to a Jew is a metaphor to her eradication of root after her father’s death. Dachau, Auschwitz, and Belsen were German concentration camps, where millions of Jews were executed during World War II. The comparison between Nazi to her father is an expression that Nazi destroyed a culture just like her father’s death destroyed her world. In the eighth stanza Plath mentions another homeless race—the gypsies. “The snows of the Tyrol, the clear beer of Vienna/Are not very pure or true. /With my gypsy ancestress and my weird luck/And my Taroc pack and my Taroc pack/I may be a bit of Jew.” Tyrol is an Austrian Alpine region. Gypsies, like the Jews, were objects of Nazi genocidal ambition, and many of them died in concentration camps. Plath’s identification with Jews and Gypsies brings to mind “wandering nations.” It implies that Plath feels that she is alone, helpless in the world, that someone is torturing her both emotionally and physically. On the other hand, Sylvia Plath’s references of Austria or Tyrol can be about her mother Aurelia Plath, who was of Austrian descent. The “snows” and “beer” are not “very pure or true”, which depicts an attractive façade that masks an ugly reality. Plath might feel that her mother embodied an image outwardly sweet and affectionate with a negative and destructive inside. The next stanza consists of some descriptions of her father’s appearance, who had bright blue eyes and kept neat moustache: “I have always been scared of you, /With your Luftwaffe, your gobbledygoo. /And your neat moustache/And your Aryan eye, bright blue. /Panzer-man, panzer-man, O You—” Both luftwaffe and panzer are German air force and Nazi tank corps respectively. “Gobbledygoo” may mean gobbledygook, wordy and generally unintelligible jargon. Again, Sylvia Plath laments the loss of her German language. So far in this poem we can feel that Plath was still haunted by her father’s death long ago. She felt that her father had not loved her enough to want to survive for her. She felt distanced from him, primarily due to the loss of language.
