Sylvia Plath Reads ‘Daddy’
Sylvia Plath’s terrible death has been the talked about in the literary circles for ages. She, who considered being dead is to be perfected, left traces of her desire to die in all her poems. Plath’s life, if chronicled, will read as a terrible, brilliant and fascinating poem. For Plath life was poetry. If Sigmund Freud is to be believed the aim of life is death. So then do these two thoughts not tie up into one and explain Plath’s fascination with death? She herself answers this for us when she says “The blood jet is poetry, / There is no stopping it” in her poem “Kindness”.
Plath’s arguably most influential poem “Daddy” has been considered to be a benchmark of confessional poetry. It is a poem in which Plath is seen to be metaphorically killing her father who, in real life, died when she was nearly eight years old. Her father’s metaphorical death seems crucial for her to be able to get through but that seems to be a rather surface level reading of the poem. Plath in a BBC interview talked about the poem where she said:
“The poem is spoken by a girl with an Electra complex. The father died while she thought he was God. Her case is complicated by the fact that her father was also a Nazi and her mother very possibly part Jewish. In the daughter the two strains marry and paralyze each other –she has to act out the awful little allegory once over before she is free of it.”
The poem was written on October 12th, 1962, shortly before her death. Daddy here is almost a representative figure of male dominance, where she or the narrator of the poem equates him to all Nazis, all Germans. Stephen Gould Axelrod writes that “at a basic level, ‘Daddy’ concerns its own violent, transgressive birth as a text, its origin in a culture that regards it as illegitimate –a judgment the speaker hurls back on the patriarch himself when she labels him a bastard.” The father here is a mythical figure more than anything else. There is no one particular face of the Daddy. He is every dominating man, and there is a need to kill him, for her to be through. He is a patriarch, a father figure, a husband, a Nazi and a Vampire even, who has sucked her blood for seven years. The need to vanquish the Daddy is to put an end to shadow of the ‘male muse,’ the frustration that probably stemmed from trying to make a way in a man dominated literary world.
The autobiographical element, then, cannot be ignored. Whether or not the poem is about her father Otto Plath or her husband, Ted Hughes, it certainly does talk of the world these two were part of, which presented her with limitations in her literary pursuits. Marrying the personal with the political or the historical, Plath’s poem, her finest or not, is a testament to her talent which certainly is par excellence.
Here’s a video of Plath reading the poem Daddy: