Daddy – by Sylvia Plath

The theme of mortality in “Daddy”

Sylvia Plath was an American poet, a novelist and also a short story writer.She was born in 1932

in Boston, Massachusettsand committed suicide on February 11, 1963. She is best known for her

two published collections, “The Colossus and Other Poems” and “Ariel“, but she also wrote

journals and letters.

Sylvia Plath is a complex poet with a complex mind and that`s why her poetry is difficult to

analyze. Her poems are written based on themes like victimization, death, nature, body,

motherhood or patriarchy.

A huge portion of her work contains the theme of death which manifests in different ways. In

"Full Fathom Five," she speaks of her death and burial which is a sign that the author thought

about her own death and finally she committed suicide. The theme of death appears also in

“Colossus”, “Lady Lazarus”, “Ariel” or “Edge”.

The author uses the theme of death in her poems because it suggests her release from the

difficulties of life. Dying, she will be able to free her mind from the corporeal cage.

The theme of death is expressed in Sylvia Plath poems in a metaphorical and literal

representation. She tried to reveal in her poetry her own opinions about death and about the

reasons she would like to pass away in the other world.

I can say that I don`t completely understand her way of writing or why she uses so much this

theme of death. In my opinion, death gives to her poems a note of pessimism but, in the same

time, it makes us understand many aspects of life.

In her poem “Daddy”, Sylvia Plath uses the theme of death in a complex way. He doesn`t .just

want to kill her father but she also wants to commit suicide. At some point, only her own death

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can release her from suffering, but, fortunately, someone unknown, maybe a force of nature,

saves her. We realize here that death doesn`t represent a way of running out of problems.

“Daddy” is one of the most notable works of the writer Sylvia Plath. First of all, one should

consider that the poem was written shortly after her death and was published posthumously in

1965.

The date of the poem is highly relevant as of the presence and controversial use of the

Holocaust as a metaphor; just by reading the poem, we can find annotations in German: “ach,

du”, “ich,ich”. Moreover, when going into the writer`s background, we can find that her father to

whom the poem is directly addressed, was a Nazi. This obviously had an impact on her and, as

the critic Robert Philips wrote, “Plath was to achieve relief” by making mortality the main theme

in “Daddy”.

The American writer chooses to discuss in this poem several themes, such as the exploration

of the gender, supernatural and mortality, the last one being the most important.

The speaker of “Daddy” is in fact obsessed with mortality and goes further beyond that, into

supernatural, as the author`s father haunts her and makes her seek her own death in hope of

reuniting with the suffer loss.

Sylvia states from the beginning that she has lived in her father`s “old shoe” explicitly phallic

image and was not able to get out of it. As we all know, a shoe protects the foot and keeps it

warm, but here the shoe is a trap which is smothering the foot. Using the color “black” to

describe the shoe, Sylvia Plath accentuates the idea of death and the foot becomes a body in a

coffin since the shoe is fitting tightly around it.

The pressure on the author`s life caused by the loss of the parental figure in her life has had

such an impact that, at a certain point, Plath wishes she was the one who murdered her father:

“Daddy, I have had to kill you” because it would have caused her less harm. In my opinion, this

confession is shocking and violent and we don`t know if the speaker is sad that her father died or

she`s angry.

In the next line, the speaker describes the body of her father as “marble-heavy” creating a creepy

image. We can see here the stiff heaviness of the father`s corpse which is compared with a

marble gravestone. Further, the speaker compares the body with a bag, but one which was as

powerful as God.

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After the speaker describes her father as a statue, she says that she used to pray to recover

him. Here we can interpret that once upon a time she didn`t want her father to die, but using the

phrase “used to”, we realize that this wish was in the past and now she doesn`t pray to get her

father back anymore.

In the poem, we find out that the speaker could never talk to her father maybe because he

made her nervous or maybe she wasn`t so god at speaking German. However, she says that the

German language was obscene and it terrifies her, making her feels that it is a train which it takes

her to a horrible death.

Sylvia Plath talks in the poem about the gipsy ancestress. It seems that the speaker had a gipsy

female ancestor and she may be as well part Jewish. Here comes again the idea of death. It is

known that gypsies and Jews were killed by the Nazis during the Holocaust because they were

considered to be "impure." Then, the speakers suggests that Nazis should have killed the snows

of Tyrol, or the beer of Vienna, for being impure too.

The idea of death is continued as the life of the deceased people, including her father, goes on.

There are supernatural entities in the poem, vampires and devils. The speaker`s emotions are

supernatural themselves because of their intensity needed to convey them. Moreover, the

speaker`s comparison of her husband and father to Hitler, vampires and devils makes not only

these men but Hitler seem like these horrible creatures. Therefore, there is an indirect

characterization of how she has seen her father, as he was a Nazi: a hidden vampire and a little

devil. Lastly, one should furthermore take note of the absence of good: the author fails to

mention the presence of any good supernatural entities, which contribute to the dark atmosphere

aroused previously in the reader by the usage of images such as: “Chuffing me off like a Jew”,

“So no black no sky could squeak through”. “But they pulled me out of the sack, and theu stuck

me together with glue”.

The father died when the speaker was ten years old and we find out that ten years later she

wanted to die too. She wanted to commit suicide in order to reconnect with her father. This is not

an idea that came into her mind when she was twenty years old. As we know, earlier in the poem,

she used to pray to recover her father and maybe suicide was a way of getting back to him.

Maybe she thought that by killing herself she would be buried near her father and she will be

able to create a connection with him, a connection that she never had. In my opinion, this crazy

idea is influenced by the speaker`s disturbance caused by the failed relationship with her father.

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She realizes that it doesn`t exist any other way to repair this relationship, so she appeals to

extreme solutions.

We don`t know who rescued the speaker from death but we find out that this attempt was

benefic for her, because, now she knows what to do.

It is also to be taken note on the interpretation of the male gender in the relationship with the

mortality: the poem applies to all men, and not exclusively to the speaker`s father because of the

metaphors and the imaginary that connected the male gender to violence and war, which

ultimately cause death. this is why the author`s emotions towards her father are both hateful

towards betrayal, cheating, killing and mournful to the wives and daughters at the same time.

In the poem appears the color of death, the color “black”. As I have already said, “black” is used

to describe the shoe in which the speaker has lived. But this color has other connotations too. It

could refer to an oppressive society, like the time of Nazi rule, it could also refer to the

relationship of the speaker with her father and not least the inability to speak.

The mortality plays here an important role. It is the key which opens and locks the human

soul. The death of the speaker`s father represent for her a relief but also torments her. Even

though she wants to kill him because she desires to escape from the shoe, she realizes then that,

with her father dead, she won`t be able to restore the relationship with him.

For Sylvia Plath, death represents another dimension which, when is reached, it is able to

rescue the human soul. This dimensionknown only after death, can change the worse things a

human lived on the earth.

An idea that comes from the poem is that the father continues to impact the speaker`s life

even after he dies. I think that this is an extraordinary aspect that Sylvia Plath points out in the

poem. That is why the mortality is such an important theme and maybe the most controversial. It

seems that the whole life of the character gravitates around this theme.

The speaker is not able to live in normal conditions because she is stuck in the past and what

she needs is a door through she must pass and lock it definitively. She has to look forward, to

forget about her distress and cure her wounds.

Near the last lines of the poem, the speaker says: “If I've killed one man, I've killed two”.

What can we understand reading this? I think it is about her father which represents the first man

and the second one is the model of her father. But she actually didn`t kill them. Everything

happened in her mind. I guess that the line expresses the fact that by getting over her father, the

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speaker was able to live with her husband who was actually a model made after her parental

image. So, succeeding to metaphorically kill her father, she also did this with her husband and

she could finally find her way to happiness.

Finally, it is to be mentioned that, at the end of the poem, Sylvia Plath founds peace, as she is

“through” with her father and relieved by conceiving all of her emotions into this poem. She may

not have managed to have killed him and get rid of his haunting image, but now she has killed

any sort of feelings and memory that has taken her mind over. Therefore, one can clearly state,

given the above analysis, that the main theme of the poem is mortality, from the first line of the

poem, to its last.

In my opinion, “Daddy” is a difficult poem because of its violent images, Jewish suffering or

the harsh tone. The poem is constructed in a dark way and has a composition that prioritizes

death.

But, in the end of the poem, it is not death which wins. It is true that, it represented a very

important aspect in speaker`s life and helped her understand that only while you are alive you

can solve every problem. But she realized that it is not worth to die in order to reconnect with her

father. She had to understand that the past is past and she must continue living.

I think that the theme of death makes the poem dark and sad. This doesn`t mean that “Daddy”

is a bad poem. Contrary, it is a poem from which we have so many things to learn. It shows us

the importance of family in everyone`s life.

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