Who’s Your Daddy? (Pun Intended!)

The main ideas within this poem are varied and multifaceted; ranging from abandonment and suffering to lack of control and eventual freedom. The author herself tries to simplify the theme of the poem by essentially literalizing it, saying: “The poem is spoken by a girl with an Electra complex. Her 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 before she is free of it.” (Rosenthal, 81-82)

But Plath’s “Daddy” covers many broad and common emotional bases, while incorporating a universal symbol of torment as an extended metaphor of her speaker’s mental anguish. In the end, it is realized by the reader that the ultimate goal of the speaker from the beginning of the poem was to purge herself of her father’s memory; which finally means expelling his destructive image from her brain and ridding herself of her controlling husband of seven years.

From the onset of the poem, even in the title, it is hinted that the speaker may be a child, or viewing the topic from a childish vantage point. The addressing of her father as “Daddy” is a connotative insinuation that the speaker feels dominated or oppressed by this figure. Initially, she creates a nursery rhyme image of a woman, herself, in a shoe, her fathers. The rhyming scheme is a repetition of the /oo/ sound, intermittently throughout the verse-ends. To me, this sound makes me think of babies, and young toddlers. “Oo” to me is a sound of childhood and of dependence. Further indication of this is provided by the Joycean technique of using infantile words such as “Achoo” and “Gobbledygoo” to provide a mental framework of the speaker.

This repetition of a single rhyming sound throughout this poem suggests a psychologically soothing nature to the echo, at least for the author. Platizky, a literary critic seems to suggest that this is not abnormal in elegy type poetry:
“Mourning poems (such as "Daddy") frequently repeat sound or stanzaic patterns (for example, In Memoriam) in symbolic replication of Freud's theory about the child's "fort-da" game in which a child, anxiously separated from a parent, compulsively pushes and pulls a spool forward and backward in an unconscious, ritualized attempt to master the anxiety that is produced by the parent's unreliable presence. Similarly in "Daddy," the compulsively repeated /oo/ sound may defensively perform a like function.” (Platizky, 2)

Control is another imperative issue throughout the poem. Playing off the Holocaust, a common theme of repression and suffering, Plath’s speaker struggles for control over her emotions concerning her father. While it is obvious that the speaker loves her father, it is just as apparent that the memory of his death and her feelings of abandonment because of that tragedy have scarred her image of him. She just wishes to be rid of the pain caused by her thoughts of him.

Plath’s Nazi imagery causes the reader to recreate the pictures of Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen and all the other horrors that occurred under the watch of Hitler’s Germany while she offers her feelings about her “daddy”, thus making you consider her thoughts in an altered state of thinking. This is an effective metaphor, causing a dark cloud to immediately hang over the verses. Swastikas, Fascists, Luftwaffes, panzer-men: all of these things evoke different and equally disturbing images in readers’ minds. This was Sylvia Plath’s precise intention.

Next is the speaker’s obsession with control, or more specifically lack of control. From the outset of the poem, the woman lacks control over her life; she allows her father’s memories to dictate her emotions. Apparently even before his death, the narrator says that she “never could talk to” him. He was a domineering and harsh man according to the woman, so much so that he controls the speaker’s thoughts beyond the grave. As a result of these despondent thoughts, the speaker feels oppressed by her recollections of him.

There is also a rhythm of control (and again, loss of control) within the poem, created primarily by controlling pace with punctuation. The author is most in command of her feelings in the stanzas containing more end-stops. These “controlled” bits and pieces are frequently the stanzas containing a good number of direct references to Nazi atrocities and German-related things. The author loses control and stanzas become chaotic when the topic shifts primarily to the father and her “model” of him: her husband. Emotion takes control of the verse and reason flies out of the poetical window.

In spending such a massive amount of time wishing for her father to still be alive, and being hindered and depressed by these thoughts, the speaker has gone and found a man she feels is representative of her image of “daddy.” “I made a model of you”, says Plath, seemingly in reference to Ted Hughes, her husband. This assumption is later reinforced by the phrase “I do, I do.”

The wave of negative emotion attributed formerly to the father is now dumped upon the husband. She builds him up to be the fascist, the oppressor, the “man in black with a Meinkampf look.” The feelings she previously had for her father are now blanketed on the man she deemed worthy to take his place in her life. The likeness of the husband in regards to the woman’s recollection of her “daddy” caused her to languish in constant torment for over twenty years. His emotional effect on her was draining, thus the analogy of a vampire sucking the life slowly out of her. And after seven years of him “drinking her blood”, the speaker now has freedom from the grip of the father’s memory. She is elated to be rid of him, and finally to be able to make peace with her memories of her father.

The speaker, in the last stanza of the poem, confronts the father’s memory with the infamous line “Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m through”, thus bringing the poem and the pain to some sort of closure. This concept of being “through” brings to mind for me, a sense of emptiness, like quitting. And while the closure is necessary, it leaves much to be known. By “through”, could the author have meant the speaker’s suicide or just a new found apathy towards her tragic childhood? This again seems to be a return to childishness. This is something children do, stamp their feet and cross their arms angrily, pretending that they do not care. Whatever the intended meaning, it does indeed bring finality to a very intense poem.

Sylvia Plath was obviously a tortured soul, for reasons known and unknown to critics and readers. This poem is just one example of her expression of angst from her childhood and its evolution into her emotional distress later in life. This same theme is expressed in many of her other poems, namely, of the ones that I am familiar with, “Lady Lazarus”, “Purdah” and “Metaphors” come to mind.