Daddy By Sylvia Plath Essay

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For the following essay I chose to debate the thesis in the poem “Daddy” by Sylvia Plath. Plath is the speaker of the poem and lost her father at the age of ten when she still though highly of him. As time goes on she sees that her father had an oppressive dominance over her and compares him to a Nazi and a devil. The conflict that she had with her father eventually pours over in a short and painful marriage. Plath has feelings of hatred towards her father and husband. She allows the reader to feel her pain through the use of various poetic devices. In this paper I will argue that Plath uses this poem to discuss the emotions she had dealing with her fathers life and death and how it affected her relationships. In the poem Plath immediately…show more content…
“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” (Plath, Lines 31-35). With Plath’s use of similes in this stanza she shows the reader the great degree of pain and suffering the speaker had went through. She does show by comparing her pain to the torture and torment of millions during World War II. Plath also uses a simile to compare her father to Hitler. “I have always been scared of you, | With your Luftwaffe, your gobbledygook. | And your neat moustache | And your Aryan eye, bright blue” (Plath, Lines 41-44). By drawing this comparison to her father as Hitler it shows the oppressiveness in which she had to live just as the Jews did. In reality her father is Hitler and she is Jew as shown by her thinking in lines (31-35). She also shows that Hitler was responsible for the lives of so many Jews, just as her father was responsible for her…show more content…
An example of this is the introduction of the devil and the comparison made with her father. “You stand at the blackboard, daddy, | In the picture I have of you, | A cleft in your chin instead of your foot | But no less a devil for that, no not | Any less the black man who | Bit my pretty red heart in two” (Plath, Lines 51-56). In the lines presented there is yet another referral to the foot. However this time the foot is being suspicious of what is going on. The same can be said about Plath who is becoming increasingly suspicious of her father and his motives. The cleft in the foot draws a comparison to the cleft in the hoof of the devil. Plath states that a cleft in your chin instead of your chin, but no less a devil. Plath is trying to show that her father is still a devil even though his cleft is his chin instead of hooves. Plath continues this way of thinking through vivid imagery of her husband and father portrayed as vampires. “If I’ve killed one man, I’ve killed two - | The vampire who said he was you | And drank my blood for a year, | Seven years, if you want to know. | Daddy, you can lie back now. | There’s a stake in your fat black heart | And the villagers never liked you” (Plath, Lines
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