Sylvia Plath Speech

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Sylvia Plath lived a short, disturbed life, and much of her misfortune she has traced to her father. After her dad Otto Plath died when she was ten, she was able to identify his overwhelming presence in many other experiences she had during the remainder of her life. Coming from a German-born teacher, Sylvia Plath uses angry and emphatic language to identify the cruel and emotional experiences that the absence of her father has caused throughout her life, and she parallels his oppressive relationship with her to a Nazi’s oppressive relationship to a Jew during the Holocaust, which is her feminist attempt to explain how relationships between men and women function. Plath feels like the relationship between and her father is a microcosm of all…show more content…
“At twenty I tried to die and get back, back, back to you.” Plath infers later in the poem that she is more compelled to experience his presence again than to live without it, which is why she attempts suicide so that she can join him in the afterlife. Part of why she feels angered is because he died when she was only ten years old and her experiences without him have been dark, she feels as if he is the cause for some of her troubles. Also, the use of repetition in her speech seen here, and many other places, is her way of showing the intimidation she felt from her father because he made her nervous and shy. “I could never talk to you. The tongue stuck in my jaw. It stuck in a barb wire snare. Ich, ich, ich, ich.” She uses this style of repetition with important words throughout the poem to mimic this fear. Plath gives off hints of a feminist side she inhabits throughout the poem, which was a fairly new idea at the time and could have probably caused for an uneasy reading for some people, which is consistent with much of the rest of the poem which might be uneasy to read. “Every woman adores a fascist, the boot in the face, the brute brute of heart of a brute like you.” This can be seen as her countering the culture norm of women submitting to the dominant role of men, resisting to conform to the role women were thought to play as just a wife and mother. In stanzas thirteen and fourteen, when she says “I made a model of you… I said I do, I do.” She weirdly confesses her admiration for her father and almost suggests she would marry him by saying “I do, I do” and switch roles with her mother. This demonstrates how even though men can be oppressive to women, women are attracted to the oppressor even though they are a leading catastrophic force in their
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