Sylvia Plath’s ‘Daddy’ can never be felt by merely reading the poem. To understand the anguish and pang of the loss of her father, one has to fathom the depth of her life. An autobiographical aspect recounts the impressions formed upon the author’s mind rather than the true experiences that she faced, so it gets distorted and fragmented.
This fragmented truth filters out more as a refracted truth than a reflected version. The poem ‘Daddy’ also gets represented through the perverted veins of her feelings which somewhat gets intertwined with the cry of other women.
The Skewed Girl’s Tale
Sylvia Plath, also known as Victoria Lucas, born in twentieth-century America, is a poet whose mind was clouded with depression and death. But her paralyzing mind is the outcome of losing her father at a very tender age. Laying open the pages of Plath’s Life, the autobiographical aspect becomes more pertinent, as readers get to know the hidden scar beneath mere words.
The death of Otto Plath in 1940 left the eight-year-old Sylvia Plath, in a haywire situation. She could never completely recover herself from this emotional loss. Adding salt to injury was his conjugal bond with Ted Hughes, a British poet. In her marital life, she faced dejection as his husband maintained double standards.
So, ‘Daddy’ and many of her provoking poems in ‘Ariel’ are about a young woman’s conflicts, anguish and trauma as a daughter and as a wife. This voice of feminism gets intermingled with the oppressed Jews of the Holocaust, as it was the impending danger, lurking in the socio-political air.
Sylvia Plath’s ‘Daddy’ did not limit itself to her story, but acquired the lost voice of every woman.
Peeling the Layers of ‘Daddy’
The poem ‘Daddy’ makes a powerful impact, when the suppressed anger, betrayal, hate and fear of loss get released through the lines which emphasize the autobiographical aspect. These negative emotions transition the lighter verse into a verbal blast.
The poem oscillates between a love and hate relationship of Plath towards her father. Plath reminiscences her father as a strict yet loving father, so there is a line of similarity, drawn between him and the Christian God of the Old Testament, Jehovah. Yet, Plath associated her rootless position with the Jews and even made a model of her father in the ‘Meinkampf’ look. Considering, her father was a strong Nazi figure, she struggled to maintain her individualism as she has to submit to his authority.
Even her husband whom she adored, turned to her as a figure of a devilish brute because the frantic effort of getting back her father from the grave became vain. Moreover, she considered him a copy of her father, but he betrayed her. So the inner need to recompose her father was completely torn out from the roots.
Distorted Veins
Sylvia Plath lost her father at a very young age, so her only association with her father is through her memories. This recollection appears grotesque to her, so she compares to her father as “Not a God, but Swastika”. Plath feels that she has been put under the thumb of patriarchal supremacy, whether it is her father or husband.
This oppression gets a political colour as she relates it to Hitler’s predominance over the Jews. She could not outstate it since her bitter self-reproach was mingled with sadomasochistic feelings for her father. But the world is too cruel, as it crashes the self and leaves out the corpse. Plath found the vent of her love i.e. her Electra complex relation with her father in her husband, but this left her as a beggar of love.
The utter pang of loveless life cast a shadow of darkness and so she yearned for death.
Her voice of femininity against male hegemony becomes her poetic persona. ‘Daddy’ does not only represent a daughter’s tantrums, her bitter resolve to break the hold of her father but a woman’s oversensitive feelings due to a big chasm in the relationship.
Critic George Steiner has referred to ‘Daddy’ as the Guernica of Modern Art. Guernica is a fragmented painting by Pablo Picasso wrought by violence and chaos. This violence gets shaped in the form of mental violence as well as the political undertone of state-sponsored genocide during World War II in Sylvia Plath’s ‘Daddy’.
Cry of Feminist Poets
The hurtful incidents that stifle women and the cry of women do not get restricted to a definite time and space. This immense agony gets transfigured into a voice of boldness, of a struggle and a quest for one’s own identity which is not overcast by male figures. The developing psychic integrity of womanhood can be found in the poems of two contemporary poets of the twentieth century.
Besides the American poet, Sylvia Plath, India too witnessed a feminine uproar in the poetry of Kamala Das. Both Sylvia Plath and Kamala Das found poetry as a medium to express their love, frustration and failure in their restless quest for spiritual love. These embarrassing portraiture of the autobiographical aspects of the poems get intertwined, despite having a spatial void and not being influenced by each other.
Kamala Das was married to K. Madhavrao at a younger age, but throughout her life, she starved for fulfilment in love. Her partner misused her and used her for merely sexual gratification. So, she retorts of being at a stranger’s gate to receive love. Sylvia Plath became vengeful when she was jilted in love for Ted Hughes and wished to slaughter all the men in the world, who have deserted the women folk.
Disappointment faced by both made them resolute to stoop down to death. The only difference is that Plath attempted suicide many times and was successful in her last effort whereas Das never succumbed to suicide.
These confessional poems extended the personal agony beyond the confinements to embrace more female writers, providing them with the valour to striptease their autobiographical notes.
Conclusion
“Daddy” as an autobiographical poem by Sylvia Plath creates an outburst of emotions, attaining a strong as well as universal verbal blast. The conflict between considering her father “Frisco Seal” at once and then as “Ghastly statue” is the result of pathological mourning that she suffered from. In this poem, she confessed that the copy of her father also cheated her.
By penning down the autobiographical aspect through her poem, she made her creation immortal despite her brief role play in the mortal world. Though Ted Hughes at a later age confessed the injustices met against him, Sylvia Plath was no more present.
Had she been present at that time, would she have forgiven Ted Hughes? Is it easy to forego all the pains and injustices with a single apology? Would it have been justified if Sylvia Plath had compromised and got reconciled with Ted Hughes again?
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