MARGINALIZATION (Different learners in Marginalized Group
A Critical Analysis Of Quot Daddy Quot By Sylvia Plath
1. Andrea Martínez Celis Universidad Complutense de Madrid
Crítica Literaria e Investigación Contemporánea en Lengua Inglesa
Dr. María Goicoechea de Jorge 3º Grado en Estudios Ingleses
Facultad de Filología 09/04/2015
A Critical Analysis of
Daddy
by Sylvia Plath
2. Daddy
Sylvia Plath
You do not do, you do not do
Any more, black shoe
In which I have lived like a foot
For thirty years, poor and white,
Barely daring to breathe or Achoo.
Daddy, I have had to kill you.
You died before I had time–
Marble-heavy, a bag full of God,
Ghastly statue with one gray toe
Big as a Frisco seal
And a head in the freakish Atlantic
Where it pours bean green over blue
In the waters off beautiful Nauset.
I used to pray to recover you.
Ach, du.
In the German tongue, in the Polish town
Scraped flat by the roller
Of wars, wars, wars.
But the name of the town is common.
My Polack friend
Says there are a dozen or two.
So I never could tell where you
Put your foot, your root,
I never could talk to you.
The tongue stuck in my jaw.
3. It stuck in a barb wire snare.
Ich, ich, ich, ich,
I could hardly speak.
I thought every German was you.
And the language obscene
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.
The snows of the Tyrol, the clear beer of Vienna
Are not very pure or true.
With my gipsy ancestress and my weird luck
And my Taroc pack and my Taroc pack
I may be a bit of a Jew.
I have always been scared of you,
With your Luftwaffe, your gobbledygoo.
And your neat mustache
And your Aryan eye, bright blue.
Panzer-man, panzer-man, O You–
Not God but a swastika
So black no sky could squeak through.
Every woman adores a Fascist,
The boot in the face, the brute
Brute heart of a brute like you.
You stand at the blackboard, daddy,
In the picture I have of you,
A cleft in your chin instead of your foot
4. But no less a devil for that, no not
Any less the black man who
Bit my pretty red heart in two.
I was ten when they buried you.
At twenty I tried to die
And get back, back, back to you.
I thought even the bones would do.
But they pulled me out of the sack,
And they stuck me together with glue.
And then I knew what to do.
I made a model of you,
A man in black with a Meinkampf look
And a love of the rack and the screw.
And I said I do, I do.
So daddy, I’m finally through.
The black telephone’s off at the root,
The voices just can’t worm through.
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.
They are dancing and stamping on you.
They always knew it was you.
Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m through
5. 1
Daddy
Sylvia Plath
General Analysis
Sylvia Plath was an American writer, she wrote poetry, novels, and short
stories. She was born in Boston 1932 and she committed suicide in London in
1963. ‘Daddy’ was written in 1962, around four months before her death, but it
was published posthumously. Her entire life was a controversy since she
suffered several depressions during most of her adulthood, taking the fatal
decision of ending her own life when she was just thirty years old. She was
considered a feminist by some people and exactly the opposite by others. One
of her first goals in life was to be a good wife and a good mother, but at the
same time she got to be a famous writer and to place herself in the world of
literature among several male names in which women had not been accepted
until then. Could a woman be a perfect wife and a feminist at the same time?
She could not answer this question since she died very young. Her poetry was
famous for being especially honest, for describing exactly what she felt without
caring about what people could think, and this was a difficult task for a woman
in the society of the Fifties. She wrote about very different themes during her
life; nature, love, vengeance, rage etc. However, her favourite theme was death,
it seemed from the very beginning of her career that she was obsessed with
death. In most of her works, whatever the subject, the darkness of death
remains between the lines. She wrote confessional poetry; it means personal
poetry, the poetry of the ‘’I’’ in which the author uses literature to confess
personal experiences, private feelings, traumas, depressions or difficult
relationships. ‘Daddy’ is one of her most famous poems because of very the
hard metaphor she does about the Holocaust. She ‘‘lived’’ The Second World
War as a child despite she could live a normal life far from the war, her father
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was a German American author, Otto Plath, he is more likely protagonist of this
poem. He and his daughter could have a difficult relationship, although he died
when she was only eight years old. She compared the Holocaust with the
patriarchal society in which she lived; the father’s image as a God is similar to
the image of Hitler in Germany.
Sylvia Plath could be considered within the literary canon inasmuch as she won
several major awards in literature, notably the Pulitzer Prize for poetry for 'The
Collected Poems' in 1982. 'Daddy' was not in this book and it was maybe
because of the controversial issue that she wrote about. Perhaps this poem is
not considered within the canon because, as many authors claim, the canon is
not just about literary quality but ideology and politics. Therefore, a woman
writing about the Holocaust as a metaphor of her father does not exactly match
the perfect idea of the Western Canon.
This essay will analyse and criticize a polemic poem written by a controversial
author from some varied critical movements.
New Criticism
New Criticism is a movement very focused on the ‘’close reading’’ of the
piece itself, forgetting historical context, the biography of the author or other
external factors that can modify the way in which people read literature. New
Critics defend that this kind of reading is completely objective, because they try
to isolate literalness. This theory attempts to create a science of literature,
meaning that literature needs a technique to be literature. As New Critics it is
necessary to know the ‘false fallacies’:
-Intentional fallacy: The author does not write what he or she intends to do, it
means that readers cannot assume and judge the intentions of the author.
-Affective fallacy: Separating the poem from its own effect. This is that the
reader has to differentiate what the poem is and what the poem does.
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-Biographical Fallacy: Assuming that literature must be an actual reflection of
the author’s life and experience.
-Communication fallacy: Literature is not a way to indoctrinate people.
Literature does not have anything to do with politics or ideologies. Literature
should not interfere with society.
Taking this information into account, the first step to interpret this poem as
New Critic is to analyse form and meter. This includes rhythm, rhyme, and
rhetoric. New Criticism tries to find a pattern. On the one hand ‘Daddy’ has free
verse which means that there is no an established pattern of rhythm or rhyme.
On the other hand, ‘Daddy’ is composed of sixteen quintains, ie sixteen five-line
stanzas. The poem must have a unified meaning. The main problem with this
analysis is that as New Critics do not take into account the context, there are
just abstract content in this poem. The free verse and the complex meaning of its
lines could be because it is just a metaphor of Anarchy in literature. However,
the title of the poem clearly reveals that the poem talks about her father, which
means that the author is reflecting her life.
Russian Formalism
Russian Formalism stresses the importance of poetic language in the
literature studies. Russian Formalists try to create a ‘scientific method‘ to
differentiate between literature and ‘no-literature’. The main difference with
New Criticism is that Formalists believe that human ‘content’ gives the context
for the functioning of literary ‘devices’ while New Critics were very humanistic.
The tool to recognize literature quality is the use of poetic language, this
language has some properties that the reader can analyse. Poetry is the result of
an excellent use of language whose main characteristic is the rhythm. As
literature is compound of language, linguistics, as the science of language, is
fundamental for the Formalists. Literature is autonomous, which means that it
is different from the quotidian and practical use of language. Form and content
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are absolutely connected, since Formalists defend the idea that the history of
literature is the innovation in formal structures. ‘Defamiliarization’ is one of the
main concepts; it is the ability to use language in a different way from the
ordinary language to cause distinctive effects on the readers. Formalists also
distinguish between ‘plot’ and ‘story’; while ‘plot’ is the literary part, ‘story’ is
just raw material that must be organized by the author.
Firstly, the author uses in ‘Daddy’ a lot of ordinary language, but in a different
way through literary devices, this could be seen as defamiliarization of
language. For example the use of ‘shoe’, ‘tongue’, ‘town’, ‘engine’,
‘blackboard’, ‘brute’, ‘glue’, ‘telephone’ etc. They are very used in the quotidian
life however in this poem they are conveying very different feelings from the
daily life. It is also notable the several references to some countries and
religions, and the use of the word ‘Fascist’ in the literary context, in a poetic
manner. The plot of the poem is the relationship between the ‘Daddy’ and his
daughter. The story might be the facts of the Second World War with which the
author works. The motif of this poem is the father, while the motivation is that
the father existed so, the reference to reality is clear along the whole text. The
main literary device that Sylvia Plath used is metaphor; the entire poem is a
metaphor, therefore it could be called allegory. As it was said before, she
compares her family life with a Fascist life. The concept of ‘foreground’ to refer
to ‘the aesthetically intentional distortion of linguistics components’ is clear in
this poem. She uses words with different functions. For example, when she
mentions several Nazi extermination camps: ‘‘Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen’’, she
is looking for the aesthetic side of these horrible places that make the readers
think of very sad images. The same when she says ‘‘Every woman adores a
Fascist, The boot in the face, the brute, Brute heart of a brute like you.’’, she
gets the aesthetic vision, even the erotic side of this of a violent scene.
9. 5
Structuralism
This critical theory defends that literary texts must have a universal narrative
structure; it means that they must follow a kind of rules, a predetermined
system, to be considered literature. This is the reason because literature is
divided into genres. For Structuralists, literature is easier to understand by
experienced readers than by the rest of people. Literature and its rules must be
taught in educational institutions.
When talking about Structuralism, Binary Opposition theory must be
mentioned. This means that we as human beings associate automatically certain
opposites, such as men as opposed to women, ie, who is not a man, is a
woman, and several examples like this.
The main problem with this critical theory is that nothing would be new at all,
because all literature pieces would follow the same structure, taking the
greatest of literature as examples. Is Sylvia Plath just following these rules? She
respects a structure; sixteen five-line stanzas, and this is the reason because it is
considered a poem. Furthermore, she is labeled in the genre of confessional
poetry, despite she wrote other genres as well. However, critics strike again
with the theme of the poem, the newest and most relevant aspect of this poem.
On the one hand, it cannot be said that this is absolutely new, but Sylvia Plath is
not trying to follow rules or copy other great poets. She is trying to create her
own style to convey her own feelings without thinking about the literary
system. On the other hand, the reader can feel the deep part of the poem, she is
not inventing a stage, she is actually talking about historical facts, a hard reality.
Therefore, she could be trying to convey these elements to create what is called
by Structuralists as 'true literature'.
10. 6
Poststructuralism and Deconstruction
This theory was born as opposed to Structuralism and it is based on the idea
of the complexity of human being. Since literature is created by humans,
literature is too complex to be classified under structures and systems. Some
modern philosophers such as Freud found out that there are parts of the human
condition that we cannot control. Therefore, this theory is closely related to
phallogocentrism. Jacques Derrida explained it as a mixture of phallocentrism;
that is the supremacy of the male, and logocentrism; which gives more
importance to language, both of them relative to the meaning.
As when talking about Structuralism it must be mentioned the Binary
Opposition theory, Poststructuralism defends the opposite theory;
Deconstruction. This theory rejects opposites and hierarchies, it goes against the
universal relations previously established. The only possible way to understand
the world is deconstructing it, ie; forgetting our preconceptions and our
knowledge previously learned. Nothing is true. The human being knows
nothing about the world or about the human beings themselves. Therefore, we
cannot create rules or systems, because nothing is clear. One thing may mean
several things at the same time or nothing. A sign does not have to mean a
signifier and a signified, because there is no truth. There is a trial of signifiers;
this means that a sign is a sign of a sign of a sign etc.
Perhaps it is no coincidence that this movement of literary criticism was born in
the same era in which Sylvia Plath wrote this poem; in the Sixties. The reader
can identify this lack of meaning of life in this poem and the rest of her literary
work. Actually, this poem is so important because of the absence of a clear
meaning or an explanation; all we have are just assumptions. This problem is
found with all authors whose writings were published after their deaths,
because anybody can give a clear answer for them. The general assumption is
that this poem is about her father. However, her father died when she was
eight, so maybe, as some people believe, it is about her husband, or somebody
else. The western ideology tends to relate the figure of authority to the father or
11. 7
the husband, always with the man. But, as it was said before, if we ‘deconstruct’
reality the reader could understand better the poem. Labeling this poem under
an ideology, it is not clear if it is feminist or misogynist, if it is racist or antiracist
etc. This is because nothing is absolutely true. The reader cannot understand
Sylvia Plath’s mind or intention, because there are parts of our brain that we
ourselves cannot control. Sometimes even the author is not aware of what she
or he is writing, because subconscious may be who is talking.
Conclusion
After studying ‘Daddy’ by Sylvia Plath from different critical theories, the
reader cannot extract a clear conclusion. The Western Cannon’s theory would
say that this is not literature because of the topic that she is talking about; the
Holocaust, nobody can create literature of such a horrible historical event. New
Critics would say that this is not literature because the reader cannot
understand any word without the context and she does not follow a clear
pattern, therefore it would not make any sense. Formalist would criticize its
‘ordinary’ language, but they would praise the way she manages to create
literature from that lot of common words. Structuralists would agree with the
structure of ordered stanzas, but they would not agree with the intertextuality
of the text and the lack of a marked rhythm. Poststructuralism would be the
most suitable critical theory for this poem because of the lack of a clear meaning
and the ‘deconstruction’ of the words that Sylvia Plath gets to create.
Personal Opinion
From my point of view, Sylvia Plath is a great author and this poem is
probably the best one. Despite that she uses free verse, the poem has much
musicality due to rhyme. She has the power to create a beautiful piece of
literature referring to the most heinous crime against humanity, and that is
12. 8
great. However, I am not able to analyse this poem without thinking that it was
written a short time before she committed suicide. Therefore, I, as a reader, can
feel anxiety because of the lack of life’s meaning that she conveys through these
lines. She had tried to end her life several times before, but when she was
writing this poem she wanted to write something about her father, but it was
not just about her father. I think that her subconscious wrote a poem about her
entire life. Firstly, her father, then her husband and, at the end of her life, even
her own children could be the hidden subject of this poem. She was always
under the pressure of being a woman of the middle class because of different
factors. Going to university, getting married and having children were
supposedly her dreams, the goals of her life, as they were for most of women at
that time. Nevertheless, when she achieved all the things she wished, she
ignited the gas, and she ended her own life forever. Perhaps she realized that
happiness was not in the goals, it was in the way to get her goals, and she did
not enjoy her life at all. Answering the question I asked at the beginning, I
strongly believe that a woman can be a perfect wife, a perfect mother, and a
feminist at the same time. Although, I think this poem is not just a claim about
the patriarchal society; it is a summary of her life, a way to ask for help or just
saying goodbye.
In my opinion, it is impossible to separate literature from its context, words
cannot work on their own, they need a context to make sense. Literature is not a
science. For me the most wonderful of literature is freedom, not to have the
obligation of following rules or systems, feeling free to interpret it. L'art pour
l'art , love to create something, in a selfless way, and without labels.
13. 9
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