Thursday, April 12, 2012
Daddy
In "Daddy", Sylvia Plath creates the metaphor of her father being a Nazi and her being a Jew. This seems like an incredibly extreme metaphor considering everything the Nazi’s did to the Jews. She doesn’t even limit this metaphor to just her father but also considers her husband to also be like a Nazi. What are the chances that the two most important men in her life would happen to be as truly evil as she claims? This leads me to believe that the actual experiences she had with her father and husband weren’t actually as bad as the Holocaust but the impact they have had on her life were as dramatic. She mentions trying to kill herself when she is twenty. While her father never physically attempted to kill her, he did cause her to attempt to kill herself. This shows how strongly someone can influence someone else even if they aren’t trying to. We also see that she isn’t referring to her experiences with her father at the very end when she declares that she is through. Her father has been dead for many years so she can’t be talking about her experiences with him but is instead talking about her thinking about him. I’m still unsure if I feel this justifies her using something as horrible as the holocaust as a metaphor.
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I agree entirely with your post. I think it is unjustifiable to compare a singular relationship with the persecution of an entire race, but at the same time I think Plath was using such an extreme comparison to draw a reaction from the reader, which she definitely accomplished. She is obviously concerned with theatricality and drawing attention to her personal circumstances, perhaps as a mode of dealing with the pain she so obviously has endured at the hands of countless men in her life. I think this poem was extremely personal to her, and although it is extremely self-involved to view your own pain as equal to that of a mass genocide, maybe writing the piece was simply cathartic and a way to release so much anger and hurt. She seems to be taking a defiant stance, almost taunting the pain and her torturers, but usually this is a sign of deep hurt. Plath was a very deeply disturbed individual, but that is no excuse for being so insensitive to such a raw subject, especially at the time it was written.
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