Annotations: Introducing Sylvia Plath's Daddy to Society

Blog’s have tedious objectives as it is, so it’s important to start this particular blog off with the most tedious of all proclamations, in the form of a literary introduction to Sylvia Plath’s “Daddy”, written in 1962, providing a context beyond classroom and into sociopolitical involvement. Now, beyond the tumblr blogs of be-laced high school girls (poem lines removed from context and interposed onto pictures of Matty Healy), Sylvia Plath doesn't gain much intellectual traction...except, that's a stereotype, formed after years of a reinforced narrative that Plath liked to whine a lot. Several scholars of the time described her poetry as trite, or as fantasies, but Plath's writing, with deeper analysis, is quite concrete.

(for scholars' analyses http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/m_r/plath/daddy.htm
Nance and Jones specifically state that the poem's purpose is to “dispossess herself of fantasies”...which is certainly a compelling idea to challenge)

(for Plath's poem, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poems/detail/48999)

Plath accurately identifies herself as a woman (all she needed was a doctor to tell her so), and as such can speak of a certain plight common to the gender, which was her purpose in such confessional poetry in the first place (unless one assumes her a narcissist). Any fans of “The Bell Jar”, her confessional allegory featuring Esther Greenwood (a thinly-veiled representation of herself, it seemed to me), experienced a very depressed woman when they were sucked into Plath’s mad world, herself cast in this world as a “numb trolleybus” stuck in the hell of her own mind.

Plath’s “Daddy” takes us through that familiar area, but where this specific campaign takes place is up for a hot debate. In her use of Nazi imagery in the confessional poem, Sylvia Plath seems on the surface to be in rejection of everything– most specifically the habits bred into her by her father’s upbringing. She identifies a system in which her vitality slowly drains away (like how vampires suck blood), where pseudonym or suicide is what eventually gets her work noticed, a reality which presents solid concrete to plant her prevalent fascination with death, told through folklore and allegory. She plants it there as a statement, against not only external factors but also how they’ve been internalized, inside the mind of a girl who as of now cannot get out of a certain societal shadow.

She must get out, she must remove herself from what she sees herself complicit in, as passive victim. She never exorcises her inner demons, the poem is not a magic spell to grant her freedom– it’s a stage on open mic night where nothing she says will change how her success will not be legitimized by her own efforts, as she happens to live in 1950s Western patriarchy. The fact that her poetry collections gained moderate success only after her suicide shows such, that Plath was not recognized as a mind of her own but as one who was occasionally interesting when in tandem with her celebrity suicide, and previously her flirtation with such in the poems that later showed up in her Colossus collection.

("Fame cannot be avoided. And when it comes / You will have paid for it with your happiness, / Your husband and your life.", wrote Ted Hughes in "Birthday Letters"...painting her with a tragic mental torment in the wake of her death)

Distilled into these shorter-form poems like “Daddy”, one can grasp through the tumultuous war zone why Esther might not have been the only one. Hell, her popularity proves Plath isn’t the only one either. When she proclaims in the use of Nazi imagery that her father has oppressed her, and then thereafter builds connections between her father the Nazi and every other man as Nazi (“I thought every German was you”, line 28), she makes not just a statement on the state of her mind, but also on society as a whole. She has been socialized herself, “a bit of a Jew”, “a Jew to Daschau, Auschwitz, Belson”, beginning to “speak like a Jew” inside her “father’s black shoe”. Now, while this seems at first to be a just a personal problem with an abusive father, one can glean a few connections with something larger and more mechanical going on in small details.

First, she’s not the only “Jew”. Her mother is also a metaphorical Jew, and on a broader level, she tells us that “every woman adores a Fascist”, which brings us to the next point Plath has for us. She confuses her father for “every German”, and feels that having put a stake through her husband of seven years, she has symbolically done the same to her father, who died as a God before he could be cast down. Now taken on their own, still everything appears personal in nature, but in observation of the poem in completion (without first assuming the poem “girlish” or simply about someone with an untreated “Electra complex”), one sees that Plath has no problem making broad generalizations when connecting herself with the state of her mother and “every woman”, and her father with other men and “every German”. Thus, even if the intention was to narrate Plath’s reality alone, it’s yet suitable to use her narrative as societal allegory, identifying not just her own problems but also their societal roots.

(look, I'm not here to debate whether there wAs in fact, rampant sexism in the '50s, but I do assert that Plath wasn't speaking from nowhere, and her annotations fit in the era of The Feminine Mystique and The Second Sex quite well, expanding and deepening their arguments)

In fact, why is it that Plath has so easily internalized her father’s own oppressive behaviour? Why is it that she can so easily hate herself with this internalization, and similarly hate herself in her part in creating this internalization? She displays all the traits of an abuse victim, one who has been gaslit into taking responsibility for the abuse and one who herself feels fractured and permanently broken from same said abuse…and yet, her father died extremely early into her childhood, giving her ample time to work through this abuse with the help of understanding others…unless, the patterns her father supposedly set up have continued to be established, creating a “black shoe” that truly can withstand thirty years. After all, her husband continues similar behaviour with a “love of rack and screw” that she claims to drain her vitality.

(ironically, Plath is again blamed for her issues by critics in the wake of her blooming fame, which came only after her suicide)

This poem as a document cannot be seen as an attempt at “growing up”, transferring out of adolescence, as it is often characterized. After all, she’s lived in a shoe for thirty years, and her blood has been vampirically sucked from her veins for seven years. This is an important adult problem for her, and she claims a right to these adult issues (she’s about thirty, after all). The childish language more characterizes her adult reality as she is seen externally, and her use of “childish fantasy” to bring about “adult hatred” more finds Plath trying to navigate societal definitions for the word "woman" rather than Plath having a hard time understanding being an adult woman.

In other words, Plath uses words like “achoo”, “gobbledygoo”, “panzer-man”, and “daddy”, more to show how she feels rather than who she is. Her work is infantilized, thus she expresses such in her art. She’s a thirty year old lady who lives in a shoe, she has nightmares of vampires, and she speaks in children’s rhymes, because that is what her readers are to expect from her. She parodies this in her very adult language and feelings, beyond just hatred (not a very innocent emotion itself). She’s elegant, and her children’s rhyme is better executed than your typical “hickory dickory dock”. She fills the poem with dualities and complex emotional identities, pulling off a sharply described perspective into her tragedy, which I imagine speaks a whole hell of a lot more than just Plath’s personal realities.

To help with understanding Plath’s unique place in gender politics, Simon de Beauvoir’s Second Sex (written a decade prior to “Daddy”) holds a defining narrative for the proximity of “woman” to man. After all, since gender exists first as a societal labelling system (“sex” being the biological label), it’s important first to assert what society has itself decided. For de Beauvoir, woman is labelled “other” by society, or that gender which is not male. Woman is simply not man, and man is established to have historically been the one defining not only what is masculine, but also what is human. Thus, woman is the gender other than that gender which has also decided what human is, creating a societal void between women and claim on their definition as human. Men have no such void, and as such have no need to assert their humanity. Women, on the other hand, must justify themselves while navigating this gender divide, even before a societal hierarchy can be climbed. A man-dominated society impresses woman’s role for her, without choice on her part.

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Plath, as such, cannot buy into what has been decided for her. The allegory of her “daddy” portrays her realization of this reality, when she acknowledges a past where she didn’t speak against oppression, her tongue “sticking to the roof of her mouth”, complicitly buying into her oppression, and then deciding instead to tear the “black telephone” out by the root. It’s self-construction outside what she’s been defined under without question all this time, using the feminine stereotypes she previously fulfilled (marriage to a more socially important figure and having his babies) instead as a voodoo doll for her rejection of such ideals. She is neither feminine nor masculine, as both are defined by men in the first place and constructed around what “men are” and what “men aren’t” according to the same group, inevitably subjective to the desires of said men.

She attempts to assert her radical freedom beyond social bounds, tearing off outside connections (the black telephone) in order to dispossess herself. She wishes to purify herself of all this blackness, her symbolism of the persistent oppression. Unfortunately, black boots and panzer-men prove to be a pervading issue deep in her identity, and she struggles to navigate without giving up completely. If Plath were to commit to decisive forms of action to lift her from oppression, she runs the risk of in-authentically identifying herself with masculinity, or at the very least been seen as such. If she chooses to embrace purely her femininity, the problem returns to a woman’s world, where her existence is legitimized by satiating men’s desires. She doesn’t want to do either, and so she declares herself “through”.

Her choice of medium, at least in this case, is more than appropriate for declaring herself, and furthermore legitimizing herself rather than depending on the definitions of others. Poetry itself is declarative power, to end wars (like in “Wichita Vortex Sutra”), the obliteration of legacy (“Ozymandias”), the greatness of otherwise little things (Thoreau’s ode to “Merrimack and Concord”), etc. In “Daddy”, Sylvia Plath seeks to speak herself free, where otherwise she is caught in traps at every corner. Her Germany was filled with Nazis, and she was tired of being a Jew, speaking like a Jew, acting as her Jew mother did and how Jews do, going about loving these fascists.