Daddy by Sylvia Plath

Daddy by Sylvia Plath

Author's Profile

The short and prolific life of Sylvia Plath has arguably generated more controversies, created more mythologies, and spawned more interpretations than that of any other twentieth-century American woman writer. A terse yet phantasmagoric poet with a crippling depressive streak, Plath committed suicide at age thirty, leaving behind a prodigious output of poetry, a novel, The Bell Jar, and many works of short fiction. Since her death, the popular rush to interpret her life—as protofeminist or victim, genius or overachiever—has sometimes overshadowed the work itself (Annas, 1988).

Though most celebrated for her poetry, Plath has entered the collective mind of American popular culture through the story of her one novel, The Bell Jar. Though the work cannot qualify as autobiography, Plath mined her own suicide attempt and subsequent hospitalization in 1953 to create the harrowing world of her protagonist, Esther Greenwood. In an often withering, unsparing first-person voice, The Bell Jar indicts both psychiatric treatment in the 1950s and the domestic constrictions—including near-compulsory marriage and childbirth—facing young women at that time. The famous opening of the novel finds Esther in New York at the moment when Ethel and Julius Rosenberg were to be electrocuted. Esther's nauseated fascination with their death inaugurates the reader into a suitably hellish world that revolves under a “bell jar.”

In her poetry, Plath treated similar themes, though her work shows significant change between her first and second books of poems. Trained in formal verse, she was influenced by Theodore Roethke, Robert Lowell (with whom she studied in Boston), and arguably her fellow-student Anne Sexton; Plath was also fond of reading Yeats and Hopkins. Her first collection, The Colossus, shows a well-schooled ear, admirable mastery of stanzaic shape, and sometimes a glut of lush language. Plath was both an acute observer—often of landscape, seascape, and artworks—and a constructor of rigorous mythologies. In the title poem of the volume and in “Full Fathom Five,” Plath's syntax wrestles to recreate the dead Otto Plath. Supernatural figures throughout the volume (as in “Lorelei”) occasion a break in perception, allowing the speaker a consciousness of nether realms and dislocation.

Indeed, Plath's gift for self-mythology and oneiric fictionalization troubles the “confessional” label that is often applied to her work. In Ariel's “Lady Lazarus,” for example, Plath feminizes the New Testament Lazarus figure in order to speak to her own suicide attempt. Here, as in the infamous “Daddy,” Plath, who was not Jewish, also weaves strands of mass-produced imagery associated with the Holocaust. In The Haunting of Sylvia Plath (1991) Jacqueline Rose convincingly argues that Plath's writing works to validate the claims of fantasy and dream, not unitary identity; but some readers have found her reappropriation of the Holocaust to be either sensationalist or complacent.

Daddy by Sylvia Plath

The last six months of Sylvia Plath's life produced much of the work for which she is now known. Plath wrote “Daddy” in October 1962, about five months before her suicide in February 1963. It was one of the poems that ...