Some have applied a Freudian interpretation of this poem, analysing it in terms of an ‘Electra Complex’. She was never, therefore, able to resolve her feelings or come to terms with their problematic relationship. Otto Plath died of untreated gangrene caused by diabetes when Plath was eight years old. Others, such as Seamus Heaney, have criticized her ‘gratuitous’ references to the Holocaust in his wake:Ī poem like ‘Daddy’, however, brilliant a tour de force …however its violence and vindictiveness can be understood or excused in light of the poet’s parental and marital relations … nevertheless … rampages so permissively in the history of other people’s sorrows that it simply withdraws its rights to our sympathy. A famous Jewish comparative literature professor at Yale, Harold Bloom, was notoriously offended by Plath’s use of the Holocaust as a literary metaphor. This can be seen in how Plath expresses sympathy and identification with Jews and their suffering. Plath, a forerunner of Second Wave Feminism that developed in the 1960s believed the discrimination of women at the hands of men in the middle of the 20th century was similar to the oppression the Jews faced against the Nazis.
A hard-working, studious blacksmith’s son who immigrated to America as a teenager and forged an academic career teaching German and biology, Otto Plath was not a Nazi. In The Death and Life of Sylvia Plath, biographer Ronald Hayman suggests that she had actually worshipped her father when she was a little girl, doting on his praise. Despite many misinterpret her symbolic language as confessional poetry about Sylvia’s relationship with her father, Andrew Wilson, Plath’s biographer, has asserted that Sylvia actually had a ‘great relationship with her father’. The poem is an extraordinary achievement, loaded with anger and brutal language and repetition of emphatic ideas. There's a stake in your fat black heart And the villagers never liked you. 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. The black telephone's off at the root, The voices just can't worm through. I made a model of you, A man in black with a Meinkampf look And a love of the rack and the screw. But they pulled me out of the sack, And they stuck me together with glue. At twenty I tried to die And get back, back, back to you. You stand at the blackboard, daddy, In the picture I have of you, A cleft in your chin instead of your foot, But no less a devil for that, no not Any less the black man who Bit my pretty red heart in two. Every woman adores a Fascist, The boot in the face, the brute Brute heart of a brute like you. Panzer-man, panzer-man, O You- Not God but a swastika So black no sky could squeak through. And your neat mustache And your Aryan eye, bright blue. With my gipsy ancestress and my weird luck And my Taroc pack and my Taroc pack I may be a bit of a Jew. The snows of the Tyrol, the clear beer of Vienna, Are not very pure or true.
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