Sylvia Plath-Lady Lazarus Daddy

Lady Lazarus
Sylvia Plath
I have done it again.
One year in every ten
I manage it--
A sort of walking miracle, my skin

Bright as a Nazi lampshade,
My right foot
A paperweight,
My face featureless, fine
Jew linen.
Peel off the napkin

O my enemy.
Do I terrify?--
The nose, the eye pits, the full set of teeth?

The sour breath
Will vanish in a day.
Soon, soon the flesh

The grave cave ate will be
At home on me
And I a smiling woman.

I am only thirty.
And like the cat I have nine times to die.
This is Number Three.

What a trash
To annihilate each decade.
What a million filaments.

The peanut-crunching crowd
Shoves in to see
Them unwrap me hand and foot--

The big strip tease.
Gentlemen, ladies
These are my hands

My knees.
I may be skin and bone,
Nevertheless, I am the same, identical woman.

The first time it happened I was ten.
It was an accident.
The second time I meant

To last it out and not come back at all.
I rocked shut
As a seashell.
They had to call and call
And pick the worms off me like sticky pearls.
Dying
Is an art, like everything else.
I do it exceptionally well.
I do it so it feels like hell.

I do it so it feels real.
I guess you could say I've a call.
It's easy enough to do it in a cell.

It's easy enough to do it and stay put.
It's the theatrical
Comeback in broad day

To the same place, the same face, the same brute
Amused shout:
'A miracle!'
That knocks me out.
There is a charge
For the eyeing of my scars, there is a charge

For the hearing of my heart--
It really goes.
And there is a charge, a very large charge

For a word or a touch
Or a bit of blood
Or a piece of my hair or my clothes.

So, so, Herr Doktor.
So, Herr Enemy.
I am your opus,
I am your valuable,
The pure gold baby
That melts to a shriek.

I turn and burn.
Do not think I underestimate your great concern.
Ash, ash--
You poke and stir.
Flesh, bone, there is nothing there--
A cake of soap,
A wedding ring,
A gold filling.
Herr god, Herr Lucifer

Beware
Beware.
Out of the ash

I rise with my red hair
And I eat men like air.
Genre Poem
Keywords Death and Dying , Doctor-Patient Relationship , Hospitalization , Patient Experience
, Power Relations , Rebellion , Suicide , Women's Health
Summary A 30 year-old woman describes with chilling power her three suicide attempts. She
compares herself to a cat with nine lives and to a concentration camp victim; yet
"dying / is an art . . . / I do it exceptionally well." The doctors/men that save her are
the enemy, and she warns them to "beware."
Commentary This is one of the poems which made Plath famous posthumously, written during the
last half year of her life, before she succeeded in killing herself at age 31. The poems
are brilliant, angry, energetic and highly personal (confessional). They may provide
insight into the frame of mind of a conflicted, talented woman attempting to make
her mark during the period before "woman's lib."
On "Lady Lazarus"
Eillen M. Aird
A companion piece to 'Daddy', in which the poet again fuses the worlds of personal pain and
corporate suffering, is ‘Lady Lazarus'. In this poem a disturbing tension is established between the
seriousness of the experience described and the misleadingly light form of the poem. The
vocabulary and rhythms which approximate to the colloquial simplicity of conversational speech,
the frequently end-stopped lines, the repetitions which have the effect of mockingly counteracting
the violence of the meaning, all establish the deliberately flippant note which this poem strives to
achieve. These are all devices which also operate in Auden's 'light verse', but the constantly shifting
tone of 'Lady Lazarus' is found less frequently in Auden's more cerebral poetry. At times the tone is
hysterically strident and demanding:
Shoves in to see
Them unwrap me hand and foot—
The big strip tease.
Gentlemen, ladies
These are my hands
My knees.
Then it modulates into a calmer irony as the persona mocks herself for her pretensions to tragedy:
'Dying/is an art, like everything else./I do it exceptionally well.' As in 'Daddy' Sylvia Plath has used
a limited amount of autobiographical detail in this poem; the references to suicide in 'Lady Lazarus’
reflect her own experience. As in 'Daddy’, however, the personal element is subordinate to a much
more inclusive dramatic structure, and one answer to those critics who have seen her work as
merely confessional is that she used her personal and painful material as a way of entering into and
illustrating much wider themes and subjects. In 'Lady Lazarus' the poet again equates her suffering
with the experiences of the tortured Jews, she becomes, as a result of the suicide she inflicts on
herself, a Jew:
A sort of walking miracle, my skin
Bright as a Nazi lampshade,
My right foot
A paperweight,
My face a featureless, fine
Jew linen.
The reaction of the crowd who push in with morbid interest to see the saved suicide mimics the
attitude of many to the revelations of the concentration camps; there is a brutal insistence on the
pain which many apparently manage to see with scientific detachment. ‘Lady Lazarus’ represents
an extreme use of the 'light verse' technique. Auden never forced such grotesque material into such
an insistently jaunty poem, and the anger and compassion which inform the poem are rarely found
so explicitly in his work. 'Lady Lazarus' is also a supreme example of Sylvia Plath's skill as an
artist. She takes very personal, painful material and controls and forms it with the utmost rigour into
a highly wrought poem, which is partly effective because of the polar opposition between the
terrible gaiety of its form and the fiercely uncompromising seriousness of its subject. If we
categorize a poem such as 'Lady Lazarus' as 'confessional' or 'extremist’ then we highlight only one
of its elements. It is also a poem of social criticism with a strong didactic intent, and a work of art
which reveals great technical and intellectual ability. The hysteria is intentional and effective.
From Sylvia Plat: Her Life and Work. Copyright © 1973 by Eileen M. Aird
Margaret Dickie
Plath’s late poems are full of speakers whose rigid identities and violent methods not only parody
their torment but also permit them to control it. The peculiar nature of the speaker in "Lady
Lazarus" defies ordinary notions of the suicide. Suicide is not the joyous act she claims it to be in
her triumphant assertion that she has done it again. Her confidence, at the moment of recovery, that
her sour breath will vanish in a day and that she will soon be a smiling woman is a perverse
acceptance of her rescuers' hopes, although she calls her rescuers enemies. The impulse of the
speaker is the overwhelming desire to control the situation. She is above all a performer, chiefly
remarkable for her manipulation of herself as well as of the effects she wishes to have on those who
surround her. She speaks of herself in hyperboles, calling herself a "walking miracle," boasting that
she has "nine times to die," exclaiming that dying is an art she does "exceptionally well," asserting
that "the theatrical/ Comeback in broad day" knocks her out. Her treatment of suicide in such
buoyant terms amounts to a parody of her own act. When she compares her suicide to the
victimization of the Jews, and when she later claims there is a charge for a piece of her hair or
clothes and thus compares her rescued self to the crucified Christ or martyred saint, she is engaging
in self-parody. She employs these techniques partly to defy the crowd, with its "brute / Amused
shout:/ 'A miracle!' " and partly to taunt her rescuers, "Herr Doktor," "Herr Enemy," who regard her
as their "opus." She is neither a miracle nor an opus, and she fends off those who would regard her
in this way.
The techniques have another function as well: they display the extent to which she can objectify
herself, ritualize her fears, manipulate her own terror. Her extreme control is intimately entwined
with her suicidal tendencies. If she is not to succumb to her desire to kill herself and thus control her
own fate, she must engage in the elaborate ritual which goes on all the time in the mind of the
would-be suicide by which she allays her persistent wish to destroy herself. Her control is not sane
but hysterical . When the speaker assures the crowd that she is "the same, identical woman" after
her rescue, she is in fact telling them her inmost fear that she could (and probably will) do it again.
What the crowd takes for a return to health, the speaker sees as a return to the perilous conditions
that have driven her three times to suicide. By making a spectacle out of herself and by locating the
victimizer in the doctor and the crowd, rather than in herself, she is casting out her terrors so that
she can control them. When she boasts at the end that she will rise and eat men, she is projecting her
destruction outward. That last stanza of defiance is really a mental effort to triumph over terror, to
rise and not to succumb to her own victimization. The poet behind the poem allows Lady Lazarus to
caricature herself and thus to demonstrate the way in which the mind turns ritualistic against horror.
Although "Lady Lazarus" draws on Plath's own suicide attempt, the poem tells us little of the actual
event. It is not a personal confession, but it does reveal Plath's understanding of the way the suicidal
person thinks.
From Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes. Copyright © 1979 by the Board of Trustees of
the University of Illinois.
Arthur Oberg
"Lady Lazarus" and "Daddy" are poems which seem written at the edge of sensibility and of
imagistic technique. They both utilize an imagery of severe disintegration and dislocation. The
public horrors of the Nazi concentration camps and the personal horrors of fragmented identities
become interchangeable. Men are reduced to parts of bodies and to piles of things. The movement
in each poem is at once historical and private; the confusion in these two spheres suggests the extent
to which this century has often made it impossible to separate them.
The barkerlike tone of "Lady Lazarus" is not accidental. As in "Daddy," the persona strips herself
before the reader ... all the time utilizing a cool or slang idiom in order to disguise feeling. Sylvia
Plath borrowed from a sideshow or vaudeville world the respect for virtuosity which the performer
must acquire, for which the audience pays and never stops paying. Elsewhere in her work, she
admired the virtuosity of the magician's unflinching girl or of the unshaking tattoo artist. Here, in
"Lady Lazarus," it is the barker and the striptease artist who consume her attention. What the poet
pursues in image and in rhyme (for example, the rhyming of "Jew" and "gobbledygoo") becomes
part of the same process I observed in so many of her other poems, that attempt, brilliant and
desperate, to locate what it was that hurt.
Sylvia Plath never stopped recording in her poetry the wish and need to clear a space for love. Yet
she joined this to an inclination to see love as unreal, to accompanying fears of being unable to give
and receive love, and to the eventual distortion and displacement of love in the verse. Loving
completely or "wholly" she considered to be dangerous, from her earliest verse on.
[. . . .]
Poems like"Daddy" and "Lady Lazarus’ in the end may not be the triumphs which their momentum
and inventiveness at times celebrate. Instead, and this is my sense of them, they belong more to
elegy and to death, to the woman whose "loving associations" abandoned her as she sought to create
images for them.
From Modern American Lyric: Lowell, Berryman, Creeley,-and Plath. Rutgers
University Press, 1978
Jon Rosenblatt
. . . The poem reflects Plath's recognition at the end of her life that the struggle between self and
others and between death and birth must govern every aspect of the poetic structure. The magical
and demonic aspects of the world appear in "Lady Lazarus" with an intensity that is absent from
"The Stones."
The Lady of the poem is a quasi-mythological figure, a parodic version of the biblical Lazarus
whom Christ raised from the dead. As in "The Stones," the speaker undergoes a series of
transformations that are registered through image sequences. The result is the total alteration of the
physical body. In "Lady Lazarus," however, the transformations are more violent and more various
than in "The Stones," and the degree of self-dramatization on the part of the speaker is much
greater. Four basic sequences of images define the Lady's identity. At the beginning of the poem,
she is cloth or material: lampshade, linen, napkin; in the middle, she is only body: knees, skin and
bone, hair; toward the end, she becomes a physical object: gold, ash, a cake of soap; finally, she is
resurrected as a red-haired demon. Each of these states is dramatically connected to an observer or
observers through direct address: first, to her unnamed "enemy"; then, to the "gentlemen and
ladies"; next, to the Herr Doktor; and, finally, to Herr God and Herr Lucifer. The address to these
"audiences" allows Plath to characterize Lady Lazarus's fragmented identities with great precision.
For example, a passage toward the end of the poem incorporates the transition from a sequence of
body images (scars-heart-hair) to a series of physical images" (opus-valuable-gold baby) as it shifts
its address from the voyeuristic crowd to the Nazi Doktor:
[lines 61-70]
The inventiveness of the language demonstrates Plath's ability to create, as she could not in "The
Stones," an appropriate oral medium for the distorted mental states of the speaker. The sexual pun
on "charge" in the first line above; the bastardization of German ("Herr Enemy"); the combination
of Latinate diction ("opus," "valuable") and colloquial phrasing ("charge," "So, so . . . ")—all these
linguistic elements reveal a character who has been grotesquely split into warring selves. Lady
Lazarus is a different person for each of her audiences, and yet none of her identities is bearable for
her. For the Nazi Doktor, she is a Jew, whose body must be burned; for the "peanut-crunching
crowd," she is a stripteaser; for the medical audience, she is a wonder, whose scars and heartbeat
are astonishing; for the religious audience, she is a miraculous figure, whose hair and clothes are as
valuable as saints' relics. And when she turns to her audience in the middle of the poem to describe
her career in suicide, she becomes a self-conscious performer. Each of her deaths, she says, is done
"exceptionally well. / I do it so it feels like hell."
The entire symbolic procedure of death and rebirth in "Lady Lazarus" has been deliberately chosen
by the speaker. She enacts her death repeatedly in order to cleanse herse1f of the "million
filaments" of guilt and anguish that torment her. After she has returned to the womblike state of
being trapped in her cave, like the biblical Lazarus, or of being rocked "shut as a seashell," she
expects to emerge reborn in a new form. These attempts at rebirth are unsuccessful until the end of
the poem. Only when the Lady undergoes total immolation of self and body does she truly emerge
in a demonic form. The doctor burns her down to ash, and then she achieves her rebirth:
Out of the ash
Using the phoenix myth of resurrection as a basis, Plath imagines a woman who has become pure
spirit rising against the imprisoning others around her: gods, doctor, men, and Nazis. This
translation of the self into spirit, after an ordeal of mutilation, torture, and immolation, stamps the
poem as the dramatization of the basic initiatory process.
"Lady Lazarus" defines the central aesthetic principles of Plath's late poetry. First, the poem derives
its dominant effects from the colloquial language. From the conversational opening ("I have done it
again") to the clipped warnings of the ending ("Beware / Beware"), "Lady Lazarus" appears as the
monologue of a woman speaking spontaneously out of her pain and psychic disintegration. The
Latinate terms ("annihilate," "filaments," "opus," "valuable") are introduced as sudden contrasts to
the essentially simple language of the speaker. The obsessive repetition of key words and phrases
gives enormous power to the plain style used throughout. As she speaks, Lady Lazarus seems to
gather up her energies for an assault on her enemies, and the staccato repetitions of phrases build up
the intensity of feelings:
[lines 46-50]
This is language poured out of some burning inner fire, though it retains the rhythmical precision
that we expect from a much less intensely felt expression. It is also a language made up almost
entirely of monosyllables. Plath has managed to adapt a heightened conversational stance and a
colloquial idiom to the dramatic monologue form.
The colloquial language of the poem relates to its second major aspect: its aural quality. "Lady
Lazarus" is meant to be read aloud. To heighten the aural effect, the speaker's, voice modulates
across varying levels of rhetorical intensity. At one moment she reports on her suicide attempt with
no observable emotion:
I am only thirty.
And like the cat I have nine times to die.
This is Number Three.
The next moment she becomes a barker at a striptease show:
Gentlemen, ladies,
These are my hands.
Then she may break into a kind of incantatory chant that sweeps reality in front of it, as at the very
end of the poem. The deliberate rhetoric of the poem marks it as a set-piece, a dramatic tour de
force, that must be heard to be truly appreciated. Certainly it answers Plath's desire to create an
aural medium for her poetry.
Third, "Lady Lazarus" transforms a traditional stanzaic pattern to obtain its rhetorical and aural
effects. One of the striking aspects of Plath's late poetry is its simultaneous dependence on and
abandonment of traditional forms. The three-line stanza of "Lady Lazarus" and such poems as
"Ariel," "Fever 103°," "Mary's Song," and "Nick and the Candlestick" refer us inevitably to the
terza rima of the Italian tradition and to the terza rima experiments of Plath's earlier work. But the
poems employ this stanza only as a general framework for a variable-beat line and variable rhyming
patterns. The first stanza of the poem has two beats in its first line, three in its second, and two in its
third; but the second has a five-three-two pattern. The iambic measure is dominant throughout,
though Plath often overloads a line with stressed syllables or reduces a line to a single stress. The
rhymes are mainly off-rhymes ("again," "ten"; "fine," "linen"; "stir," "there"). Many of the pure
rhymes are used to accentuate a bizarre conjunction of meaning, as in the lines addressed to the
doctor: "I turn and burn. / Do not think I underestimate your great concern."
Finally, "Lady Lazarus," like "Daddy" and "Fever 103°," incorporates historical material into the
initiatory and imagistic patterns. This element of Plath's method has generated much
misunderstanding, including the charge that her use of references to Nazism and to Jewishness is
inauthentic. Yet these allusions to historical events form part of the speaker's fragmented identity
and allow Plath to portray a kind of eternal victim. The very title of the poem lays the groundwork
for a semicomic historical and cultural allusiveness. The Lady is a legendary figure, a sufferer, who
has endured almost every variety of torture. Plath can thus include among Lady Lazarus's
characteristics the greatest contemporary examples of brutality and persecution: the sadistic medical
experiments on the Jew's by Nazi doctors and the Nazis' use of their victims' bodies in the
production of lampshades and other objects. These allusions, however, are no more meant to
establish a realistic historic norm in the poem than the allusions to the striptease are intended to
establish a realistic social context. The references in the poem—biblical, historical, political,
personal—draw the reader into the center of a personality and its characteristic mental processes.
The reality of the poem lies in the convulsions of the narrating consciousness. The drama of
external persecution, self-destructiveness, and renewal, with both its horror and its grotesque
comedy, is played out through social and historical contexts that symbolize the inner struggle of
Lady Lazarus.
The claim that Plath misuses a particular historical experience is thus incorrect. She shows how a
contemporary consciousness is obsessed with historical and personal demons and how that
consciousness deals with these figures. The demonic characters of the Nazi Doktor and of the risen
Lady Lazarus are surely more central to the poem's tone and intent than is the historicity of these
figures. By imagining the initiatory drama against the backdrop of Nazism, Plath is universalizing a
personal conflict that is treated more narrowly in such poems as "The Bee-Meeting" and "Berck-
Plage." The fact that Plath herself was not Jewish has no bearing on the legitimacy of her
employment of the Jewish persona: the holocaust serves her as a metaphor for the death-and-life
battle between the self and a deadly enemy. Whether Plath embodies the enemy as a personal
friend, a demonic entity, a historical figure, or a cosmic force, she consistently sees warfare in the
structural terms of the initiatory scenario. "Lady Lazarus" is simply the most powerful and
successful of the dramas in which that enemy appears as the sadistic masculine force of Nazism.
from Sylvia Plath: The Poetry of Initiation. Copyright © 1979 by University of
North Carolina Press.
Helen Vendler
"Lady Lazarus," written in the same feverish thirtieth-birthday month that produced "Daddy" and
"Ariel," is a mélange of incompatible styles, as though in a meaningless world every style could
have its day: bravado ("I have done it again"), slang ("A sort of walking miracle"), perverse fashion
commentary ("my skin/Bright as a Nazi lampshade"), melodrama ("Do I terrify?"), wit ("like the cat
I have nine times to die"), boast ("This is Number Three"), self-disgust ("What a trash/To annihilate
each decade"). The poem moves on through reductive dismissal ("The big strip tease") to public
announcement, with a blasphemous swipe at the ecce homo ("Gentlemen, ladies/These are my
hands/My knees"), and comes to its single lyric moment, recalling Plath's suicide attempt in the
summer before her senior year at Smith:
I rocked shut
As a seashell.
Almost every stanza of "Lady Lazarus" picks up a new possibility for this theatrical voice, from
mock movie talk ("So, so, Herr Doktor./So, Herr Enemy") to bureaucratic politeness, ("Do not think
I underestimate your great concern") to witch warnings ("I rise with my red hair/And I eat men like
air"). When an author makes a sort of headcheese of style in this way--a piece of gristle, a piece of
meat, a piece of gelatin, a piece of rind--the disbelief in style is countered by a competitive faith in
it. Style (as something consistent) is meaningless, but styles (as dizzying provisional skepticism) are
all.
Poems like "Daddy" and "Lady Lazarus" are in one sense demonically intelligent, in their wanton
play with concepts, myths, and language, and in another, and more important, sense not intelligent
at all, in that they willfully refuse, for the sale of a cacophony of styles (a tantrum of style), the
steady, centripetal effect of thought. Instead, they display a wild dispersal, a centrifugal spin to
further and further reaches of outrage. They are written in a loud version of what Plath elsewhere
calls "the zoo yowl, the mad soft/ Mirror talk you love to catch me at." And that zoo yowl has a
feral slyness about it.
From "An Intractable Metal." The New Yorker (1982).
Paul Breslin
"Lady Lazarus," another anthology-piece, reveals that this vacillation has, in addition to its
misplaced mimetic function, a rhetorical function as well. This poem, much more overtly than
"Daddy," anticipates and manipulates the responses of the reader. The speaker alternately solicits
our sympathy and rebukes us for meddling. "Do I terrify?" she asks; she certainly hopes so. By
comparing her recovery from a suicide attempt to the resurrection of Lazarus, she imagines herself
as the center of a spectacle—we envision Christ performing a miracle before the astonished
populace of Bethany. But unlike the beneficiary of the biblical miracle, Plath's "lady Lazarus"
accomplishes her own resurrection and acknowledges no power greater than herself. "Herr God;
Herr Lucifer, I Beware I Beware," she warns. Her self-aggrandizing gestures invite attention, and
yet we are to be ashamed of ourselves if we accept the invitation:
Shoves in to see
Them unwrap me hand and foot—
The big strip-tease.
The crowd is aggressive ("shoves"), its interest lascivious; it seeks an illicit titillation, if not from
the speaker's naked body, then from her naked psyche.
Again, one might argue that the divided tone of "Lady Lazarus" is a legitimately mimetic
representation of the psychology of suicide. A suicide attempt is partly motivated by the wish to get
attention and exact revenge on those who have withheld attention in the past by making them feel
responsible for one's death. Those who attempt suicide in a manner unlikely to succeed—and Plath
's attempts, including the successful one, seem to have been intended to fail—are torn between the
desire "to last it out and not come back at all" and the hope that someone will care enough to
intervene. Moreover, a suicide attempt is itself a confession, a public admission of inward
desperation: Recovering from such an attempt, one would have to contend with the curiosity
aroused in other people. One might indeed feel stripped naked, sorry to have called so much
attention to oneself, and yet suddenly powerful in commanding so much attention.
Plath's analogy of the strip-tease or the sideshow conveys, with force and precision, the
ambivalence of suicidal despair. Had she extended that metaphor through the entire poem, holding
its complexities in balance, "Lady Lazarus" might have achieved the stability of tone and judgment
lacking in "Daddy." But unfortunately, Plath succumbed to the urge to whip up further lurid
excitement with the analogy of the concentration camp, introduced in stanzas two and three but
dormant thereafter until it returns at the end of stanza twenty-one. It reenters stealthily:
There is a charge
For the eyeing of my scars, there is a charge
For the hearing of my heart.
It really goes.
And there is a charge, a very large charge,
For a word or a touch
Or a bit of blood
Or a piece of my hair or my clothes.
The first five lines of this passage, which continue the metaphor of strip-tease or freak show, are
witty and self-possessed in their bitterness. "Large charge" is of course, slang for "big thrill" and so
glances at the titillation the audience receives as well as the price of admission. But with "a bit of
blood / Or a piece of my hair or my clothes," we suddenly recall the "Nazi lampshade" of stanza
two. The speaker's "enemy"' whether it be Herr God, Herr Lucifer, or the peanut-crunching crowd,
would kill her and dismember the body for commodities (or, in the context of biblical miracle,
relics; in either case she is martyred). Interestingly, as the irony becomes less controlled, more
phantasmagorical and unhinged, the rhythm begins to fall into anapests, and the rhyme on "goes"
and "clothes" is one of the most insistent in the poem. The sound of the poetry, reminiscent of light
verse, combines strangely with its macabre sense, rather like certain passages in "The Raven" where
one feels that Poe has been demonically possessed by W. S. Gilbert ("For we cannot help agreeing
that no living human being / Ever yet was blessed with seeing bird above his chamber door").
In the last twenty lines of "Lady Lazarus," irony vanishes, its last glimmer coming ten lines from
the end in "Do not think I underestimate your great concern." By this point, the speaker has turned
from the crowd to address a single threatening figure:
So, so, Herr Doktor
So, Herr Enemy.
I am your opus,
I am your valuable
The pure gold baby. . . .
The enemy, hitherto unspecified, turns out to be a German male authority figure, perhaps a scholar
like Otto Plath ("Herr Doktor"), who thinks of the speaker as his "pure gold baby." An inward
confrontation with this father imago replaces the confrontation with the intrusive crowd. The poem
enters a realm of pure fantasy as the "Herr Doktor" rapidly assumes the cosmic proportions of "Herr
God, Herr Lucifer." There is also a shift in the figurative language, corresponding to the shift in
tone and implied audience. The clammy imagery of "the grave cave" and "worms . . . like sticky
pearls" gives way to an imagery of death by fire. The resurrection of Lazarus becomes the birth of
the Phoenix, and the extended metaphor of a public spectacle abruptly disappears. The threat of the
final line, "And I eat men like air" (SP, 247), has little connection with anything in the first twenty-
one stanzas.
As with "Daddy," one may try to save consistency by declaring the speaker a "persona." The poem,
by this reckoning, reveals a woman gradually caught up in her anger and carried by it toward a
recognition of its true object: not the crowd of insensitive onlookers, but the father and husband
who have driven her to attempt suicide. The end of the poem, thus understood, breaks free of
defensive irony to release cathartic rage. But it is hard to see why this rage is cathartic, since it no
sooner locates its "real" object than it begins to convert reality back into fantasy again, in a
grandiose and finally evasive fashion. Was it that Plath unconsciously doubted her right to be angry
and therefore had to convict her father and her husband of Hitlerian monstrosities in order to justify
the anger she nonetheless felt? Or did she fear that the experiential grounds of her emotions were
too personal for art unless mounted on the stilts of myth or psycho-historical analogy? On such
questions one can only speculate, and the answers, even if they were obtainable, could illuminate
the poems only as biographical evidence, not as poems.
from The Psycho-Political Muse: American Poetry since the Fifties. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1987. Copyright © 1987 by the U of Chicago P.

Kathleen Margaret Lant
"Purdah" and "Lady Lazarus" - written within a week of each other during October 1962 - further
reveal Plath's conviction that undressing has become for her a powerful poetic gesture, and in these
poems it is the female speaker who finally disrobes - and here she attempts to appropriate the power
of nakedness for herself. Plath does not simply contemplate from the spectator's point of view the
horrors and the vigor of the act of undressing; now her female subject dares to make herself naked,
and she does so in an attempt to make herself mighty. At this point, nakedness has somehow
become strongly assertive, at least at one level in these poems. "Purdah" and "Lady Lazarus" take
up the power of the uncovered body that Plath began to explore in "A Birthday Present." But in
these two later poems, that figurative nakedness is compromised by the metaphorical significance of
the female body. The naked force in "A Birthday Present" is ultimately masculine since it has the
potential to enter the speaker like a cruelly sharp knife; the body that is unclothed encodes the
assertiveness of the revealed male body. The body made bare in "Lady Lazarus" and "Purdah,"
however, is female, and for that reason the power of that body's undraping must be - at least in
terms of Plath's metaphorical universe - necessarily diminished.
[. . . . ]
"Lady Lazarus" conveys the same sense of confusion or ambivalence in that the power of the
speaking subject of the poem seems undermined by the melodramatic unclothing of that subject.
Lady Lazarus is clearly - like the speaker of "Purdah" - meant to threaten; she asks rather
sarcastically, "Do I terrify?", but the language by means of which she shapes her unclothing seems
to compromise the grandeur of her act. She is not covered by grime or grit or falseness; her
covering is somehow already too feminine, too ineffectual: My face a featureless, fine / Jew linen. //
Peel off the napkin" (244). "Lady Lazarus" presents most clearly one of the central problems with
Plath's use of the metaphor of nakedness, for in this poem Plath refers to this act of unclothing as
"The big strip tease." And in this act, no woman is terrifying, no woman is triumphant, no woman is
powerful, for she offers herself to "the peanut-crunching crowd" in a gesture that is "theatrical"
(245) rather than self-defining, designed to please or to appease her viewers more than to release
herself.
To strip is to seduce; it is not to assert oneself sexually or psychologically. And by the end of the
poem, the speaker seeks to shame the male viewer who is exploiting her; she threatens him openly:
"Out of the ash / I rise with my red hair / And I eat men like air" (247). But the threat is empty.
Alicia Ostriker observes, too, that the rage here is "hollow" because the reader is fully aware that
the speaker of this poem "is powerless, she knows it, she hates it" (102). But Ostriker does not name
the source of this powerlessness - the speaker's physical vulnerability. The female subject has
offered here pieces of herself, she has displayed herself not in an assertive way but in a sexually
provocative and seductive way, and - at the very end - she resorts to descriptions of her appearance
- her red hair - but not delineations of her reality - her anger. She does not convince the audience
that she is, in fact, dangerous, for she must offer the female body as an object rather than assert it as
a weapon. It is telling, too, that the speaker's audience in "Lady Lazarus" is made up entirely of men
(Herr God, Herr Lucifer, Herr Doktor), for by revealing herself only before such an audience, she
ensures that her unveiling will be read not as a powerful assertion of identity but rather as a
seductive gesture of submission and invitation.
from "The big strip tease: female bodies and male power in the poetry of Sylvia
Plath." Contemporary Literature 34.4 (Winter 1993)
Al Strangeways
In "Lady Lazarus," for example, Plath collapses the "them and us" distinction by confronting
readers with their voyeurism in looking at the subject of the poem. To apply Teresa De Lauretis's
theorizing of the cinematic positioning of women to Plath's poem, in "Lady Lazarus," the speaker's
consciousness of her performance for the readers (who are implicitly part of the "peanut-crunching
crowd") works to reverse the gaze of the readers so that they become "overlooked in the act of
overlooking."
By extension, in her parodic overstatement (Lady Lazarus as archetypal victim, archetypal object of
the gaze) Plath highlights the performative (that is, constructed rather than essential) nature of the
speaker's positioning as object of the gaze, and so (to extend Judith Butler's terms), Lady Lazarus
enacts a performance that attempts to "compel a reconsideration of the place and stability" of her
positioning, and to "enact and reveal the performativity" of her representation. This sense of
performativity and the reversal of gaze likewise extends, in "Lady Lazarus," to compel
reconsideration not only of the conventional positioning of the woman as object, and of the
voyeurism implicit in all lyric poetry, but also of the historical metaphors as objects of the gaze.
Readers feel implicated in the poem's straightforward assignment and metaphorizing of the speaker
in her role as object and performer, and contingently are made to feel uncomfortable about their
similar easy assimilation of the imagery (of the suffering of the Jews) that the speaker uses. In
"Daddy," a similar relationship between reader, speaker, and metaphor is at work.
From "’Boot in the Face’: The Problem of the Holocaust in the Poetry of Sylvia
Plath." Contemporary Literature 37.3 (Fall 1996).
Christina Britzolakis
Although Plath's 'confessional' tropes are often seen in terms of a Romantic parable of
victimization, whether of the sensitive poetic individual crushed by a brutally rationalized society,
or of feminist protest against a monolithic patriarchal oppressor, her self-reflexivity tends to turn
confession into a parody gesture or a premiss for theatrical performance. The central instance of the
'confessional' in her writing is usually taken to be 'Lady Lazarus'. M. L. Rosenthal uses the poem to
validate the generic category: 'Robert Lowell's 'Skunk Hour' and Sylvia Plath's 'Lady Lazarus' are
true examples of 'confessional' poetry because they put the speaker himself at the centre of the
poem in such a way as to make his psychological shame and vulnerability an embodiment of his
civilization.' The confessional reading of the poem is usually underpinned by the recourse to
biography, which correlates the speaker's cultivation of the 'art of dying' with Plath's suicidal career.
Although Plath is indeed, at one level, mythologizing her personal history, the motif of suicide in
'Lady Lazarus' operates less as self-revelation than as a theatrical tour de force, a music-hall routine.
With 'Daddy', 'Lady Lazarus' is probably the single text in the Plath canon which has attracted most
disapproval on the grounds of a manipulative, sensationalist, or irresponsible style. Helen Vendler,
for example, writes that 'Style (as something consistent) is meaningless, but styles (as dizzying
provisional scepticism) are all . . . Poems like 'Daddy' and 'Lady Lazarus' are in one sense
demonically intelligent, in their wanton play with concepts, myths and language, and in another,
and more important, sense, not intelligent at all, in that they wilfully refuse, for the sake of a
cacophony of styles (a tantrum of style), the steady, centripetal effect of thought. Instead, they
display a wild dispersal, a centrifugal spin to further and further reaches of outrage.' Here, the
element of 'wilful' pastiche in 'Lady Lazarus' is measured against a normative ideal of aesthetic
detachment. Yet the poem's ironic use of prostitution as the figure of a particular kind of
theatricalized self-consciousness—of the poet as, in Plath's phrase, 'Roget's trollop, parading words
and tossing off bravado for an audience' (JP 2I4)—calls for a reading which takes seriously what
the poem does with, and to, literary history.
Like 'Lesbos', 'Lady Lazarus' is a dramatic monologue which echoes and parodies 'The Love Song
of J. AIfred Prufrock'. The title alludes, of course, not only to the biblical story of Lazarus but also
to Prufrock's lines: 'I am Lazarus, come from the dead, | Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you
all'. Like Eliot, Plath uses clothing as a metaphor for rhetoric: the 'veil' or 'garment' of style. By
contrast with Eliot's tentative hesitations, obliquities, and evasions of direct statement, however,
Plath's poem professes to 'tell all'. Lady Lazarus deploys a patently alienated and manufactured
language, in which the shock tactic, the easy effect, reign supreme. Her rhetoric is one of direct
statement ('I have done it again'), of brutal Americanisms ('trash', 'shoves', 'the big strip tease', 'I do
it so it feels like hell', 'knocks me out'), of glib categorical assertions and dismissals ('Dying is an
art, like everything else') , and blatant internal rhymes ('grave cave', 'turn and burn'). As Richard
Blessing remarks, both 'Lady Lazarus' and 'The Applicant' are poems that parody advertising
techniques while simultaneously advertising themselves. The poet who reveals her suffering plays
to an audience, or 'peanut-crunching crowd'; her miraculous rebirths are governed by the logic of
the commodity. Prufrock is verbally overdressed but feels emotionally naked and exposed,
representing himself as crucified before the gaze of the vulgar mass. Lady Lazarus, on the other
hand, incarnates the 'holy prostitution of the soul' which Baudelaire found in the experience of
being part of a crowd; emotional nakedness is itself revealed as a masquerade. The 'strip-tease' artist
is a parodic, feminized version of the symbolist poet sacrificed to an uncomprehending mass
audience. For Baudelaire, as Walter Benjamin argues, the prostitute serves as an allegory of the fate
of aesthetic experience in modernity, of its 'prostitution' to mass culture. The prostitute deprives
femininity of its aura, its religious and cultic presence; the woman's body becomes a commodity,
made up of dead and petrified fragments, while her beauty becomes a matter of cosmetic disguise
(make-up and fashion). Baudelaire's prostitute sells the appearance of femininity. But she also
offers a degraded and hallucinated memory of fulfilment, an intoxicating or narcotic substitute for
the idealized maternal body. For the melancholic, spleen-ridden psyche, which obsessively dwells
on the broken pieces of the past, she is therefore a privileged object of meditation. She represents
the loss of that blissful unity with nature and God which was traditionally anchored in a female
figure. Instead, Benjamin argues, the prostitute, like commodity fetishism, harnesses the 'sex-appeal
of the inorganic', which binds the living body to the realm of death.
Lady Lazarus is an allegorical figure, constructed from past and present images of femininity,
congealed fantasies projected upon the poem's surface. She is a pastiche of the numerous deathly or
demonic women of poetic tradition, such as Foe's Ligeia, who dies and is gruesomely revivified
through the corpse of another woman. Ligeia's function, which is to be a symbol, mediating
between the poet and 'supernal beauty', can only be preserved by her death. Similarly, in Mallarme's
prose poem 'Le Phenomene Futur', the 'Woman of the Past' is scientifically preserved and displayed
at a circus sideshow by the poet. For Plath, however, the woman on show, the 'female phenomenon'
is a revelation of unnaturalness instead of sensuous nature, her body gruesomely refashioned into
Nazi artefacts. Lady Lazarus yokes together the canonical post-Romantic, symbolist tradition which
culminates in 'Prufrock', and the trash culture of True Confessions, through their common concern
with the fantasizing and staging of the female body:
I rocked shut
As a seashell.
The densely layered intertextual ironies at work in these lines plot the labyrinthine course of what
Benjamin calls 'the sex appeal of the inorganic' through literary history. They echo Ariel's song in
The Tempest, whose talismanic status in Plath's writing I have already noted. Plath regenders the
image, substituting Lady Lazarus for the drowned corpse of the father/king. The metaphor of the
seashell converts the female body into a hardened, dead and inorganic object, but at the same time
nostalgically recalls the maternal fecundity of the sea. The dead woman who suffers a sea change is
adorned with phallic worms turned into pearls, the 'sticky', fetishistic sublimates of male desire. In
Marvell's poem of seduction, 'To His Coy Mistress', the beloved is imagined as a decaying corpse:
'Nor, in thy marble vault shall sound | My echoing song: then worms shall try | That long-preserved
virginity: | And your quaint honour turn to dust; | And into ashes all my lust.' In T. S. Eliot's The
Waste Land, the refrain 'Those are pearls that were his eyes' is associated with the drowned
Phoenician sailor, implicit victim of witch-like, neurotic, or soul-destroying female figures, such as
Madame Sosostris and Cleopatra.
Lady Lazarus stages the spectacle of herself, assuming the familiar threefold guise of actress,
prostitute, and mechanical woman. The myth of the eternally recurring feminine finds its fulfilment
in the worship and 'martyrdom' of the film or pop star, a cult vehicle of male fantasy who induces
mass hysteria and vampiric hunger for 'confessional' revelations. Lady Lazarus reminds her
audience that 'there is a charge, a very large charge | For a word or a touch | Or a bit of blood | Or a
piece of my hair or my clothes.' It is as if Plath is using the Marilyn Monroe figure to travesty Poe's
dictum in 'The Philosophy of Composition' (I846) that 'the death of a beautiful woman is,
unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world'. The proliferation of intertextual ironies also
affects the concluding transformation of 'Lady Lazarus' into the phoenix-like, man-eating demon,
who rises 'out of the ash' with her 'red hair'. This echoes Coleridge's description of the possessed
poet in 'Kubla Kahn': 'And all should cry Beware! Beware! His flashing eyes, his floating hair!' The
woman's hair, a privileged fetish-object of male fantasy, becomes at once a badge of daemonic
genius and a flag of vengeance. It is tempting to read these lines as a personal myth of rebirth, a
triumphant Romantic emergence of what Lynda Bundtzen calls the female 'body of imagination'.
The myth of the transcendent-demonic phoenix seems to transcend the dualism of male-created
images of women, wreaking revenge on 'Herr Doktor', 'Herr God', and 'Herr Lucifer', those
allegorical emblems of an oppressive masculinity. Yet Lady Lazarus's culminating assertion of
power—'I eat men like air'—undoes itself, through its suggestion of a mere conjuring trick. The
attack on patriarchy is undercut by the illusionistic character of this apotheosis which purports to
transform, at a stroke, a degraded and catastrophic reality. What the poem sarcastically 'confesses',
through its collage of fragments of 'high' and 'low' culture, is a commodity status no longer veiled
by the aura of the sacred. Lyric inwardness is 'prostituted' to the sensationalism of 'true confession'.
The poet can no longer cherish the illusion of withdrawing into a pure, uncontaminated private
space, whose immunity from larger historical conflicts is guaranteed by the 'auratic' woman. . . .for
Plath the female body, far from serving as expiatory metaphor for the ravages of modernity, itself
becomes a sign whose cultural meanings are in crisis.
from Sylvia Plath and Theatre of Mourning. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999.
Copyright © 1999 by Christina Bitzolkais
Susan Gubar
[NB. Prosopopoeia: a rhetorical figure involving the adoption of the voices of the
imagined, absent dead.]
If identification with the victims who could not disidentify with their tormentors constitutes the trap
of prosopopoeia in "Daddy," the trope functions as a trip in "Lady Lazarus." What does it mean to
think of the imperilled Jews as—to borrow a phrase Maurice Blanchot used to approach the
complex subject of Holocaust-related suicides—fetishized "masters of un-mastery"? The wronged
speaker here can only liberate herself from "Herr Doktor" or "Herr Enemy" by wresting the power
of persecution from him and turning it against herself. We know that the ongoingness of the
torments of the Shoah perpetuated postwar suicides, but did those casualties mutate into mystic
scapegoats whose envied status as paradigmatic victims would in turn generate ersatz survivor-
celebrities? This is one way to grasp the shock of "Lady Lazarus," for the narcissistic and
masochistic speaker has become obsessed with dying, relates to it as "a call." With her skin "Bright
as a Nazi lampshade," her foot "A paperweight," and her face "featureless, fine / Jew linen," Lady
Lazarus puts her damage on theatrical display through her scandalous suicide artistry (244). Have
Jews been made to perform the Trauerspiel for a "peanut-crunching crowd" at the movies and on
TV, like the striptease entertainer through whom Plath speaks? Does Lady Lazarus's "charge" at
making death feel "real" and at "the theatrical / / Comeback" anticipate a contemporary
theatricalization of the Holocaust? Certainly, her vengeful warning that "there is a charge / for the
hearing of my heart" evokes the charge—the cheap thrill and the financial price and the emotional
cost—of installations, novels, testimonials, college courses, critical essays, and museums dedicated
to the six million.
The commodification of Lady Lazarus's exhibitionism issues in spectators paying "For a word or a
touch / Or a bit of blood / / Or a piece of my hair or my clothes"; she brags about her expertise at
the art of dying: "I do it so it feels like hell. / I do it so it feels real" (245, emphasis mine). The
spectacular quality of Plath's figure adumbrates the notorious celebrity of a writer like Benjamin
Wilkomirski, whose gruesome bestseller Fragments (about a child's experiences in the camps) was
praised as "free of literary artifice of any kind" before it was judged to be a fraud. In remarks that
gloss Plath's suicide-performer's pandering to her audience, Daniel Ganzfried argued that
Wilkomirski's suicide would be read as an authentication of his identity as a victim: "These people
talking about suicide will suggest it to him. . . . Some of his supporters would love him dead
because then it looks like proof that he's Wilkomirski." Plath's poetry broods upon—just as
Ganzfried's argument reiterates—the contamination of the very idea of the genuine. As Blanchot
cautions, " If there is, among all words, one that is inauthentic, then surely it is the word 'authentic."'
To the extent that the impresario of Plath's stage, "Herr God" / "Herr Lucifer," has reduced Lady
Lazarus from a person to an "opus" or a "valuable," the poem hints that even reverential post-Shoah
remembrances may be always-already defiled by the Nazi perpetrators—that prosopopoeia will not
enable the poet to transcend the tarnished uses to which the past has been, can be, will be put. In the
voice of a denizen of disaster, Plath mocks the frisson stimulated by the cultural industry she herself
helped to spawn.
Revolted by her own dehumanization, Lady Lazarus then imagines triumphing over the murderous
Nazis by turning vengeful herself, if only in the incendiary afterlife conferred by the oven:
Ash, ash—
You poke and stir.
Flesh, bone, there is nothing there—
A cake of soap,
A wedding ring,
A gold filling.
Herr God. Herr Lucifer
Beware
Beware.
Out of the ash
As it feeds on "men like air"—predatory psychic dictators but also perhaps men turned to smoke—
the red rage that rises out of the ashes only fuels self-combustion, debunking the idea of
transcendence or rebirth at the end of the poem. With its ironic echo of the conclusion of
Coleridge's "Kubla Kahn"—"Beware, beware, his flashing eyes, his floating hair"—"Lady Lazarus"
repudiates Romantic wonder at the power of the artist, replacing the magical "pleasure dome" of his
artifice with the detritus to which the Jewish people were reduced. The poem's speech act amounts
to a caustic assessment of the aesthetic sellout, the disaster-imposter luminary: "there is nothing
there—." That no consensus exists among contemporary historians over whether the Nazis made
cakes of soap out of their victims (though they certainly did "manufacture" hair and skin, rings and
fillings and bones) drives home the bitter irony that propels the poem, namely that imaginative
approaches to the Shoah may distort, rather than safeguard, the dreadful but shredded historical
record. Reenactments of the calamity, including her own, are indicted, even as Plath issues a
warning that they will take their toll.
Will the figure of prosopopoeia, so seductive for poets from Jarrell and Plath to Simic and Rich,
outlive its functions as the Holocaust and its atrocities recede into a past to which no one alive can
provide firsthand testimony? Or will the imperatives of "post-memory" imbue this rhetorical
strategy—which insists on returning to the unbearable rupture of suffering—with newfound
resonance once the Shoah can no longer be personally recalled? Given the passage of time as well
as the flood of depictions of the catastrophe, the very vacuity of the desecrated (buried alive,
incinerated, unburied, dismembered) bodies that licensed the personifications of prosopopoeia may
make verse epitaphs seem shoddily inadequate. Plath's taunting sneer—"I turn and burn. / Do not
think I underestimate your great concern" (246)—chronologically preceded the highly profitable
entertainment industry the Holocaust business has so recently become. However, besides
forecasting it, "Lady Lazarus" offers up a chilling warning about the fetishization of suffering with
which the figure of prosopopoeia flirts. Indeed, Plath's verse uncannily stages the bases for
accusations of exploitation, larceny, masochism, and sensationalism that would increasingly accrue
around Holocaust remembrance. In addition, her impersonation of the real victims invariably
generates awareness of the spurious representation put in the place of the absence of evidence.
Calling attention to what Geoffrey Hartman and Jean Baudrillard term our propensity to adopt a
"necrospective," poems deploying prosopopoeia draw us closer to an event that is, simultaneously,
distanced by their debased status as merely simulated and recycled image-substitutions.
from "Prosopopoeia and Holocaust Poetry in English: Sylvia Plath and Her
Contemporaries." Yale Journal of Criticism (2001)
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.
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
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.
12 October 1962

From The Collected Poems by Sylvia Plath, published by Harper & Row. Copyright
© 1981 by the Estate of Sylvia Plath. Used with permission.

On "Daddy"
Guinevara A. Nance and Judith P. Jones

The process of doing away with daddy in the poem represents the persona’s attempts at psychic
purgation of the image, "the model" of a father she has constructed. Her methods, however, are
more akin to magic than murder, since it is through a combination of exorcism and sympathetic
magic that she works to dispossess herself of her own fantasies.
The first twelve stanzas of the poem reveal the extent of the speraker’s possession by what, in
psychoanalytic terms, is the imago of the father—a childhood version of the father which persists
into adulthood. This imago is an amalgamation of real experience and archetypal memories wherein
the speaker’s own psychic oppression is represented in the more general symbol of the Nazi
oppression of the Jews. For example, the man at the blackboard in the picture of the actual father is
transformed symbolically into the "man in black with a Meinkampf look." The connecting link, of
course, between each of these associations is the word "black," which also relates to the shoe in
which the speaker has lived and the swastika "So black no sky could squeak through." Thus the
specific and personal recollections ignite powerful associations with culturally significant symbols.
The fact that the girl is herself "a bit of a Jew" and a bit of a German intensifies her emotional
paralysis before the imago of an Aryan father with whom she is both connected and at enmity.
Commenting on the persona in a BBC interview, Plath herself suggests that the two strains of Nazi
and Jew unite in the daughter "and paralyze each other" so the girl is doubly incapacitated to deal
with her sense of her father, both by virtue of her mixed ethnicity and her childish perspective. As
the persona recalls the father of her early years, she emphasizes and blends the two perspectives of
impotence: that of the child before its father and of the Jew before the Nazi. The child's intimidation
is clear, for example, in "I never could talk to you. / The tongue stuck in my Jaw"; but the sense of
the childhood terror melds into a suggestion of the Jewish persecution and terror with the next line:
"It stuck in a barb wire snare."
What Plath accomplishes by the more or less chronological sequencing of these recollections of
childhood, and on through the twenty year old's attempted suicide to the point at thirty when the
woman tries to extricate herself from her image of daddy, is a dramatization of the process of
psychic purgation in the speaker. The persona's systematic recollection of all the mental projections
of her father amounts to an attempt at dispossession through direct confrontation with a demon
produced in her imagination. Both psychoanalysis and the religious rite of exorcism have regarded
this process of confrontation with the "trauma" or the "demon" as potentially curative; and from
whichever perspective Plath viewed the process, she has her persona confront—in a way almost
relive—her childhood terror of a father whose actual existence is as indistinct as the towns with
which the girl tries to associate him. Plath also accentuates linguistically the speaker's reliving of
her childhood. Using the heavy cadences of nursery rhyme and baby words such as "Chuffing,"
"Achoo," and "gobbledygoo," she employs a technical device similar to Joyce's in A Portrait of the
Artist as a Young Man, where the child's simple perspective is reflected through language. Like
Joyce, Plath wants to recreate with immediacy the child's view. But whereas Joyce evolves his
Stephen Dedalus from the "baby tuckoo" and the "moocow" stage into maturity, she has her speaker
psychically regress to her childhood fantasies, where every German is potentially her father and the
German language seems to be an engine "chuffing" her off to Dachau. Because the persona's past is
pathologically connected to her present, this regression requires minimal distance for the adult
woman who has been unable to relinquish the childish perspective.
[....]
As the language of the poem begins to exclude baby talk and to develop more exclusively the
vocabulary of venom, it signals a change in the persona's method of dealing with this image of the
father. She moves from confrontation with her childhood projections to an abjuration of the total
psychic picture of the father in an attempt at exorcism. Sounding more like Clytemnestra than a
little girl playing Electra, she renounces the deity turned demon with a vengeance in the declaration,
"Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I'm through." The virulence of this and the statements immediately
preceding it indicates a ritualistic attempt to transform the little girl's love into the adult's hatred and
thereby kill the image which has preyed upon her.
The turning point in the poem and in the speaker's efforts to purge herself of the psychological
significance of the father image occurs in the following stanza:
But they pulled me out of the sack,
And they stuck me together with glue.
I made a model of you.
The statement, "I made a model of you," suggests several levels of meaning. On the most obvious
level, the speaker implies that she made of her father a prototype of all men; and this is borne out in
the merging of the father with the man to whom she says "I do, I do." Her image of the "man in
black with a Meinkampf look" is superimposed upon the husband so that instead of having one
unreality to destroy, she has two—the prototypic father and the husband who is fashioned in his
likeness. The poem "Stings" establishes a similar relationship between the dead-imaginary father
and the living but spectral husband:
A third person is watching .
He has nothing to do with the bee-seller or me.
Now he is gone
in eight great bounds, a great scapegoat.
A more complicated implication of the speaker's action in making a model of the father, but one
which is also consonant with the allusions to folklore in the later references to vampirism, concerns
the persona's use of magic to rid herself of the mental impressions associated with her father. The
making of a model, image, or effigy suggests symbolically a reaction not so much to the real father
but to the imago, or projection of his image in the mind of the persona. She employs what Fraser in
The Golden Bough refers to as "sympathetic magic"—a generic term for various forms of magic
which are based on the premise that a correspondence exists between animate and inanimate
objects. One form, homeopathic magic, is predicated on the belief that any representation may
affect what it depicts. For example, a picture of a person, a voodoo doll, or any other sort of
portrayal can, when acted upon, influence its prototype. In "Daddy," it is the model of the father
that the persona destroys; and the solution suggested in the making of the model seems to occur as a
consequence of its association with the speaker's own reconstruction after her attempted suicide,
when she is "stuck . . . together with glue. " Her remodeling, described in a way that recalls the
assembling of a collage, seems to be the associative stimulus for the idea of constructing the model
through which to effect her dispossession. It is this model, a fabricated representation of a distorted
vision of the father—a patchwork mental impression of him—that she seeks to destroy.
[....]
The tension between rebirth and annihilation pervades the Ariel poems and seems to be a
consequence of unreconciled relationships. Plath recognizes her Nazis and vampires to be mental
images of her own creation, but she persists in relating to them as if they were real. Here, as in the
other poems, when she lets go of the image, there is nothing left and she is finished, "through."
Paradoxically, the problem with the exorcism in "Daddy" is not that it fails to work, but that it does
work.
[....]
She roots out the old fixations, but without them she is psychically empty, effaced—as many of the
late poems suggest.
from Concerning Poetry 11:1 (Spring 1978).
Jon Rosenblatt
"Daddy" is, of course, Plath's most extended treatment of the father symbol, though it is by no
means her best poem. The rapid, often wild succession of elements relating to the father are not
entirely integrated into the poem. It opens with a reference to the father's black shoe, in which the
daughter has "lived like a foot," suggesting her submissiveness and entrapment. The poem then
moves to a derisive commentary on the idealized image of the father ("Marble heavy, a bag full of
God") and summarizes his background: his life in a German-speaking part of Poland that was
"Scraped flat by the roller / Of wars" (A, p. 49). The daughter admits here, for the first time in the
poetry, that she was afraid of him. Yet all these references are merely introductory remarks to
prepare the reader for the fantastic "allegory" that is to come. As Plath describes it in her note: "The
poem is spoken by a girl with an Electra complex. Her father died while she thought he was God.
Her case is complicated by the fact that her father was also a Nazi and her mother very possibly part
Jewish. In the daughter the two strains marry and paralyze each other—she has to act out the awful
little allegory once before she is free of it."
Plath's real father was not a Nazi, and her mother was not Jewish. The historical references,
however, allow her to dramatize her rebellion against the oppressive father. The entire poem may
seem to have stretched the permissible limits of analogy. This piece of "light verse," as Plath called
it, constantly shifts between grotesque, childish flights and allusions and deadly serious rage toward
the father-Nazi. On one hand, Plath characterizes her situation in terms of nursery rhymes, recalling
the tale of the old lady in the shoe; and on the other, of Jews being taken off to "Dachau, Auschwitz,
Belsen" (p. 50). The father is a "Panzer-man," but he is also called "gobbledy-goo." German and
English intermix grotesquely:
Ich, ich, ich, ich.
There is a line as startling and compact as this: "Every woman adores a Fascist"; but there is also
the fatuousness of the lines following; "The boot in the face, the brute / Brute heart of a brute like
you" (p. 50). And the end of the poem drops the carefully established Nazi allegory for a piece of
vampire lore. Plath imagines that a vampire-husband has impersonated the dead Nazi-father for
seven years of marriage, drinking the wife's blood, until she has finally put a stake through his heart
(the traditional method of destroying the vampire).
"Daddy" is obviously an attempt to do away altogether with the idealized father; but it also makes
clear how difficult a task that is. Daddy keeps returning in the poem in different guises: statue, shoe,
Nazi, teacher, devil, and vampire. If the starting point of Plath's idealization of the father was the
heroic white patriarch of "Lament," the end point is the black vampire of "Daddy." The father has
been reenvisioned in terms of his sexual dominance, cruelty, and authoritarianism. Ironically, the
father, who was mourned in the earlier poems as the innocent victim of deathly external forces, has
himself been transformed into the agent of death. It is as if the underside of Plath's feelings toward
the father had surfaced, abolishing the entire "epic" that she described in "Electra on Azalea Path"
and replacing it with a new cast of characters and a new plot. The story is no longer the daughter's
attempt to reunite with and to marry the dead father; it is now the daughter's wish to overthrow his
dominance over her imagination and to "kill" him and the man who takes his place—the vampire in
"Daddy," the Nazi in "Lady Lazarus," or the husband in "Purdah." Rebellion and anger supplant the
grief and depression of the earlier poems.
from Sylvia Plath: The Poetry of Initiation. Copyright © 1979 by University of
North Carolina Press.
Paul Breslin
"Daddy" is one of Plath's most detailed autobiographical poems, and perhaps for that reason, it
occasionally takes the shared resonance of private references too much for granted. When Plath
describes her father as a "Ghastly statue with one gray toe / Big as a Frisco seal," the reader may
shrug and mutter, "Oh, well, a harmless touch of surrealism." If one reads Butscher's biography and
learns that Otto Plath's fatal illness began when "he developed a sore on his toe in the middle of
1940 and neglected it completely until he required hospitalization," the literal significance of this
otherwise arbitrary detail becomes clear. But one can read not only "Daddy," but all of the other
poems as well, without finding the literal fact required to remove the lines about the "gray toe" from
the opacity of private symbolism. One might also ask the motive for the portentousness surrounding
the ages ten, twenty, and thirty (which requires Otto Plath to die when his daughter is ten rather than
eight). finally, the association of the father with Nazis becomes somewhat more comprehensible
when we realize that Otto Plath died in 1940. The Plaths, as German Americans, were appalled by
Hitler and followed the news from Europe closely. One can see how, to a child, the death of her
father, roughly coinciding with a terrible threat emanating from the father's country of origin, might
suggest fantasies of Hitler as her father's ghost, striking back from the grave. But all of this is
guesswork based on information withheld from the poem—and withheld, it seems likely, from
Plath's conscious recognition also. To interpret the poem thus is not merely to use biography as a
way of understanding context, but to use it as a counter-text, correcting that of the poem. Such
interpretations may be useful in reconstructing biographical truth, but they will not do for reading
poems.
"Daddy" always makes a powerful and simple effect when read aloud. One hears the gradual release
of suppressed anger, building to the triumphant dismissal: "Daddy, Daddy, you bastard, I'm
through." The simplicity immediately evaporates when one begins to ask what attitude the poem
encourages us to take toward its speaker. To what extent does this voice have the poet's
endorsement? One finds, once the initial impact has worn off, many of the ironic disclaimers
associated with dramatic monologue. By calling the poem "Daddy" rather than, say, "Father," Plath
lets us know that she recognizes the outburst to follow as childish, truer to the child's fantasy of
domination and abandonment than to the adult's reconstruction of the facts. The diction of the poem
keeps reminding us of that childishness: "Achoo" as a verb, "gobbledy-goo," "pretty red heart." The
obsessive repetition, not only of certain words but of the rhyme-sound oo, evokes the doggerel of
playground chants or, more to the point, the stubborn reiterations of a temper tantrum. The poet
shows her awareness that her rage is partly a tantrum by allowing the savagery to be touched with
humor:
But of course they couldn’t know "it was you," since "daddy" is a vampire only in the privacy of the
speaker's fantasy. The joke turns—although one may laugh at it without quite realizing this—on the
brazen ratification of private nightmare as communal good sense.
There is some warrant, then, for claiming that the speaker of "Daddy" does not have the full
endorsement of the poet, who knew very well how excessive the speaker's outburst is and wrote that
knowledge into the poem. On these grounds too, one might defend the poem against Irving Howe's
charge that "there is something monstrous, utterly disproportionate, when tangled emotions about
one's father are deliberately compared with the historical fate of the European Jews." If we argue
that the poet encloses the speaker's point of view within a more mature authorial judgment, we can
claim that the disproportion is deliberate and ironic. The grotesque inflation of private suffering to
the scale of the holocaust would then illustrate the workings of the unconscious, in which such
distortions occur as a matter of course, and would not represent the poet's rational assessment of her
condition. It was not Plath or any other confessional poet, but W. H. Auden who wrote:
Accurate scholarship can
Unearth the whole offense
From Luther until now
That has driven a culture mad,
Find what occurred at Linz,
What huge imago made
A psychopathic god. . . .
If, as Auden's lines would have it, the "psychopathic god" whom the Nazis worshipped as their
Fuhrer was an externalization of typical German fantasies about typical German fathers, why should
we fault Plath for looking through the other end of the telescope, finding in her own fantasies about
"daddy" the stuff of which psychopathic gods are made?
Having made this defense, however, I find that the poem as a whole will not sustain it. Sometimes,
as in the simpering cuteness of "bit my pretty red heart in two" or the impotently furious tautology
of "the brute, brute heart / Of a brute like you," Plath seems intent on making her speaker sound
foolish. But there is no mistaking the dead-serious rage that generates the poem's hypnotic
reiterations. The ironic self-deflation fades in and out without warning:
But the name of the town is common
My Polack friend
But your foot, your root, I never could talk to you.
It stuck in a barb wire snare
Ich, ich, ich, ich,
I could hardly speak
Chuffing me off like a Jew,
One can get dizzy trying to follow the tonal shifts of this passage. The first lines are casual: the
speaker can use the pejorative "Polack," since the friend knows it's a joke. "There are a dozen or
two"—the precise number is of no great concern. "The name of the town is common," after all. One
would never guess, from these three lines alone, the breathless intensity that prevails elsewhere in
the poem. From their perspective, the story of Otto Plath is but one of many like it—many
immigrants came to America from towns like his. But with the next lines, we are back inside the
speaker's haunted psyche: the location of the town becomes a dark secret withheld, another proof
that "I never could talk to you." With the return of the oo rhyme, the obsessive, angry voice that
began the poem returns also. The speaker's comparison of herself to a Jew hauled off "to Dachau,
Auschwitz, Belsen" is chilling, but the last two lines of the passage are again ironic, even
incongruously funny.
Not only does the tone of "Daddy" veer precipitously between the luridly sinister and the self-
deprecatingly clever, there are places where Plath's technical competence simply deserts her. Poems
that ironically bracket the consciousness of the speaker within that of the poet must give assurances
that the poet sees through the language of the speaker, and recognizes, as the speaker does not, its
evasions and failures. Many lines, even whole stanzas, resist enclosure in an ironic discourse:
Panzer-man, panzer-man, O you—
"Scared of you"—this is the speech of childhood, but in earnest. "Gobbledygoo" is also the
language of childhood, but it is applied to the father, not the daughter, and seems to be chosen for
reasons of sound, not sense. Why is "gobbledygoo" parallel to "Luftwaffe," as if it were an equally
dreaded alternative? The rhythm of the last line, moreover, is extremely awkward. The sing-songy
lilt of iambs and anapests suddenly reverses accent in a line of two dactyls followed by an iamb. (I
assume demoted stress on the last syllable of "panzer-man," because otherwise there is total
metrical chaos.) The exclamation "O you," since it cannot raise the already feverish emotional
temperature any further, appears, like "gobbledygoo," to result from carelessness. My point is not
just that the stanza is badly written, although it is, but that it sounds full of conviction, rather than
ironically aware of its own badness. One cannot feel that the poet sees through the speaker's
obsession and presents it to the reader for judgment. My reservations about "Daddy" are similar to
those expressed earlier about "Skunk Hour." Both poems memorably evoke intense and painful
inward states but vacillate in their implicit interpretation of the experience they present. In both, the
language fluctuates between lyrical endorsement and ironic critique of the speaker's despair. Such
vacillation, of course, occurs in the experience of those who struggle against despair or madness,
but if form is not to be mere imitative form, poetry about this kind of experience must clarify the
motives of that vacillation rather than simply reproducing it.
from The Psycho-Political Muse: American Poetry since the Fifties. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1987. Copyright © 1987 by the U of Chicago P.
Mutlu Konuk Blasing

"Daddy" is Plath's most theatrical example of this operation. The "you" of otherness strikes the
keynote of the poem and raises the rhyming to a pitch of compulsive repetition that effectively
drowns out the "I." Even the "do" of action or choice is only an echo of du, the father's ich. The
poem's regressive form is less a "manic defence" against a painful subject than a confirmation of the
defeat of the poet's language, its total surrender to the "you" of otherness:
Ich, ich, ich, ich,
"Ich, ich, ich, ich" is the poem's skeleton, the pure reductive form that supports its four-stress
rhythm. Thus "ich" is also the "barb wire" of a language that checks the poet's tongue and cuts off
her speech by being not hers but Daddy's "I"—already there, already encoded. This "ich" is a
foreign language to the self; its consonants set "a barricade of barb and check" (CP, 50) against the
open vowel "I," which yearns to be free. Yet "ich" rhymes with "speak" and thus makes a mockery
of the "I" 's very drive for self- expression.
If this encoded, anterior, foreign "ich" is Daddy's sign, the daughter's repetition of it can only inflict
pain on her and magnify her separation, and the drama of the father's language silencing the
daughter easily translates into a variety of internal or civil wars. The Nazi-Jew struggle becomes a
recurrent emblem of destructive, preempting, silencing language. "Cut" provides other models: the
poet branches out from her personal pain to Pilgrims, Indians, "Redcoats," "Homunculus,"
"Saboteur," "Kamikaze," "Ku Klux Klan," and "Babushka," for all the "foreign" languages say the
same thing—a Babel of tongues amplifying her inner war with her own "foreign" language. In the
end, she can only circle back to "Dirty girl, / Thumb stump" (CP, 235-36), with its suggestion of
amputation or even castration. And "the thin / Papery feeling" of the cut suggests that the violent
excision of the signifier's force amounts to a reduction of life to writing. Thus Plath's "foot
fetishism" is a perfectly ironic symptom of her "sickness."
from American Poetry: The Rhetoric of Its Forms. New Haven: Yale UP, 1987.
Copyright © 1987.
Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar

In such famous late poems as "Lady Lazarus" and "Daddy" she fantasizes vengeful victories won by
female speakers who openly act for themselves.
From No Man’s Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century,
Volume I, The War of the Words. Copyright © 1998 by Yale University Press.
Robert von Hallberg

It took a long time for readers and critics to appreciate the importance of gender in Plath, and
among confessional poets generally. Lowell confesses to a failure to sympathize adequately with his
father. Plath, though, reveals a severity in her feelings about her father that makes questions of
fairness or sympathy entirely moot. "Daddy, I have had to kill you," she states plainly. Hers is a
stunningly performative poetic:
Here in the last strophe of "Daddy" literal biographical truth is obviously irrelevant. The
construction of a voice -- nasty, proud, murderous -- is what matters. The second and fourth lines
here recover the meanness of an angry child, and the insistent rhymes running through the poems
she composed in a rush just months before her suicide repeatedly evoke the source of strong feeling
in childhood. After two decades in which American and English poets concentrated their efforts on
complications of tone, carefully measured ironies, Plath breaks through to the art of the fantastically
overdone.
From The Cambridge History of American Literature, Volume 8, Poetry and
Criticism, 1940-1995. Ed. Sacvan Bercovitch. Copyright © Cambridge University
Press.
Anne Stevenson
The Ariel poems emerged from an enclosed world - the crucible of Sylvia's inner being. Sometimes
the enclosure is a hospital, sometimes it seems to be a fairground (as with "The Applicant" and
"Lady Lazarus") or monstrous Grand Guignol ("Daddy") where fearsome, larger-than-life puppets
cavort as they might before a mesmerized child. With "Daddy," written on the twelfth, the nursery-
rhyme jingle is incantatory - a deadly spell is being cast. A ferocious rejection of "daddy" is taking
place; the most damning charges imaginable are being hurled at him. Yet the wizardry of this
amazing poem is that its jubilant fury has a sobbing and impassioned undersong. The voice is
finally that of a revengeful, bitterly hurt child storming against a beloved parent.
[. . . .]
Anyone who has heard the recording of "Daddy" that Sylvia made for the British Council that
October will remember the shock of pure fury in her articulation, the smoldering rage with which
she is declaring herself free, both of ghostly father and of husband. The implication is that after this
exorcism her life can begin again, that she will be reborn. And indeed on ethical grounds only a
desperate bid for life and psychic health can even begin to excuse this and several other of the Ariel
poems. . . .
From Bitter Fame: A Life of Sylvia Plath. Copyright © 1989 by Anne Stevenson.
Helen McNeil
In "Daddy," perhaps Plath's most famous poem,. . . Otto Plath appears coded, first as the patriarchal
statue, "Marble-heavy, a bag full of God / Ghastly statue with one gray toe." Then, shockingly, he
becomes a Nazi, playing tormentor to Plath's Jew. Although Otto Plath came from Silesia, in what
was then Germany, he was not a Nazi, nor was his daughter Jewish, nor is there evidence that he
mistreated her. In a classic transference, "Daddy" transforms the abandoned child's unmediated
irrational rage into qualities attributed to its object: if Daddy died and hurt me so, he must be a
bastard; I hate him for his cruelty; everyone else hates him too: "the villagers never liked you.". . .
Plath knew that she hadn't ever completed the process of mourning for her father, and both she and
"Daddy" recognize that in some way she had used Hughes as a double of her lost
father. . . ."Daddy" operates by generating a duplicate of Plath’s presumed psychic state in the
reader, so that we reexperience her grief, rage, masochism, and revenge, whether or not these fit the
‘facts.'
From "Sylvia Plath," in Helen Vendler, ed. Voices and Visions: The Poet in America.
(Random House, 1987).
George Steiner
Born in Boston in 1932 of German and Austrian parents, Sylvia Plath had no personal, immediate
contact with the world of the concentration camps. I may be mistaken, but so far as I know there
was nothing Jewish in her background. But her last, greatest poems culminate in an act of
identification, of total communion with those tortured and massacred. The poet sees herself on
Chuffing me off like a Jew. . . .
Distance is no help; nor the fact that one is 'guilty of nothing'. The dead men cry out of th yew
hedges. The poet becomes the loud cry of their choked silence:
Herr God, Herr Lucifer
Beware
Beware.
Out of the ash
'Lady Lazarus'
Here the almost surrealistic wildness of the gesture is kept in place by the insistent obviousness of
the language and beat; a kind of Hieronymus Bosch nursery rhyme.
Sylvia Plath is only one of a number of young contemporary poets, novelists, and playwrights,
themselves in no way implicates in the actual holocaust, who have done most to counter the general
inclination to forget the death camps. Perhaps it is only those who had no part in the events who
can focus on them rationally and imaginatively; to those who experienced the thing, it has lost the
hard edge of possibility, it has stepped outside the real
Committing the whole of her poetic and formal authority to the metaphor, to the mask of language,
Sylvia Plath became a woman being transported to Auschwitz on the death trains. The notorious
shards of massacre seemed to enter into her own being:
A cake of soap,
A wedding ring,
A gold filling.
'Lady Lazarus'
In 'Daddy' she wrote one of the very few poems I know of in any language to come near the last
horror. It achieves the classic act of generalization, translating a private, obviously intolerable hurt
into a code of plain statement, of instantaneously public images which concern us all. It is the
'Guernica' of modem poetry. And it is both histrionic and, in some ways, ‘arty', as is Picasso's
outcry.
Are these final poems entirely legitimate? In what sense does anyone, himself uninvolved and long
after the event, commit a larceny when he invokes the echoes and trappings of Auschwitz and
appropriates an enormity of ready emotion to his own private design? Was there latent in Sylvia
Plath's sensibility, as in that of many of us who remember only by fiat of imagination, a fearful
envy, a dim resentment at not having been there, of having missed the rendezvous with hell? In and
'Daddy' the realization seems to me so complete. The sheer rawness and control so great, that only
irresistible need could have brought it off. These poems take tremendous risks, extending Sylvia
Plath's essentially austere manner to the very limit. They are a bitter triumph, proof of the capacity
of poetry to give to reality the greater permanence of the imagined. She could not return from them.
From "Dying is an Art." In The Art of Sylvia Plath: A Symposium. Ed. Charles
Newman. Copyright © 1970 by Charles Newman and the Estate of Sylvia Plath
Eileen M. Aird
The poem has already received a good deal of critical attention which has focused on the
autobiographical aspect. The danger of such criticism lies in its assumption that the poem is
objectively 'true', that it bears a precise relationship to the facts of the poet's life. Without a doubt
this poem embodies most forcefully the feeling which runs through her later poetry that the distress
she suffered was in some way connected with her memories of her dead father, but the poem cannot
be literally or historically true. Otto Plath, who was born in 1885 and came to America at the age of
fifteen, died when his daughter was nine and certainly could not have been the active German Nazi
officer of the poem. However he was of pure Prussian descent and one of his daughter's obsessions
was that, given other circumstances, it might have been that he would have become a Nazi. In the
same way her mother, Aurelia Plath, who is of Austrian descent, could have had Jewish blood and if
she had lived in Europe might have become one of the host of murdered Jews. In terms of the poem
itself the mother figure is unimportant; the daughter appropriates the mother's attributes and the
relationship is developed through the father-daughter, Nazi-Jew complexity. Questioned about this
poem by Peter Orr, Sylvia Plath explained:
In particular my background is, may I say, German and Austrian. On one side I am
first generation American, on one side I am second generation American, and so my
concern with concentration camps and so on is uniquely intense. And then, again,
I'm rather a political person as well, so I suppose that's part of what it comes from.
When she described the poem at another time she did so in dramatic terms which included no overt
hint that the situation described was her own:
The poem is spoken by a girl with an Electra complex. Her father died while she
thought he was God. Her case is complicated by the fact that her father was also a
Nazi and her mother very possibly part-Jewish. In the daughter the two strains marry
and paralyse each other--she has to act out the awful little allegory before she is free
of it.
The poem exploits Freudian psychology which argues that the child is, at some stages in its
development, 'in love' with the parent. The girl reacts with hate for the father who has made her
suffer by dying at such a point in her development. The description of the father as 'marble-heavy'
and a 'ghastly statue' reveals the ambivalence of her attitude for he is also associated with the beauty
of the sea. The image of the father as a statue echoes the similar conception of 'The Colossus'; here,
as in the earlier poem, the statue is of huge and awesome proportions. The ambivalent feelings of
fear and love have remained with the daughter as an obsession which dwarfs and restricts her own
life, and in an attempt to rid herself of it she must ritually destroy the memory of the father:
You died before I had time--
She first attempted to do this by joining the father through suicide but then found an escape through
marriage to a man with many of the father's characteristics:
The psychological is only one aspect of the poem however. Sylvia Plath extends the reference by
making the father a German Nazi and the girl a Jew, so that on a historical and actual, as well as on
an emotional level their relationship is that of torturer and tortured. The boot image of the first verse
can now be seen not only as an effective image for the obsessional nature of the daughter's neurosis,
but also as carrying suggestions of the brutality associated with the father as Nazi officer. The
transition from father-daughter to the Nazi-Jew relationship is simply and dramatically effected.
The hatred of the daughter merges into the emotional paralysis of her recognition, as Jew, of him as
Nazi: 'I never could talk to you. / The tongue stuck in my jaw.' The jaw becomes the barbed wire of
the concentration camps, and the repeated self-assertive 'Ich' of the German language recalls the
sound of the engines carrying Jews to the camps. In revolt from the obscenity of the language--
which is an extension of the emotional revolt against the father--the daughter begins to talk like a
Jew, that is she identifies herself with the archetypal, suffering Jew of the camps. She now describes
the father as a Nazi officer and no longer associates him with God but with a swastika 'So black no
sky could squeak through'. The theme of intermingled love and hate arises again as the daughter
comments on the sexual fascination of cruelty:
It finds a further echo in the description of the husband who is also 'A man in black with a
Meinkampf look', who has been chosen for his similarity to the father in the hope that his presence
will exorcise the daughter's obsession.
A. Alvarez recalls that Sylvia Plath described this poem as 'light verse':
When she first read me this poem a few days after she wrote it, she called it a piece
of 'light verse'. It obviously isn't, yet equally obviously it also isn't the racking
personal confession that a mere description or précis of it might make it sound.
The significance of such a term applied to 'Daddy' becomes clearer if we consider the theory of light
verse held by W. H. Auden. Auden has written:
Light verse can be serious. It has only come to mean vers de société, Triolets,
smoke-room limericks, because under the social conditions which produced the
Romantic Revival, and which have persisted, more or less, ever since, it has only
been in trivial matters that poets have felt in sufficient intimacy with their audience
to be able to forget themselves and their singing-robes.
Auden equates the writing of 'light verse' with a homogeneous and slowly changing society in
which the interests and perceptions of most men are similar; difficult poetry is produced in an
unstable society from which the poet feels detached. Undoubtedly, at the time of writing, Auden
saw himself as belonging to an unstable society, and his use of 'light verse’ is highly sophisticated
in that he consciously adopted it as a means of communication for his social criticism; it is not,
according to Auden, the natural way in which any modern poet would express himself. 'Daddy' may
reasonably be said to be 'light' in the sense that Auden's early poetry is ‘light'. This quality is purely
an attribute of form and does not in any way characterise the subject which is fully serious. The
strong, simple rhythm, the full rhymes and subtle half-rhymes, the repetitive, incantatory vowel-
sounds sweep the poem along in a jaunty approximation to a ballad. The mood of the poem is
conversational, the daughter directly addresses the memory of the father with energy and feeling.
The vocabulary is simple, the last line scenting almost too indulgently colloquial until we realise
that the strategy of the whole poem has been to undermine emotion. When Sylvia Plath described
this poem as 'a piece of light verse' she was focusing our attention on the flippant, choppy,
conversational swing of the poem which, with its dramatic structure, gives a measure of
impersonality to a subject which, less surely handled, could have been destroyed by either self-pity
or sensationalism.
From Sylvia Plath: her Life and Work. Copyright © 1973 by Eileen M. Aird
Margaret Dickie
In "Daddy" and a number of other late poems, the most difficult problem is the effort to assess the
poet's relationship to her speaker. Because "Daddy" calls upon specific incidents in Plath's
biography (her suicide attempts, her father's death, her marriage), we are tempted to identify the
poet and the speaker directly, although such an identification cannot account for the fact that Plath
employs techniques of caricature, hyperbole, and parody that serve to distance the speaker from the
poet and at the same time to project onto the speaker a strange version of the poet's own strategies.
"Daddy" becomes a demonstration of the mind confronting its own suffering and trying to control
what it feels controls it. The speaker's simplistic language, rhyme, and rhythm become one means
by which she attempts to charm and hold off the evil spirits. Another means is the extreme facility
of her image-making. The images themselves are important for what they tell us of her sense of
being victimized and victimizer; but more significant than the actual image is the swift ease with
which she can turn it to various uses. For example, she starts out imagining herself as a prisoner
living like a foot in the black shoe of her father. Then she casts her father in her own role; he
becomes "one grey toe / Big as a Frisco seal," and then quickly she is looking for his foot, his root.
Next he reverts to the original boot identity, and she is the one with "The boot in the face."
Immediately she finds "A cleft in your chin instead of your foot." At the end she sees the villagers
stamping on him. Thus she moves from booted to booter as her father reverses the direction, and the
poem's sympathies for the booted or booter shift accordingly.
The mind that works in this way is neither logical nor psychologically penetrating; it is simply
extremely adept at juggling images. And it is caught in its own strategies. The speaker can control
her terrors by forcing them into images, but she seems to have no understanding of the confusion
her wild image-making betrays. When she identifies herself as a foot, she suggests that she is
trapped; but when she calls her father a foot, the associations break down. In the same way, when
she caricatures her father as a Fascist and herself as a Jew, she develops associations of torture
which are not exactly reversed when she reverses the identification and calls herself the killer of her
vampire-father. The speaker here can categorize and manipulate her feelings in name-calling, in
rituals, in images - but these are only techniques, and her frenzied use suggests that she employs
those methods in the absence of any others. When she says, "Daddy, I have had to kill you," she
seems to realize the necessity of the exorcism and to understand the ritual she performs, but the
frantic pitch of the language and the swift switches of images do not confirm any self-
understanding. The pace of the poem reveals its speaker as one driven by a hysterical need for
complete control, a need arising from a fear that without such control she will be destroyed. Her
simple, incantatory monologue is the perfect vehicle of expression for the orderly disordered mind.
In talking to A. Alvarez, Plath called her late poems "light verse." "Daddy" does not seem to fall
easily into that category, despite its nonsense rhymes and rhythms, its quickly flicking images. It is
neither decorous nor playful. On the other hand, considering its subject, it is neither ponderous nor
serious. Above all it offers no insight into the speaker, no mitigating evidence, no justification.
Perhaps Plath's classification is clear only if we consider her speaker a parodic version of the poet -
and, of course, if she were consciously borrowing from Hughes's animal poems, these poems must
be read as a comment on his poetic voice as well. Plath's speaker manipulates her terror in singsong
language and thus delivers herself in "light verse" that employs its craft in holding off its subject.
For all the frankness of this poem, the name-calling and blaming, the dark feeling that pervades it is
undefined, held back rather than revealed by the technique. The poet who has created such a
speaker knows the speaker's strategies because they are a perverted version of her own, and that is
the distinction between the speaker's "light verse" and the poet's serious poem. If this poem comes
out of Plath's own emotional experience, as she said her poem did, it is not an uninformed cry from
the heart. Rather, Plath chooses to deal with her experience by creating characters who could not
deal with their own experiences and, through their rituals, demonstrate their failure.
[. . . .]
Plath's poem shows the limitations of the mind that operates only to rehearse the perfect kill. . . .
"Daddy" is a poem of revenge, and its violence is a reaction against torture. . . .
Plath's depiction of the monomaniacal daughter-victim-killer suggests she was aware that such a
figure was far from a genius. The simplicity of her language matches the simplicity of her thinking;
in fact, her violent rage has subsumed all other feelings or thoughts. . . .The father-husband figure
whom she finally kills is then a "Panzer-man," "A man in black with a Meinkampf look," emblem
of all the black men who have loomed as threatening forces in her poetry.
From Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes. Copyright © 1979 by the Board of Trustees of
the University of Illinois.
Charles Molesworth
When I speak of Plath's concealment I want to stress the counterforce of her confessional impulses,
of the part of her poetic temperament that makes her turn a poem about the hatefulness of her father
into a quasi ritual, a Freudian initiation into the circlings we create around our darkest secrets.
Strangely Transylvanian and oddly chthonic, the father in "Daddy" is one only someone under
analysis, or perhaps an adept in advanced comparative mythology, could easily identify. But so
great is the pain borne by the poet's exacerbated sensibility that only the appropriation of the
greatest crimes against humanity will serve as adequate counters for it:
And your neat moustache
Panzer-man, panzer-man, O You--
Every woman adores a Fascist.
Here the repetitions, the insistent rhyming on the ou sound, and the tone of mixed contempt and
fascination all serve to mimic and perhaps to exercise a child's fixation on authority, self-hatred, and
guilt. Who but a supreme egotist could take the plight of the victims of genocide as the adequate
measure of her own alienation? Perhaps if we didn't know the comfortable bourgeois background of
Plath's family, we could say the poem was about authority "in general," about the feminists' need to
make clear the far-reaching power of chauvinist "enemies." But instead we hear the tones of a
spoiled child mixing with the poem's mythical resonances. Indeed, the petulance of the voice here,
its sheer unreasonableness masked as artistic frenzy, found wide and ready acceptance among a
large audience.
From The Fierce Embrace: A Study of Contemporary American Poetry. Copyright ©
1979 by the Curators of the University of Missouri.
Alan Williamson
Archetypally, Plath's father is represented either as godlike but fragmentary, protean, inaccessible
("The Colossus," "Full Fathom Five," or else as the dark father, the Nazi and torturer. That this
latter image is archetypal, the biographers, I hope, have made clear enough: in life Otto Plath, far
from being a Nazi, left the Kaiser's Germany partly because he was a militant pacifist. Possibly the
image stems from Plath's early anger at her father as a Prussian "autocrat"; yet her longing for him
is so evident, in The Bell Jar and elsewhere, that one's mind is drawn more to the traditional
etiology of masochism. In place of what is really feared--abandonment, indifference--malignity or
persecution is substituted, both because it implies concern, or at least involvement, intention, on the
part of the other, and because it constitutes a very high degree of presence. Nothing is so unlike the
inaccessibility of a corpse as the intrusiveness of a tyrant, a jailer, a torturer. In an oblique way,
"Daddy" seems to acknowledge all this. At a point in the poem when the Nazi theme has reached a
pitch of hysterical inarticulacy ("the brute / Brute heart of a brute like you"), the father's real image
suddenly comes to mind, and there is a comic incongruity:
You stand at the blackboard, daddy,
In the picture I have of you,
The speaker seems suddenly half-aware that the fantasy image needs defending, and the true
grounds of reproach—as well as a much more loving underlying feeling--slip out:
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.
The father's negative omnipresence, while it conveys a truth about the state of obsessive mourning,
also expresses an unappeased wish on the part of the hurt little girl whose voice can still be heard
here.
[. . . .]
[T]he vampire mythology of "Daddy" . . . confirms the Laingian presupposition that intimacy saps
one's limited stock of vital forces, threatens one's very being. But, by a deeper logic, if men are the
undead, it means that they are the dead: the "dead lover," the dead father, returning in his death-
denying disguise of omnipotent will. To find love a negative, obliterating experience is thus to feel
reunited with the father. Insofar as the "blood flood" signifies menstrual blood, it is also to become
one with the barren moon-goddess, the evil father's consorts In this overdetermination, we come
very near the core of the masochist theme in Plath's work.
"Daddy" represents a vengeful literary assimilation, after the separation, of Plath's marriage to the
same complex, and the same ritual. To reproduce the (masochistically transformed) image of the
father, she has chosen a man for his dominating, sadistic qualities, regarding even his sexuality, like
Marco's or Irwin's, as a torture instrument:
And yet the opening premise itself ("I made a model of you") implies the possibility that she has
merely imagined him this way, or else made him this way by her will to respond only to this
element in him; and thereby has, in a sense, destroyed him, or at least the relationship ("If I've killed
one man, I've killed two"). It is, after all, the destruction of the model that makes the voodoo rite of
exorcism effective. There is a burden of guilt as well as abusiveness to this passage, which can only
be glossed over if it is to be read as a straightforward attack on the husband's character. Rather, the
poem, here as in the passage quoted earlier, wavers near the Jungian therapeutic point at which the
archetype becomes so inflated that it can no longer be imposed on a living, or even a dead, person.
If the separation is not completed, it is perhaps because the archetype is occasioned by an absence,
not a presence; so that, grim as it is, it alone offers the possibility of connection. As Holbrook has
pointed out, the concluding rhyme-word "through" means not only through with the father in his
vampire disguise, but through to the father where he actually is--in the grave.
It should be clear why--without denying Plath insight into the social harmfulness of
supermasculinity as an ideal--I disagree with a radical feminist interpretation of her work. Its
burden, on the more intimate level, seems to me not sexual "oppression" but the ambiguous
attractions a more-than-human Other may hold for ego weakness in either sex. Plath's writings
describe a complex of feelings in which (as in the masculine Madonna complex) the other sex does
not easily ‘scape whipping. If men are figures of indomitable will, they are morally beyond the
pale--as in the lines from "Three Women": "It is these men I mind.... They are jealous gods / That
would have the whole world flat because they are." But if they are not gods, the note of sexual
contempt for "small" men quickly becomes audible. It was Plath's strength, and a good deal of her
despair, that she realized--if not precisely this--the possibility that deep conflicts among her
conscious and unconscious values and wishes might have made her unhappiness almost inevitable.
From Introspection and Contemporary Poetry. Copyright © 1984 by the President
and Fellows of Harvard College.
Marjorie Perloff
As in the case of "The Applicant," Sylvia Plath's explanation of "Daddy" in her BBC script is
purposely evasive. "The poem," she says, "is spoken by a girl with an Electra complex. Her father
died while she thought he was God. Her case is complicated by the fact that her father was also a
Nazi and her mother very possibly part Jewish. In the daughter the two strains marry and paralyze
each other--she has to act out the awful little allegory once before she is free of it." As such,
"Dadddy" has been extravagantly praised for its ability "to elevate private facts into public myth,"
for dramatizing the "schizophrenic situation that gives the poem its terrifying but balanced
polarity"-polarity, that is to say, between the hatred and the love the "I" feels for the image of the
father/lover.
But after what we might call its initial "Guernica effect" had worn off somewhat, "Daddy" was also
subjected to some hard questions as critics began to wonder whether its satanic imagery is
meaningful, whether, for example, lines like "With your Luftwaffe, your gobbledygoo" or "Not God
but a swastika / So black no sky could squeak through" are more than fairly cheap shots, demanding
a stock response from the reader. Indeed, both the Nazi allegory and the Freudian drama of trying to
die so as to "get back, back, back to you" can now be seen as devices designed to camouflage the
real thrust of the poem, which is, like "Purdah," a call for revenge against the deceiving husband.
For the real enemy is less Daddy ("I was ten when they buried you")--a Daddy who, in real life, had
not the slightest Nazi connection--than the model made by the poet herself in her father's image:
The black telephone's off at the root,
The voices just can't worm through.
The image of the telephone is one that Plath's early admirers like George Steiner or Stephen
Spender simply ignored, but with the hindsight a reading of the Collected Poems gives us, we
recognize it, of course, as the dreaded "many-holed earpiece," the "muck funnel" of "Words heard,
by accident. over the phone." And indeed, the next stanza refers to the "vampire" who "drank my
blood for a year, / Seven years if you want to know." This is a precise reference to the length of
time Sylvia Plath had known Ted Hughes when she wrote "Daddy"--precise as opposed to the
imaginary references to Plath's father as "panzer-man" and "Fascist."
A curiously autobiographical poem, then, whose topical trappings ("Luftwaffe," "swastika,"
"Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen") have distracted the attention of a generation of readers from the
poem's real theme. Ironically, "Daddy" is a "safe" poem--and hence Hughes publishes it--because
no one can chide Plath for her Electra complex, her longing to get back to the father who died so
prematurely, whereas the hatred of Hughes ("There's a stake in your fat black heart") is much more
problematic. The Age Demanded a universal theme--the rejection not only of the "real" father but
also of the Nazi Father Of Us All--hence the label "the Guernica of modern poetry" applied to
"Daddy" by George Steiner. But the image of a black telephone that must be torn from the wall--
this, so the critics of the sixties would have held, is not a sufficient objective correlative for the
poet's despairing vision. The planting of the stake in the "fat black heart" is, in any case, a final
farewell to the ceremony of marriage ("And I said I do, I do"). What follows is "Fever 103"' and the
metamorphosis of self that occurs in the Bee poems.
From Poetic License: Essays on Modernist and Postmodernist Lyric. Copyright ©
1990 by Majorie Perloff.
A.R. Jones
The rhythm of a poem such as 'Daddy' has its basis in nursery rhyme, and in this respect may be
compared with the rhythms used by the witches in Macbeth--or, more recently, by T. S. Eliot in
Sweeney Agonistes--a dramatic fragment surprisingly close to Sylvia Plath's poem in feeling and
theme. The rhythmic patterns are extremely simple, almost incantatory, repeated and giving a very
steady return. The first line, for example, 'You do not do, you do not do', with its echoes of the
witches winding up their sinister spell, 'I'll do, I'll do, and I'll do' or T. S. Eliot's repetition of 'How
do you do. How do you do' denies the affirmation of the marriage service which is later introduced
into the poem, 'And I said I do, I do', and suggests a charm against some brooding but largely
undefined curse. As in nursery ryhme, the force, almost compulsive, of the rhythmical pattern of the
poem gives a sense of certainty, psychologically a sense of security, to a world of otherwise
remarkably haphazard and threatening events. The dilemma of the old woman who lived in the
shoe, of Dr. Foster, or of Miss Muffet terrified by the spider, is largely contained and appears
acceptable and almost reassuring in the comforts of an incantatory rhythmical pattern, for order is
imposed, often, indeed, superimposed, on an otherwise fortuitous and even terrifying reality. Also
the subject of the nursery rhyme tends to accept his situation with something like a matter-of-fact
stoicism; often he seems to co-operate with the events that beset him.
The effectiveness of 'Daddy' can largely be accounted for by Sylvia Plath's success in associating
the world of the poem with this structure of the nursery rhyme world, a world of carefully contained
terror in which rhythm and tone are precariously weighed against content to produce a hardly
achieved balance of tensions.
Sylvia Plath's persona exemplifies, she has said, the Electra complex and is involved in the classical
psychological dilemma of hatred for her mother, with whom she identifies herself, and love for her
German father whom she rejects as tyrannous, brutal and life-denying. The animus that sustains her
is both directed towards the father and driven in on herself as if, in the wish to prove her love for
those who persecute her, she must outdo them in persecuting herself. The area of experience on
which the poem depends for its images is rawly personal, even esoteric, and yet she manages to
elevate private facts into public myth, and the sheer intensity of her vision lends it a kind of
objectivity. The detachment she achieves in this sudden, terrifying insight into a private world of
suffering and humiliation far from dragging the reader into a vortex of suffering and humiliation
releases him into a sense of objectivity and fierce emotions. The central insight is that of the
persona, her awareness of her own schizophrenia, of herself as a victim, a centre of pain and
persecution; but there is also awareness of a love/hate relation with those responsible for
persecuting her. It is this insight into her schizophrenic situation that gives the poem its terrifying
but balanced polarity; the two forces, persecutor and victim, are brought together because the
persona cannot completely renounce the brutality which is embodied in the father/lover image
without also renouncing the love she feels for the father/lover figure. The love/hate she feels is the
very centre of her emotional life without which she can have neither emotion nor life. In this sense
she can be said to cooperate with those that persecute her and, indeed, to connive at her own
suffering. As in nursery rhyme, the heroine loves her familiar terrors.
The main area of conflict in the poem is not that covered by the relation of persecutors and
persecuted but is within the psyche of the persecuted herself. It is between the persona as suffering
victim as detached, discriminating will. In this poem the takes the diseased psyche takes the place of
sensibility and the problem is to establish the relations between subconscious psyche and conscious
will. Torn between love and violence, the persona moves towards self-knowledge, the awareness
that she love the violence or, at least, towards the recognition that the principles of love and
violence are so intimately associated one with the other that the love can only express itself in terms
of the violence. By accepting the need for love, she exposes herself to the pain and humiliation of a
brutal persecution. The traditional associations of love with tenderness, respect, beauty, and so on,
have been utterly destroyed; love is now associated with brutality, contempt and sadistic ugliness.
Love does not bring happiness but only torture, 'the rack and the screw'. Moreover, far from
admiring the traditional qualities of a lover, the poem insists that:
Furthermore, brutality is not only a necessary part of love but is also a central and inevitable
principle of life. In the last stanza of the poem the community itself joins the heroine in a savage,
primitive ritual of brutality--
The poem avoids self-pity by hardening its tone into one of self-contempt. The persona is divided
and judges itself The only escape from such self-knowledge is in death which the poem
acknowledges not only as a release but also as a refining and purifying force, a way of cleansing. It
is not annihilation of the personality but the freeing of it from the humiliating persecution of love
and violence.
The poem is a terrifyingly intimate portrait, but it achieves something much more than the
expression of a personal and despairing grief. The poem is committed to the view that this ethos of
love/brutality is the dominant historical ethos of the last thirty years. The tortured mind of the
heroine reflects the tortured mind of our age. The heroine carefully associates herself and her
suffering with historical events. For instance, she identifies herself with the Jews and the atrocities
of 'Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen' and her persecutors with Fascism and the cult of violence. The
poem is more than a personal statement for by extending itself through historical images it defines
the age as schizophrenic, torn between brutality and a love which in the end can only manifest
itself, today, in images of violence. This love, tormented and perverse, is essentially life-denying:
the only escape is into the purifying freedom of death. This is the hideous paradox, that the only
release from a world that denies the values of love and life is in the world of death. The nursery
rhyme structure of the poem lends this paradox the force of rnatter-of-fact reasonableness and an air
of almost reasonable inevitability. In this we are persuaded almost to co-operate with the destructive
principle--indeed, to love the principle as life itself
From "On ‘Daddy’"" in The Art of Sylvia Plath: A Symposium. Ed. Charles
Newman. Copyright © 1970 by Charles Newman and the Estate of Sylvia Plath.
Jacqueline Rose
For a writer who has so consistently produced outrage in her critics, nothing has produced the
outrage generated by Sylvia Plath's allusions to the Holocaust in her poetry, and nothing the outrage
occasioned by 'Daddy', which is just one of the poems in which those allusions appear. Here is one
such critic, important only for the clarity with which he lays out the terms of such a critique, Leon
Wieseltier is reviewing Dorothy Rabinowicz's New Lives: Survivors of the Holocaust in an article
entitled 'In a Universe of Ghosts', published in The New York Review of Books:
Auschwitz bequeathed to all subsequent art perhaps the most arresting of all possible
metaphors for extremity, but its availability has been abused. For many it was Sylvia
Plath who broke the ice . . . In perhaps her most famous poem, 'Daddy,’ she was
explicit . . . There can be no disputing the genuineness of the pain here. But the Jews
with whom she identifies were victims of something worse than 'weird luck'.
Whatever her father did to her, it could not have been what the Germans did to the
Jews. The metaphor is inappropriate . . . I do not mean to lift the Holocaust out of the
reach of art. Adorno was wrong—poetry can be made after Auschwitz and out of
it . . . But it cannot be done without hard work and rare resources of the spirit.
Familiarity with the hellish subject must be earned, not presupposed. My own feeling
is that Sylvia Plath did not earn it, that she did not respect the real
incommensurability to her own experience of what took place.
It is worth looking at the central terms on which this passage turns—the objection to Plath's
identification with the Jew: 'the Jews with whom she identifies'; to the terms of that identification
for introducing chance into Jewish history (into history): 'victims of something worse than "weird
luck"'; above all, to Plath's failure to recognise the 'incommensurability to her experience of what
took place'. Wieseltier is not alone in this criticism. Similarly, Joyce Carol Oates objects to Plath
'snatching [her word] metaphors for her predicament from newspaper headlines'; Seamus Heaney
argues that in poems like 'Lady Lazarus', Plath harnesses the wider cultural reference to a
'vehemently self-justifying purpose'; Irving Howe describes the link as 'monstrous, utterly
disproportionate'; and Marjorie Perloff describes Plath's references to the Nazis as 'empty' and
'histrionic', 'cheap shots', 'topical trappings', 'devices' which 'camouflage' the true personal meaning
of the poems in which they appear. On a separate occasion, Perloff compares Plath unfavourably to
Lowell for the absence of any sense of personal or social history in her work. The two objections
seem to cancel and mirror each other—history is either dearth or surplus, either something missing
from Plath's writing or something which shouldn't be there.
In all these criticisms, the key concept appears to be metaphor—either Plath trivialises the
Holocaust through that essentially personal (it is argued) reference, or she aggrandises her
experience by stealing the historical event. The Wieseltier passage makes it clear, however, that if
the issue is that of metaphor (‘Auschwitz bequeathed to all subsequent art perhaps the most
arresting of all possible metaphors for extremity’) what is at stake finally is a repudiation of
metaphor itself—that is, of the necessary difference or distance between its two terms: 'Whatever
her father did to her it cannot be what the Germans did to the Jews.' Plath's abuse (his word) of the
Holocaust as metaphor (allowing for a moment that this is what it is) rests on the demand for
commensurability, not to say identity, between image and experience, between language and event.
In aesthetic terms, what Plath is being criticised for is a lack of 'objective correlative' (Perloff
specifically uses the term). But behind Wieseltier's objection, there is another demand—that only
those who directly experienced the Holocaust have the right to speak of it—speak of it in what must
be, by implication, non-metaphorical speech. The allusion to Plath in his article is there finally only
to make this distinction—between the testimony of the survivors represented in Rabinowicz's book
and the poetic metaphorisation (unearned, indirect, incommensurate) of Plath.
Turn the opening proposition of this quotation around, therefore, and we can read in it, not that
'Auschwitz bequeathed the most arresting of all possible metaphors for extremity', but that in
relation to literary representation—or at least this conception of it—Auschwitz is the place where
metaphor is arrested, where metaphor is brought to a halt. In this context, the critique of Plath
merely underlines the fact that the Holocaust is the historical event which puts under greatest
pressure—or is most readily available to put under such pressure—the concept of linguistic
figuration. For it can be argued (it has recently been argued in relation to the critic Paul de Man)
that, faced with the reality of the Holocaust, the idea that there is an irreducibly figurative
dimension to all language is an evasion, or denial, of the reality of history itself. But we should
immediately add here that in the case of Plath, the question of metaphor brings with it—is
inextricable from—that of fantasy and identification in so far as the image most fiercely objected to
is the one which projects the speaker of the poem into the place of a Jew. The problem would seem
to be, therefore, not the slippage of meaning, but its fixing—not just the idea of an inherent
instability, or metaphoricity, of language, but the very specific fantasy positions which language can
be used to move into place. Criticism of 'Daddy' shows the question of fantasy, which has appeared
repeatedly as a difficulty in the responses to Plath's writing, in its fullest historical and political
dimension.
In this final chapter, I want to address these objections by asking what the representation of the
Holocaust might tell us about this relationship between metaphor, fantasy and identification, and
then ask whether Sylvia Plath’s ‘Daddy’ might not mobilize something about that relationship itself.
The issue then becomes not whether Plath has the right to represent the Holocaust, but what the
presence of the Holocaust in her poetry unleashes, or obliges us to focus, about representation as
such.
[. . .]
'Daddy' is a much more difficult poem to write about. It is of course the poem of the murder of the
father which at the very least raises the psychic stakes. It is, quite simply, the more aggressive
poem. Hence, no doubt, its founding status in the mythology of Sylvia Plath. Reviewing the
American publication of Ariel in 1966, Time magazine wrote:
Within a week of her death, intellectual London was hunched over copies of a
strange and terrible poem she had written during her last sick slide toward suicide.
'Daddy' was its title; its subject was her morbid love-hatred of her father; its style
was as brutal as a truncheon. What is more, 'Daddy' was merely the first jet of flame
from a literary dragon who in the last months of her life breathed a burning river of
bale across the literary landscape.
Writing on the Holocaust, Jean-François Lyotard suggests that two motifs tend to operate in tension,
or to the mutual exclusion of each other—the preservation of memory against forgetfulness and the
accomplishment of vengeance. Do 'Little Fugue' and 'Daddy' take up the two motifs one after the
other, or do they present something of their mutual relation, the psychic economy that ties them
even as it forces them apart? There is a much clearer narrative in 'Daddy'—from victimisation to
revenge. In this case it is the form of that sequence which has allowed the poem to be read purely
personally as Plath's vindictive assault on Otto Plath and Ted Hughes (the transition from the first to
the second mirroring the biographical pattern of her life). Once again, however, it is only that
preliminary privileging of the personal which allows the reproach for her evocation of history—
more strongly this time, because this is the poem in which Plath identifies with the Jew.
The first thing to notice is the trouble in the time sequence of this poem in relation to the father, the
technically impossible temporality which lies at the centre of the story it tells, which echoes that
earlier impossibility of language in 'Little Fugue':
DADDY
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.
You died before I had time—
Ghastly statue, with one gray toe
Big as a Frisco seal
In the waters off beautiful Nauset.
I used to pray to recover you.
Ach, du.
What is the time sequence of these verses? On the one hand, a time of unequivocal resolution, the
end of the line, a story that once and for all will be brought to a close: 'You do not do, you do not
do/Any more'. This story is legendary. It is the great emancipatory narrative of liberation which
brings, some would argue, all history to an end. In this case, it assimilates, combines into one entity,
more than one form of oppression—daughter and father, poor and rich—licensing a reading which
makes of the first the meta-narrative of all forms of inequality (patriarchy the cause of all other
types of oppression, which it then subordinates to itself). The poem thus presents itself as protest
and emancipation from a condition which reduces the one oppressed to the barest minimum of
human, but inarticulate, life: ‘Barely daring to breathe or Achoo’ (it is hard not to read here a
reference to Plath’s sinusitis). Blocked, hardly daring to breathe or to sneeze, this body suffers
because the father has for too long oppressed.
If the poem stopped here then it could fairly be read, as it has often been read, in triumphalist terms
—instead of which it suggests that such an ending is only a beginning, or repetition, which
immediately finds itself up against a wholly other order of time: 'Daddy, I have had to kill you./
You died before I had time.' In Freudian terms, this is the time of 'Nachtraglichkeit' or after-effect:
a murder which has taken place, but after the fact, because the father who is killed is already dead; a
father who was once mourned ('I used to pray to recover you') but whose recovery has already been
signalled, by what precedes it in the poem, as the precondition for his death to be repeated.
Narrative as repetition—it is a familiar drama in which the father must be killed in so far as he is
already dead. This at the very least suggests that, if this is the personal father, it is also what
psychoanalysis terms the father of individual prehistory, the father who establishes the very
possibility (or impossibility) of history as such. It is through this father that the subject discovers—
or fails to discover—her own history, as at once personal and part of a wider symbolic place. The
time of historical emancipation immediately finds itself up against the problem of a no less
historical, but less certain, psychic time.
This is the father as godhead, as origin of the nation and the word—graphically figured in the image
of the paternal body in bits and pieces spreading across the American nation state: bag full of God,
head in the Atlantic, big as a Frisco seal. Julia Kristeva terms this father 'Pere imaginaire', which
she then abbreviates ‘PI’. Say those initials out loud in French and what you get is 'pays' (country or
nation)—the concept of the exile. Much has been made of Plath as an exile, as she goes back and
forth between England and the United States. But there is another history of migration, another
prehistory, which this one overlays—of her father, born in Grabow, the Polish Corridor, and her
mother's Austrian descent: 'you are talking to me as a general American. In particular, my
background is, may I say, German and Austrian.
If this poem is in some sense about the death of the father, a death both willed and premature, it is
no less about the death of language. Returning to the roots of language, it discovers a personal and
political history (the one as indistinguishable from the other) which once again fails to enter into
words:
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
Ich, ich, ich, ich,
Twice over, the origins of the father, physically and in language, are lost—through the wars which
scrape flat German tongue and Polish town, and then through the name of the town itself, which is
so common that it fails in its function to identify, fails in fact to name. Compare Claude Lanzmann,
the film-maker of Shoah, on the Holocaust as 'a crime to forget the name', or Lyotard: 'the
destruction of whole worlds of names'. Wars wipe out names, the father cannot be spoken to, and
the child cannot talk, except to repeat endlessly, in a destroyed obscene language, the most basic or
minimal unit of self-identity in speech: 'ich, ich, ich, ich' (the first draft has ‘incestuous' for
'obscene'). The notorious difficulty of the first-person pronoun in relation to identity—its status as
shifter, the division or splitting of the subject which it both carries and denies—is merely
compounded by its repetition here. In a passage taken out of her journals, Plath comments on this 'I':
I wouldn't be I. But I am I now; and so many other millions are so irretrievably their
own special variety of 'I’ that I can hardly bear to think of it. I: how firm a letter;
how reassuring the three strokes: one vertical, proud and assertive, and then the two
short horizontal lines in quick, smug, succession. The pen scratches on the paper
I . . . I . . . I . . . I . . . I . . . I.
The effect, of course, if you read it aloud, is not one of assertion but, as with 'ich, ich, ich, ich', of
the word sticking in the throat. Pass from that trauma of the 'I' back to the father as a 'bag full of
God', and 'Daddy' becomes strikingly resonant of the case of a woman patient described at
Hamburg, suspended between two utterances: 'I am God’s daughter' and 'I do not know what I am'
(she was the daughter of a member of Himmler’s SS).
In the poem, the 'I' moves backwards and forwards between German and English, as does the 'you'
('Ach, du'). The dispersal of identity in language follows the lines of a division or confusion
between nations and tongues. In fact language in this part of the poem moves in two directions at
once. It appears in the form of translation and as a series of repetitions and overlappings—‘Ich’,
‘Ach', ‘Achoo'—which dissolve the pronoun back into infantile patterns of sound. Note too how the
rhyming pattern of the poem sends us back to the fist line. ‘You do not do, you do not do’, and
allows us to read it as both English and German: ‘You du not du’, ‘You you not you’—‘you’ as ‘not
you’ because ‘you’ do not exist inside a space where linguistic address would be possible.
I am not suggesting, however, that we apply to Plath's poem the idea of poetry as ecriture (women's
writing as essentially multiple, the other side of normal discourse, fragmented by the passage of the
unconscious and the body into words). Instead the poem seems to be outlining the conditions under
which that celebrated loss of the symbolic function takes place. Identity and language lose
themselves in the place of the father whose absence gives him unlimited powers. Far from
presenting this as a form of liberation—language into pure body and play—Plath's poem lays out
the high price, at the level of fantasy, that such a psychic process entails. Irruption of the semiotic
(Kristeva's term for that other side of normal language), which immediately transposes itself into an
alien, paternal tongue.
Plath's passionate desire to learn German and her constant failure to do so, is one of the refrains of
both her journals and her letters home: 'Wickedly didn't do German for the last two days, in a spell
of perversity and paralysis' . . . 'do German (that I can do)' . . . 'German and French would give me
self-respect, why don't I act on this?' . . . 'Am very painstakingly studying German two hours a day' .
. . 'At least I have begun my German. Painful, as if "part were cut out of my brain"' . . . 'Worked on
German for two days, then let up' . . . 'Take hold. Study German today.' In The Bell Jar, Esther
Greenwood says: 'every time I picked up a German dictionary or a German book, the very sight of
those dense, black, barbed wire letters made my mind shut like a clam'.
If we go back to the poem, then I think it becomes clear that it is this crisis of representation in the
place of the father which is presented by Plath as engendering—forcing, even—her identification
with the Jew. Looking for her father, failing to find him anywhere, the speaker finds him
everywhere instead. Above all, she finds him everywhere in the language which she can neither
address to him nor barely speak. It is this hallucinatory transference which turns every German into
the image of the father, makes for the obscenity of the German tongue, and leads directly to the first
reference to the Holocaust:
The snows of the Tyrol, the clear beer of Vienna
Are not very pure or true.
With my gypsy ancestress and my weird luck
And my Taroc pack and my Taroc pack
The only metaphor here is that first one that cuts across the stanza break—'the language obscene/
/An engine, an engine'—one of whose halves is language. The metaphor therefore turns on itself,
becomes a comment on the (obscene) language which generates the metaphor as such. More
important still, metaphor is by no means the dominant trope when the speaker starts to allude to
herself as a Jew:
Plath's use of simile and metonymy keeps her at a distance, opening up the space of what is clearly
presented as a partial, hesitant, and speculative identification between herself and the Jew. The
trope of identification is not substitution but displacement, with all that it implies by way of
instability in any identity thereby produced. Only in metaphor proper does the second, substituting
term wholly oust the first; in simile, the two terms are co-present, with something more like a slide
from one to the next; while metonymy is, in its very definition, only ever partial (the part stands in
for the whole).
If the speaker claims to be a Jew, then, this is clearly not a simple claim ('claim' is probably wrong
here). For this speaker, Jewishness is the position of the one without history or roots: 'So I never
could tell where you/Put your foot, your root'. Above all, it is for her a question, each time
suspended or tentatively put, of her participation and implication in the event. What the poem
presents us with, therefore, is precisely the problem of trying to claim a relationship to an event in
which—the poem makes it quite clear—the speaker did not participate. Given the way Plath stages
this as a problem in the poem, presenting it as part of a crisis of language and identity, the argument
that she simply uses the Holocaust to aggrandise her personal difficulties seems completely beside
the point. Who can say that these were not difficulties which she experienced in her very person?
If this claim is not metaphorical, then, we should perhaps also add that neither is it literal. The point
is surely not to try and establish whether Plath was part Jewish or not. The fact of her being Jewish
could not legitimate the identification—it is, after all, precisely offered as an identification—any
more than the image of her father as a Nazi which now follows can be invalidated by reference to
Otto Plath. One old friend wrote to Plath’s mother on publication of the poem in the review of Ariel
in Time in 1966 to insist that Plath's father had been nothing like the image in the poem (the famous
accusation of distortion constantly brought to bear on Plath).
Once again these forms of identification are not exclusive to Plath. Something of the same structure
appears at the heart of Jean Stafford's most famous novel, A Boston Adventure, published in 1946.
The novel's heroine, Sonie Marburg, is the daughter of immigrants, a Russian mother and a German
father who eventually abandons his wife and child. As a young woman, Sonie finds herself adopted
by Boston society in the 1930s. Standing in a drawing-room, listening to the expressions of anti-
Semitism, she speculates:
I did not share Miss Pride's prejudice and while neither did I feel strongly partisan
towards Jews, the subject always embarrassed me because, not being able to detect
Hebraic blood at once except in a most obvious face, I was afraid that someone's toes
were being trod on.
It is only one step from this uncertainty, this ubiquity and invisibility of the Jew, to the idea that she
too might be Jewish: 'And even here in Miss Pride's sitting-room where there was no one to be
offended (unless I myself were partly Jewish, a not unlikely possibility) . . .'. Parenthetically and
partially, therefore, Sonie Marburg sees herself as a Jew. Like Plath, the obverse of this is to see the
lost father as a Nazi: 'what occurred to me as [Mrs. Hornblower] was swallowed up by a crowd of
people in the doorway that perhaps my father, if he had gone back to Wurzburg, had become a
Nazi'—a more concrete possibility in Stafford's novel, but one which turns on the same binary,
father/daughter, Nazi/Jew, that we see in Plath.
In Plath’s poem, it is clear that these identities are fantasies, not for the banal and obvious reason
that they occur inside a text, but because the poem addresses the production of fantasy as such. In
this sense, I read 'Daddy' as a poem about its own conditions of linguistic and phantasmic
production. Rather than casually produce an identification, it asks a question about identification,
laying out one set of intolerable psychic conditions under which such an identification with the Jew
might take place.
Furthermore—and this is crucial to the next stage of the poem—these intolerable psychic conditions
are also somewhere the condition, or grounding, of paternal law. For there is a trauma or paradox
internal to identification in relation to the father, one which is particularly focused by the Holocaust
itself. At the Congress, David Rosenfeld described the 'logical-pragmatic paradox' facing the
children of survivors: 'to be like me you must go away and not be like me; to be like your father,
you must not be like your father). Lyotard puts the dilemma of the witness in very similar terms: 'if
death is there [at Auschwitz], you are not there; if you are there, death is not there. Either way it is
impossible to prove that death is there' (compare Levi on the failure of witness). For Freud, such a
paradox is structural, Oedipal, an inseparable part of that identification with the father of individual
prehistory which is required of the child: '[The relation of the superego] to the ego is not exhausted
by the precept: "you ought to be like this (like your father)." It also comprises the prohibition: "You
may not be like this (like your father)".' Paternal law is therefore grounded on an injunction which it
is impossible to obey. Its cruelty, arid its force, reside in the form of the enunciation itself.
'You stand at the blackboard, Daddy/In the picture I have of you'—it is not the character of Otto
Plath, but his symbolic position which is at stake.
[. . .]
One could then argue that it is this paradox of paternal identification. that Nazism most visibly
inflates and exploits. For doesn't Nazism itself also turn on the image of the father, a father
enshrined in the place of the symbolic, all-powerful to the extent that he is so utterly out of reach?
(and not only Nazism—Ceausescu preferred orphans to make up his secret police). By rooting the
speaker's identification with the Jew in the issue of paternity, Plath's poem enters into one of the key
phantasmic scenarios of Nazism itself. As the poem progresses, the father becomes more and more
of a Nazi (not precisely that this identity is not given, but is something which emerges). Instead of
being found in every German, what is most frighteningly German is discovered retrospectively in
him:
I have always been scared of you
And your Aryan eye bright blue.
Panzer-man, panzer-man, O You—
The father turns into the image of the Nazi, a string of cliches and childish nonsense (‘your
gobbledygoo’), of attributes and symbols (again the dominant trope is metonymy) which
accumulate and cover the sky. This is of course a parody—the Nazi as a set of empty signs. The
image could be compared with Virginia Woolf's account of the trappings of fascism in Three
Guineas.
Not that this makes him any the less effective, any the less frightening, any the less desired. In its
most notorious statement, the poem suggests that victimization by this feared and desired father is
one of the fantasies at the heart of fascism, one of the universal attractions for women of fascism
itself. As much as predicament, victimization is also pull:
Every woman adores a fascist,
For feminism, these are the most problematic lines of the poem— the mark of a desire that should
not speak its name, or the shameful insignia of a new license for women in the field of sexuality
which has precisely gone too far: 'In acknowledging that the politically correct positions of the
Seventies were oversimplified, we are in danger of simply saying once more that sex is a dark
mystery, over which we have no control. "Take me—I'm yours", or "Every woman adores a
fascist".' The problem is only compounded by the ambiguity of the lines which follow that general
declaration. Who is putting the boot in the face? The fascist certainly (woman as the recipient of a
sexual violence she desires). But, since the agency of these lines is not specified, don’t they also
allow that it might be the woman herself (identification with the fascist being what every woman
desires)?
There is no question, therefore, of denying the problem of these lines. Indeed, if you allow that
second reading, they pose the question of women's implication in the ideology of Nazism more
fundamentally than has normally been supposed. But notice how easy it is to start dividing up and
sharing out the psychic space of the text. Either Plath's identification with the Jew is the problem, or
her desire for/identification with the fascist. Either her total innocence or her total guilt. But if we
put these two objections or difficulties together? Then what we can read in the poem is a set of
reversals which have meaning only in relation to each other: reversals not unlike those discovered
in the fantasies of the patients described at Hamburg, survivors, children of survivors, children of
Nazis—disjunct and sacrilegious parallelism which Plath's poem anticipates and repeats.
If the rest of the poem then appears to give a narrative of resolution to this drama, it does so in
terms which are no less ambiguous than what has gone before. The more obviously personal
narrative of the next stanzas—death of the father, attempted suicide at twenty, recovery of the father
in the image of the husband—is represented as return or repetition: 'At twenty I tried to die/ And get
back, back, back to you' . . . 'I made a model of you', followed by emancipation: 'So Daddy I'm
finally through', and finally 'Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I'm through'. They thus seem to turn into a
final, triumphant sequence the two forms of temporality which were offered at the beginning of the
poem. Plath only added the last stanza—'There's a stake in your fat black heart', etc.—in the second
draft to drive the point home, as it were (although even 'stake' can be read as signaling a continuing
investment).
But for all that triumphalism, the end of the poem is ambiguous. For that 'through’ on which the
poem ends is given only two stanzas previously as meaning both ending: 'So daddy, I'm finally
through' and the condition, even if failed in this instance, for communication to be possible: 'The
voices just can't worm through'. How then should we read that last line—'Daddy, daddy, you
bastard, I'm through’? Communication as ending, or dialogue without end? Note too how the final
vengeance in itself turns on an identification—'you bastard'—that is, 'you father without father',
'you, whose father, like my own, is in the wrong place'.
A point about the more personal narrative offered in these last stanzas, for it is the reference to the
death of the father, the attempted suicide, and the marriage which calls up the more straightforward
biographical reading of this text. Note, however, that the general does not conceal—'camouflage'—
the particular or personal meaning. It is, again, the relationship of the two levels which is important
(it is that relationship, part sequence, part overdetermination, which the poem transcribes). But even
at the most personal level of this poem, there is something more general at stake. For the link that
'Daddy' represents between suicide and a paternity, at once personal and symbolic, is again not
exclusive to Plath.
At the end of William Styron's Lie Down in Darkness, Peyton, with whose suicide the book opened,
is allowed to tell her story; the book has work backwards from her death to its repetition through her
eyes. In one of her last moments, she thinks— encapsulating in her thoughts the title of the book
—'I've sinned only in order to lie down in darkness and find, somewhere in the net of dreams, a new
father, a new home.' And then, as if in response to that impossible dream impossible amongst other
things because of the collapse of the myth of America on Nagasaki day, the day Peyton dies—the
book ends with a 'Negro' revival baptism, as the servants of the family converge on the mass
congregation of 'Daddy Faith'. As if the book was suggesting that the only way forward after the
death of Peyton was into a grossly inflated symbolic paternity definitively lost to middle America,
available only to those whom that same America exploits. 'Daddy' is not far from this—if it is a
suicide poem, it is so only to the extent that it locates a historically actualised vacancy, and excess,
at the heart of symbolic, paternal law.
[. . .]
Finally, I would suggest that 'Daddy' does allow us to ask whether the woman might not have a
special relationship to fantasy--the only generalisation in the poem regarding women is, after all,
that most awkward of lines: 'Every woman adores a fascist.' It is invariably taken out of context,
taken out of the ghastly drama which shows where such a proposition might come from—what, for
the woman who makes it, and in the worse sense, it might mean. Turning the criticism of Plath
around once more, could we not read in that line a suggestion, or even a demonstration, that it is a
woman who is most likely to articulate the power—perverse, recalcitrant, persistent—of fantasy as
such? Nor would such an insight be in any way incompatible with women's legitimate protest
against a patriarchal world. This is for me, finally, the wager of Plath's work.
from The Haunting of Sylvia Plath. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1992. Copyright ©
1992.
Al Strangeways
This problem which Plath's treatment of the Holocaust exhibits, of exploring or representing the
inconceivable (the mythic horror of the Holocaust) with the conceivable (be it a conceivable
subject, such as personal difficulties, or a conceivable form), is also apparent in the Hollywood
films produced at the time (as well as many similar cinematic treatments from then on, with the
notable exception of Shoah [1983]). Annette Insdorf describes the difficulties inherent in cinematic
treatments of the Holocaust, citing John J. O'Connor (a New York Times television critic), who
writes: "The Diary of Anne Frank and Judgment at Nuremberg ... depend on a confined theatrical
setting, superfluous dialogue, star turns, classical editing (mainly with close-ups), and musical
scores whose violins swell at dramatic moments. These studio productions essentially fit the
bristling raw material of the Holocaust into an old narrative form, thus allowing the viewer to leave
the theater feeling complacent instead of concerned or disturbed." The act of trying to bring such
horrific events to a popular audience involves a rationalizing and conventionalizing of the material,
which ultimately runs the risk of trivializing the very events it is trying to commemorate. In Plath's
case, the "old narrative form" is that of a lyrical expression through personalized mythmaking,
within which the Holocaust fits uncomfortably. In addition to these wider difficulties of using
traditional conventions to represent the horrors of the Holocaust, the expressly symbolic approach
of poetry appears tainted by the abuse of metaphor in the Nazi regime's employment of the
"language rules" cited above, an abuse of language that Plath herself feared in the less extreme cold
war "doubletalk" discourse.
It is these problems surrounding the conventionalization and metaphorizing of the Holocaust that
not only inform Plath's late poems but are enacted by them. Lawrence Langer's tentative answer to
the way out of the impasse between the impact of the Holocaust and the ethical problems associated
with its depiction is through a creativity which works to collapse the distinction between history and
the present, metaphor and subject. . . .
Plath's late poems try to work in a similar way, "inducing a sense of complicity" by combining the
events with an intimate tone and material. Yet instead of trying directly to present the cruelty of the
Holocaust itself, the feeling Plath's poems generate is one of complicity in the easy assimilation of
such past cruelties. Her poems try to avoid the anonymity and the amnesia contingent on the "them
and us" and "then and now" distinctions that characterize the perception of history by highlighting
her use of the Holocaust as metaphor. In such poems, readers are meant to feel uncomfortable with
the suprapersonal, mythical depiction of Jewish suffering, feeling somehow implicated (because of
their traditional identification with the lyric persona) in the voyeurism such an assimilation of the
Holocaust implies. This feeling of implication that Plath's poems generate may be viewed in broad
terms as their success. Such poems are culturally valuable because the appearance of the Holocaust
in them is like a "boot in the face"--certainly, few readers leave them feeling "complacent instead of
concerned or disturbed."
[. . . .]
An understanding of the "boot in the face" effect of Plath’s treatment of the Holocaust, then,
enables the recognition that the dissonances between history and myth in her poetry are not an
aesthetic problem but work to prohibit complaisance about the definitions of--and the relationship
between--myth, history, and poetry in the post-Holocaust world.
[. . . .]
"Daddy" does not attempt to depict the suffering directly for our view (an impossible task, for the
reasons given above) but works by confronting readers with, and compounding the problematic
distinctions and connections between, the private and the historical (our lives and their suffering). In
other words, readers' reactions of unease, discomfort, and outrage are necessarily a response to the
surface, the poem itself, rather than to the events the poem uses as metaphors for its subject (be it
about individualism, freedom, or memory), because the events themselves are not graspable. The
poem is effective because it leaves readers in no clear or easy position in relation to the voyeuristic
gazes operating within it (of reader at speaker, reader at poet, poet at speaker, and all at the events
which are metaphorized) and able to take no unproblematic stance regarding the uses of metaphor
involved.
[. . . .]
In Plath's poem "Daddy," the controversial lines "Every woman adores a Fascist, / The boot in the
face, the brute / Brute heart of a brute like you" are trying to make a similar, though gendered,
point. Throughout the poem, the speaker and "daddy," masochistic and sadistic figures respectively,
appear dependent upon each other, and both figures' connections to Nazism (as Jew and Fascist)
link their dependence on each other (lack of individuation) . . . .
In the speakers consciously disturbing over-statement that "Every woman adores a Fascist," Plath
asserts that, while the archetypal male figure appearing in the rest of the poem (as father and lover)
connotes the escape from freedom through sadism, the female figure's adoration of the Fascist is an
extreme result of a stereotypically feminine escape from the feelings of aloneness associated with
freedom, through masochistic strivings. Freedom, for the archetypal "feminine" figure in "Daddy,"
is freedom from the authoritarian father figure. Political realities (in the form of Nazism) and
psychological difficulties (in the form of neurosis) are inescapably linked . . . for Plath. Thus Plath's
lines in "Daddy" are both psychological and political. They are psychological not because "Daddy"
is about Plath's relationship with her father, but in the sense that Plath uses the situation depicted in
the poem to explore the dynamics of her attitude toward individualism. Her intellectual and moral
approval of individualism is set against a consciously explored ambivalence in her desire for such
freedom, an ambivalence which is summed up in the final line, so that "Daddy, daddy, you bastard,
I’m through" may mean either that the speaker is "through with daddy" or free from him, or that she
is (in relation to the imagery of the black telephone in stanza 14) through to him, having made a
final and inescapable connection with him--having, in short, given up her freedom.
From "’The Boot in the Face’: The Problem of the Holocaust in the Poetry of Sylvia
Plath," in Contemporary Literature 37.3 (Fall 1996).
Christina Britzolakis
. . . recall Theodor Adorno's view, in Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944) of the advance of
Enlightenment rationality as a narrative of violence which tends to annihilate otherness in the name
of an implacable principle of identity. Rooted in a prehistoric split between subject and object, the
dialectic of enlightenment attempts to outlaw primitive modes of perception such as sympathetic
magic, and 'makes the dissimilar comparable by reducing it to abstract quantities'. The very reason
which the Enlightenment used as a weapon against myth, religion, and illusion has, in modem
society, turned against itself and reverted to irrationalist violence. Its oppressive tendency
culminates in the catastrophe of the Holocaust, in whose wake the entire heritage of European high
culture appears discredited or exhausted.
For Adorno, as for Plath, this dark vision of Enlightenment rationality is informed by the
catastrophic events of recent history. Yet while Plath's writing mourns the victims of what goes by
the name of historical 'progress', it also, as we have seen, plays out a deep complicity with the drive
towards mastery that Adorno sees as central to Enlightenment. This paradox manifests itself as a
tendency to yoke together historical and subjective crisis in manifestly unstable metaphorical
conjunctions. The invocation of events such as the Holocaust and Hiroshima as metaphors for states
of psychic extremity ('Daddy', 'Lady Lazarus', 'Fever 103°', 'Mary's Song') is often seen as merely
capitalizing on their public significance. Thus Irving Howe, for example: 'There is something
monstrous, utterly disproportionate, when tangled emotions about one's father are compared with
the historical fate of the European Jews . . . "Daddy" persuades once again, through the force of
negative example, of how accurate T. S. Eliot was in saying, "the more perfect the artist, the more
completely separate in him will be the man who suffers and the mind which creates".' The familiar
charge of metaphorical overreaching takes on, here, an ethical dimension; in turning a historical
event of this magnitude into a metaphor for subjective crisis, Plath allegedly perpetrates a violent
twisting or perversion of the principle of metaphoric similarity. This violation of New Critical codes
of impersonality is conflated, as Jacqueline Rose has argued, with its violation of the widespread
belief that the Holocaust is in some ultimate sense beyond representation. The scandal of 'Daddy' is
compounded by the sexualized scenario of collusion, in which the daughter/victim identifies with,
and is seduced by, the father/oppressor. What Alicia Ostriker calls 'the earliest and most famous of
female vengeance poems' none the less remains a love poem which not only explores the tangled
links between femininity, eros, and domination, but mockingly appropriates 1950s myths of female
masochism in order to do so.
As I have already argued, 'Daddy' operates in the modes of pastiche and parody, mixing Gothic
folklore, Freudian clichés, and racial and sexual stereotypes with allusions to historical events and
literary echoes. Through its blatant theatricality and unstable irony, it reflects on its own insertion
into literary history and on its own figurative processes. The speaker's comparison of herself to a
Jew also happens to thematize the activity of figuration itself:
The infamous metaphor (more precisely, simile) is an extension of the prior metaphor of the father's
language as 'An engine, an engine | Chuffing me off like a Jew'. It is, as Helen McNeil has-
suggested, 'a kind of psychic conceit, as if she is daring her reader to disbelieve what has been so
passionately felt and powerfully expressed'. Once this extravagant 'train of thought' has been put
into motion, it becomes a metaphorical machine which conveys the 'I' into a historical and
ideological 'other' space not of its own choosing ('I've boarded the train there's no getting off', as
Plath puts it in 'Metaphors'). The figurative act therefore not only puts into question the ethical
status of the poem's discourse but foregrounds this ethical instability as an aspect of the motivation
or intentionality of metaphor itself.
The Nazi-Jew metaphor is an extreme manifestation of the trope of subjection to otherness which, I
have argued, governs much of Plath's poetry. It signals a radically simplified and unstable dialectic
of self and other at work in the poem's language. This projective dialectic, of which the speaker
represents herself as both victim and perpetrator, is acted out through the metrical parallelism of
rhyme which becomes an 'engine', a seemingly automatic force with its own momentum. The entire
poem is dominated by the compulsive necessity of the 'you' rhyme, which generates as its corollary
the 'Jew'; the 'I' marking the 'not-I' as its other.
'Daddy' self-consciously exploits the linguistic primitivism of the 'unleashed tongue' through parody
voodoo rituals. The father becomes a scapegoat, ritually dismembered into metonymic body parts
such as foot, toe, head, mustache, blue eye, cleft chin, bones, heart, and resurrected in a bewildering
variety of guises: black shoe, 'ghastly statue with one gray toe', 'panzer-man', teacher, devil, black
man, Teutonic vampire, and, finally, Freudian father of the primal horde murdered by his sons. The
original of 'Daddy' is irrevocably lost; it is the symbols of the (dead) father, his law, which the
speaker is addressing: 'And then I knew what to do. | I made a model of you, | A man in black with a
Meinkampf look.' The transformations of the father are matched by the daughter, who becomes, in
succession, a white foot, Jew, pupil, gipsy, witch, and doll with a 'pretty red heart'. The violent
symmetry and parallelism of the victim-oppressor scenario recalls Theodor Adorno's claim, in
'Elements of Anti-Semitism' (1944) that the Fascist projects the impulses he cannot accept as his
own on to his victim. It is his similarity to the Jew which arouses the paranoid rage of the anti-
Semite and turns the oppressed into an oppressor. The preverbal language of mimicry—of primitive
gesture—becomes the tabooed sign of the Jew, marking him as the scapegoat. In 'Daddy', the
oppressive relationship between father and daughter is seen as part of a larger process of
scapegoating at work in history and language alike:
I have always been scared of you
Panzer-man, panzer-man, O You—
Every woman adores a fascist,
Language threatens to break down into nonsense, stuttering, and aphasia ('the brute | Brute heart of
a brute like you') . The terroristic staccato consonants of the German 'Luftwaffe' are translated into
the childish barbarism, 'gobbledygoo'. The 'blue' of the 'Aryan eye', Nazi symbol of racial purity, is
rhymed with the blue of the sky which 'squeak[s]' through the death-dealing blackness of the
swastika. Victim and oppressor secretly mirror each other; and the victim's response to paranoid
oppression is to imitate its features.
Plath's overreaching use of the Nazi-Jew metaphor in 'Daddy' cannot be separated from the poem's
wider exploration and exploitation, through language, sound, and rhythm, of the violent logic of
'othering'. It is, perhaps, this linguistic regression which is at the heart of its perceived offence to
canonical values. It does not merely refute the self-possession of the poetic subject but also suggests
that, as Freud argues in The Ego and the Id, 'what is highest in the human mind' is rooted in 'the
lowest part of. ..mental life'. There is no document of culture, Walter Benjamin wrote in the 'Theses
on the Philosophy of History' that is not at the same time a document of barbarism. Although
'Daddy' seems flagrantly to violate the Eliotic doctrine of 'impersonality', therefore, it can equally be
seen as pushing it to an unholy extreme: the truly original poet who is in touch with tradition
expresses 'the mind of Europe' not merely in its cultural glories but also in its deepest disgrace.
Plath's 'negations' are the effect of a profound ambivalence towards poetic language itself. On the
one hand, her work can be seen as a triumphant celebration of the transformative powers of
metaphor and of the 'oracular' dimension of poetic language invoked by Seamus Heaney; on the
other, it can be seen as activating a darker, daemonic, or nihilistic side of the auditory imagination.
In Plath's poetry, the Romantic identification of the 'symbol' with the sensuous, maternal fecundity
of nature, as a means of overcoming the terror of death, or of transcending melancholy, is
effectively disabled. Her rhetoric is founded on the recognition of a chronic lack of solace in
figurative language. Metaphor appears less as a means of harmonizing an alienated self with the
world, as in the Romantic tradition, than as a technology which violently, if exhilaratingly, wrests
the body to its own ends. The noble rider's drive towards mastery tends to undo itself, precipitating
a backlash of linguistic regression. Plath thus stages a 'dialectic of enlightenment' in the arena of
metaphor, rhythm, and sound, drawing upon the ambiguously incantatory and oral powers of poetic
language itself. The splitting and instability of the subject in these poems—its alternation between
the roles of oppressor and victim—forms part of a disturbance of memory and of language that is,
as I shall argue in the next chapter, at once psychic and historical.
from Sylvia Plath and the Theatre of Mourning. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999.
Copyright © 1999 by Christina Britzolakis
Renče R. Curry
Plath's interest in Germany and its relationship to exterminating and far-reaching power,
particularly its consanguinity with nazism, emanates most forcefully in "Daddy." The vast majority
of scholars who study Plath's poetry examine this poem and discuss the poem's (mis)use of
Holocaust imagery as well as the black descriptors that permeate the work. Although Plath situates
issues of racial dominance and Otherness at the forefront of this poem's literary tropes, scholars to
date do not read this poem as evidence of Plath's white authorial position.
Annas reads "Daddy" as a poem whose landscape constructs social and political boundaries
partially signified by blackness (A Disturbance 140). In addition, Annas claims that the purpose of
"Daddy" is to exorcise "the various avatars of the other" (A Disturbance 143). Broe, however, finds
Plath again locating an interchangeability among self and Other especially in the roles of victim and
victimizer (175). Guinevara A. Nance and Judith P. Jones argue that the word "black" provides the
significant spark in the poem that "ignite[s] powerful associations among culturally significant
symbols" (125). Axelrod finds the father-as-black-shoe representative of a force "capable of
stamping on his victim" (53). Furthermore, Axelrod suggests that Plath ironically designs her
"aboriginal speaker" as only capable of "black-and-white thinking" (56). Clearly, the poem invites
racially marked readings concerned with issues of Otherness; however, the scholarship does not
effectively address the white authorship and imagination that creates this Otherness in the poem.
Axelrod ventures close to marking the poet's whiteness when he addresses Plath's interest in things
German. He describes the emotional year that Plath experienced previous to writing "Daddy," and
then he summarizes her psychological state:
She was again contemplating things German: a trip to the Austrian
AIps, a renewed effort to learn the language. If "German" was
Randall Jarrell's "favorite country," it was not hers, yet it returned to
her discourse like clock work at times of psychic distress. Clearly
Plath was attempting to find and to evoke in her art what she could
not find or communicate in her life. (52)
Dyer explains that Germany, along with the Anglo-Saxons and Scandinavians, evokes the "apex of
whiteness" to the white imagination (19). What Plath desires at moments of psychic stress is a
return to the purity she associates with whiteness as well as a return to her particular ancestral
background which she claimed as German and Austrian (Rose, The Haunting 225). Yet any such
return to or contemplation of things German, especially after World War II, ignited images of
nazism for Plath and influenced an imaginative conflation of purity, personal ancestry, and the
Holocaust. The language of "Daddy" reflects this conflation.
Jacqueline Rose insinuates that Plath's connection between her own father and nazism in "Daddy" is
not the profound and ghastly stretch that other critics have claimed. Rose prompts us to entertain the
idea that nazism relied heavily on the dominance of the symbolic father: "For doesn't Nazism itself
also turn on the image of the father, a father enshrined in the place of the symbolic, all-powerful to
the extent that he is so utterly out of reach?" (232). Clearly, Plath answers "yes" to this question by
writing "Daddy." The poem opens with a metaphoric complaint issued by a "poor and white" foot
that her "black shoe" will no longer do. The "black shoe," associated with Daddy, and associated
with nazism, has become too constricting. In wanting to separate from her father and regain her
purity—her white foot—she must blacken the father and remove herself from his taint. She must
become Jew to his Nazi:
Chudding me off like a Jew.
By taking on the markings of a Jew in the poem, she highlights the heart of whiteness debates: who
exactly can claim to be white? In the context of the poem, Plath attempts to separate from her
father, whose power she associates with blackness and nazism. As her father's victim, she takes on
the role of persecuted Jew. Dyer explains that the Jews' relationship to whiteness has not been at all
fixed in time. During World War II, the Jews, as compared to Aryans, were definitively not-white.
However, like the Irish and the Mexicans, the Jews have been both included and excluded from
whiteness throughout time. In particular, their special whiteness has been used as a "'buffer'
between the white and the black or indigenous" (Dyer 19). The Jew that Plath becomes in "Daddy"
is a "buffer" Jew in the sense that it permits her multiple associations with and protections from
whiteness. As a Jewish victim of Nazis, she is non-Aryan. As a Jewish victim of Otto Plath, whom
she describes as black in the poem, she is white. As a white woman claiming identification with
Jews, she proclaims separation from the domineering whiteness of nazism. In "Daddy," Plath
particularizes and multiplies her whiteness in relationship to and variance from the negative forces
threatening her. Occupation of a Jewish persona permits her just such vacillation.
Rose argues that these vacillations provide Plath opportunities to experiment with varying psychic
positions:
Plath . . . moves from one position to the other, implicating them in
each other, forcing the reader to enter into something which she or he
is often willing to consider only on condition of seeing it as
something in which, psychically no less than historically, she or he
plays absolutely no part. (The Haunting 236)
In Rose's reading, Plath exhibits a willingness to sacrifice her own claim to white stability,
inheritance, and purity of position in order to hold up an incriminating mirror to readers. Yet, as
Rose points out, there is the problem embedded in stanza ten—"every woman adores a Fascist." In
this line, the incriminating mirror ricochets back from the reader upon yet another of Plath's
interesting identifications; she changes from affinity with the victimized Jew to adoration of the
Fascist victimizer. She claims this particular adoration as emerging from her womanliness rather
than from her Jewishness. Rose reads this line and the following "boot in the face" line as housing
such ambivalent agency that they suggest that women adore being violated and they worship
opportunities to violate Others. This reading poses "the question of women's implication in the
ideology of Nazism more fundamentally than has normally been supposed" (Rose, The Haunting
233). Plath has toyed before with this idea of white women as potentially culpable in oppression of
Others in "Moon and the Yew Tree," "Bee Meeting," and I"Wintering"; however, as in most other
circumstances, she ultimately recuperates the white woman from significant blame by concluding
the poem with an image of the more responsible white male. "Daddy" thus ends with a visit from
the villagers, similar to those of "Bee Meeting," who, this time, have come to kill the white man
rather than the white woman:
In Plath's white imagination, white men's responsibility for oppression far outweighs that of white
women.
from White Women Writing White: H. D., Elizabeth Bishop, Sylvia Plath, and
Whiteness. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2000. Copyright © 2000 by Renče
R. Curry
Roger Platizky
Images of victimization in Sylvia Plath's poem "Daddy" - of Nazis, swastikas, barbed wire, fascists,
brutes, devils, and vampires - are so frantic, imposing, and vituperative that the poem seems more
out of control than it actually is. When read rapidly and angrily, without ample attention paid to its
many unexpected pauses, Plath's poem, indeed, seems like a runaway train barreling through one
psychic nightmare after the other, until the speaker pulls the emergency cord that irrevocably
separates the self from the tormenting other in the very last line: "Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I'm
through."(1) While the poem's irregular enjambment makes some of the stanzas (for example, 4, 5,
11, and 12) appear to be running off their tracks, the locomotive force of this poem is more often
controlled by end-stopped lines that keep it from derailing. Of the poem's 80 lines, 37 are end-
stopped, with the only exception being stanza 11, which careens without pause into the next
strophe. Unlike the image patterns, which keep multiplying from one form of demonization into
another, the 15 stanzas remain stable at five lines apiece. Also suggestive of the poet's control over
her material, the stanzas containing the most end-stopped lines (four stops in stanzas 7, 14, and 16)
usually allude to concentration camps, torturers, and vampires, while the stanzas with the fewest
(one stop in stanza 1; no stops in stanza 11) characteristically show more ambivalence toward
victimization. In effect, the speaker takes away some of the power of her alleged tormentors by end-
stopping their lines. She also does this by using enjambment to diffuse some of the force of the
masculine rhymes that end the majority of her stanzas.
Psychological control in this poem of the self over the other, however, is not as readily attained. As
a number of critics have indicated, another stylistic pattern that recurs in "Daddy" is the compulsive
use of the /oo/ sound that inevitably draws the reader back to the you and do rhymes of the first line.
In fact, the ubiquitous a rhyme is repeated more than 60 times. Susan R. Van Dyne considers this
"verbal tic" to be a sign "of a disordered psyche and poetic incontinence," an "overdetermined" use
of "regressive and repetitive language."(2) Similarly, Steven Gould Axelrod regards the repetition
as childlike: "The language of the poem . . . teeters precariously on the edge of a preverbal abyss -
represented by the eerie, keening 'oo' sound with which a majority of the verses end."(3) A. Alvarez
considers the style of Plath's poem to be "a form of manic defense" (qtd. in Lane 66); and, indeed, if
the poem were read without emphasizing the end-stopped lines, this might be the case. Another
plausible explanation for the repetition-compulsion of the /oo/ sound can be adapted from a pattern
that Peter Sacks locates in English elegies.
According to Sacks, mourning poems (such as "Daddy") frequently repeat sound or stanzaic
patterns (for example, In Memoriam) in symbolic replication of Freud's theory about the child's
"fort-da" game in which a child, anxiously separated from a parent, compulsively pushes and pulls a
spool forward and backward in an unconscious, ritualized attempt to master the anxiety that is
produced by the parent's unreliable presence.(4) Similarly in "Daddy," the compulsively repeated
/oo/ sound may defensively perform a like function. Although the plosive force of Plath's invectives
against the father (and her husband) emphasize the speaker's strong desire to be psychologically
free of the introjected "daddy," the echoing /oo/ sounds that permeate the poem imply her
paradoxical need still to "get back, back, back to you" (line 59) - a sign of an incomplete, though
desired, end to mourning.
A final stylistic way in which the speaker attempts to extricate herself from her father's
psychological hold on her without completely annihilating the part of him she still loves and misses
is by creating a delicate balance between pronouns that separate his identity from hers. Although the
poem appears to give all agency to the mythically powerful patriarch, the primary pronouns
associated with him (exclusive of the imagery) are "you" and "your," which occur 28 times in the
poem in comparison to the speaker's self-referential "I," "my," and "me" that occur a total of 34
times. While the frequency of pronouns can hardly be said to neutralize the demonic imagery
associated with patriarchy in the verse, the repeated "I" pronouns still signify a heroic attempt at
psychic reintegration - of being glued back together - without others controlling the shape that
identity takes. Moreover, in the last stanzas of the poem (14-16), the speaker, atypically, uses the
contractions "I'm" and "I've" four times, suggesting a verbal effort to fuse the "I am" and the "I
have" in resistance to the father's formerly controlling "you were" and "you did." Finally, in the last
line of the poem, when the speaker calls her father a "bastard," she is not only cursing him, but
trying to make his hold on her history, personality, identity, and destiny illegitimate. Ending,
however, with the /oo/ sound in "through," the poem simultaneously proclaims and resists closure -
a partial psychological victory, at best, of the self over the other.
Judging from the biographical history of this poem, Plath's victory could only be a pyrrhic one. She
wrote "Daddy" on 12 October 1962, four months before her suicide, fifteen days before her thirtieth
birthday, on the twentieth anniversary of her father's leg amputation (alluded to in the poem, lines
9-10) and on the day she learned that Ted Hughes, the alleged "vampire" who drank her blood for
seven years (73-74), had agreed to a divorce.(5) The year 1961-62 was also the time of the trial and
execution of Adolf Eichmann, to which the concentration camp imagery in Plath's poem may allude
(Lane 219).(6) Thus, personal as well as historical victimization and attempted vindication are
dramatized in Plath's poem. But just as the execution of Eichmann as a war criminal could bring
only partial justice to the Jews who were exterminated in the death camps, and just as the stake in
the vampire's "fat black heart" (56) would only prevent the undead from causing further misery, the
speaker in Plath's "Daddy," her memories of alleged victimization echoing in every broken and
repeated nursery-sounding rhyme, can achieve only a partial victory over the "man who / Bit my
pretty red heart in two" (55-56).
NOTES
1. Sylvia Plath, "Daddy," The Collected Poems of Sylvia Plath, ed. Ted Hughes (New York: Harper,
1981) 222-224. Further quotations are from this collection.
2. Susan R. Van Dyne, Revising Life: Sylvia Plath's Ariel Poems (Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina
E 1993) 48-49. See also Jacqueline Rose, The Haunting of Sylvia Plath (Cambridge: Harvard UP,
1992) 226.
3. Steven Gould Axelrod, Sylvia Plath: The Wound and the Cure of Words (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins E 1990) 56.
4. Peter M. Sacks, The English Elegy: Studies in the Genre from Spenser to Yeats (Baltimore: John
Hopkins E 1985) 23.
5. Linda Wagner-Martin, Sylvia Plath: A Biography (New York: Simon, 1987) 28, 243; Axelrod,
52.
6. Lane makes a persuasive case that Plath "could not have missed the . . .sensational capture of
Eichmann." At least three books on the subject were published in Britain, and the award-winning
film Judgment at Nuremberg was released around the same time.
WORK CITED
Lane, Gary, ed. Sylvia Plath: New Views on the Poetry (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins P, 1979).
from The Explicator 55.2 (Winter 1997)
Kathleen Margaret Lant

By the time Plath wrote "Daddy," her faith in the inevitability of this violent sexual dynamic
apparently remained firm, but her attitude toward her place in this relationship had changed.
Tragically, she still cherished the notion that masculine sexuality was the perfect emblem for power
("Every woman adores a Fascist") and that she was doomed to sexual and social victimization ("I
think I may well be a Jew" [223]), but in "Daddy," she appropriates that power for herself or for the
female voice in that poem, and she does so in sexual terms. She becomes the rapist who terrifies,
who imposes himself upon others, who makes his imprint - both poetic and psychological - upon
reality. She no longer hides because she no longer has to. She has shed the femininity which
threatened to undermine her The existence of the poem itself, addressed to "Daddy," demonstrates
that her silence has been broken, that the father who has rendered her speechless has lost his ability
to erase her: "I never could talk to you. / The tongue stuck in my jaw" (223). The act of speaking,
thus, is her first appropriation of the father/lover's power.
Both of the men against whom the voice rails in "Daddy" have committed crimes against the
speaker's heart: Daddy is the one who "Bit my pretty red heart in two," and the lover who serves as
a replacement for Daddy "said he was you / And drank my blood for a year." Thus the female
subject's revenge must be structured similarly: she has killed Daddy and his representative ("There's
a stake in your fat black heart" [224]) by means of a figurative rape. She thrusts a deadly force
through Daddy's evil center, his source of power over her, his heart. And the very fact that she
speaks constitutes a violation of Daddy's privilege and power. Plath here reverses the metaphorical
expectations and writes a poem that is overwhelmingly powerful but also unsettling since the
speaker of the poem does not undermine the system of control which violates her but rather turns
the tables, accepting this gendering of violence as inevitable. If she will no longer be victim, she
must become victimizer. If she will no longer be raped, she must become the rapist. If she will no
longer subject her bared self to violation, she must herself become violator.
from "The big strip tease: female bodies and male power in the poetry of Sylvia
Plath." Contemporary Literature 34.4 (Winter 1993)
Susan Gubar
[NB. Prosopopoeia: a rhetorical figure involving the adoption of the voices of the
imagined, absent dead.]
. . . surprisingly, no poet has been more scathingly critical of the figure of prosopopoeia than Sylvia
Plath. Even as she exploited the trope in the Holocaust context, Plath emphasized her awareness
that imaginative identification with the victims could constitute either a life-threatening trap for the
poet or a sinister trip for the poet's readers, as "Daddy" and "Lady Lazarus" demonstrate. In
"Daddy," Plath considers what her identification might mean, rather than simply assuming that
identification: "I think I may well be a Jew" (emphasis mine). In this, Plath's self-conscious method
sustains this distance in a more sustained way than Anne Sexton does in the (probably) influential
line from "My Friend, My Friend": "I think it would be better to be a Jew." Plath's line echoes
Sexton's, but with a difference: Plath maintains a definitively post-war perspective on her own
deployment of the voice of the victims. Similarly, Plath's is a more self-consciously fictive and
qualified identification than John Berryman's effort to see himself as an "imaginary Jew." Plath
illuminates not merely the psychological scenarios which most critics examine but also offers
brilliant insights into a debilitating sexual politics at work in fascist anti-Semitism. From this
perspective, "Daddy" reads less like a confessional elegy about Plath's grief and anger at the loss of
her father, more like a depiction of Jewish melancholia—the primitive, suicidal grieving Freud
associated with loss over a love object perceived as part of the self—and thus a meditation on an
attachment to Germany in particular, and to Western civilization in general, that many European
Jews found not only inevitable but galling as well.
Although numerous readers have noted that Plath anathematizes Naziism as patriarchalism pure and
simple, they have failed to understand how the dependencies of a damaged and damaging
femininity shape her analysis of genocide. A "bag full of God," a "Ghastly statue," an "Aryan" blue-
eyed "Panzer-man" with a "neat mustache," Daddy deploys all the regalia of the fascist father
against those robbed of selfhood, citizenship, and language, for the speaker's stuttering tongue is
"stuck in a barb wire snare. / Ich, ich, ich, ich, / I could hardly speak." The daughter confronts a
symbolic order in which the relationship between the fragile "ich" and the overpowering national
and linguistic authority of Daddy frustrates any autonomous self=definition. That, as Jacqueline
Rose points out, the English "you do not do" can be heard as the German "you du not du" (226)
heightens awareness of a confluence between the daughter's vulnerable and blurred ego boundaries,
her ardent responsiveness to the lethally proximate society that constructed her, and the European
Jew's conflicted but nevertheless adoring address. Standing "at the blackboard," the fascist
represents the irrational power of rationality, of the arts and the sciences, of culture in the
Fatherland. According to Plath, the Jews chuffed off "to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen" suffered the
horror of impending extermination along with a crippling consciousness of complicity, if only the
collusion of those doomed by a long history of intimacy to love and respect a force dead set against
them.
For, through a rhetorical strategy itself implicated in the calculus of colonization, the poem dares to
confront the daughter-speaker's induction into revering Daddy and his charismatic power: "Every
woman adores a Fascist, / The boot in the face, the brute / Brute heart of a brute like you" (223).
The daughter's subsequent decision to make and marry "a model" of Daddy (224) suggests how
difficult it may be for a consciousness captivated by the inimical source which shaped it to escape
self-destructive forms of thralldom that refigure bonds saturated with the only pattern of attachment
known—lexicons of emotion devised by the dead Daddy. Vampiric, the phantom father and his
constructed surrogate, the husband who loves "the rack and the screw," have drained the speaker of
her creative talents, her currency, her autonomy. Depleted. the daughter rages against her appalled
feelings of radical insufficiency, which bespeak a blurring of boundaries between Jewishness and
Germanness that many German-Jews lamented before, during, and after the Shoah. Since this tiny
percentage of the German population played a relatively important role in business, finance,
journalism, medicine, law, and the arts in the twenties and thirties, many German-Jews felt shocked
at the betrayal of a culture to which they had vowed what Saul Friedlander calls "ever-renewed and
ever-unrequited love." When Leo Baeck, the famous Berlin Rabbi, sat down to pay his electric bill
moments before the SS dragged him off to Theresienstadt, Hyam Maccoby thinks his act
exemplified not passivity but instead many Jews' inability to believe that "this Germany; which they
loved, felt obligations toward . . . , felt gratitude toward" could have dedicated itself to their
annihilation (emphasis mine). The forfeiture of a beloved language and a revered homeland, the loss
of a citizenship that had signified and certified professional status and security: such grief reeks of
the narcissistic wound Plath's daughterly speaker suffers after she tries to commit suicide, only to
find herself instead "pulled . . . out of the sack" and stuck together "with glue."
As the Mother Goose rhymes on "you," "du," "Jew," "glue," "screw," "gobbledygoo," "shoe"
accumulate, the poem goose steps toward the concluding "I'm finally through" that proclaims a
victory over the spectral afterlife of the fascist, but only at the cost of the daughter's own life. At the
very moment Plath declares she is "through" with her father, the final line intimates that she herself
is also and thereby "through." No longer supported by the fragile hyphen between German and Jew,
the outraged daughter knows her "gipsy ancestress" and her "Taroc pack" only confirm her status as
a pariah, even decades after the catastrophic engagement with Daddy. Plath's scandalizing
feminization of Europe's Jews suggests just how appalling, how shameful would seem, would be,
the emasculation of often intensely patriarchal communities. Just as Plath's speaker asks herself
who she can possibly be without Daddy, European Jewish men and women might well have asked
themselves who they could possibly be after the Shoah definitively estranged them from their
fathers' lands, their mother tongue, their neighbors' customs, their compatriots' heritage or so the
ghastly number of post-war suicides of survivors-who-did-not-survive intimates. Without in any
way conflating the different motives and circumstances of Walter Benjamin, Paul Celan, Primo
Levi, Peter Szondi, Jean Amery, Bruno Bettelheim, Jerzy Kosinsky, Piotr Rawicz, Tadeusz
Boroswki, and Andrzej Munk, this frightful list of suicides attests to the devastating on-goingness
of the Shoah.
from "Prosopopoeia and Holocaust Poetry in English: Sylvia Plath and Her
Contemporaries." Yale Journal of Criticism (2001)
Imagery in Sylvia Plath's "Daddy"
Nicola Goelzhaeuser

Sylvia Plath once said that "Daddy" is about a girl with an Electra complex. The speaker of the
poem has lost her father at age ten, at a time when she still adored him unconditionally, then she
gradually realizes the oppressing dominance of the father, and compares him to a nazi, a devil, and
a vampire. She cannot deal with his death and has to get over the love-hatred and the images that
haunt her. After an attempted suicide she marries man as domineering as her father, and leads a
short and painful marriage.
Plath interweaves several complex groups of images like a net. Unspeakable rage and horror
surface through the almost child-like language due to these images. Separate strings of imagery are
connected through single over-determined images, like that of feet and shoes. Kenner's definition of
imagery -- that an image is "what the words actually name" and that "the poet writes down what he
means" -- is very helpful for a reading of this poem.

1. Shoes, Feet and Roots
Shoes and feet are a recurrent image in this poem, they take on different nuances of meaning as the
poem proceeds. In 1.2, the speaker compares herself to a foot (simile), that "lives" in a shoe, the
shoe is her father. Analyzing this image on an abstract level is much less helpful than visualizing it.
Then the image evokes various helpful associations: Commonly, a shoe protects the foot and keeps
it warm, in this poem, however, the shoe is a trap, smothering the foot. The adjective "black"
suggests the idea of death, and since the shoe is fitting tightly around the foot, one might think of a
corpse in a coffin. The speaker thus feels at the same time protected and smothered by her father.
In 1. 22-24, the foot image gets a new dimension --

I could never talk to you.
The foot becomes a symbol of one's origin. The father's origin is mysterious and soiled, there are so
many towns called Grabow that his roots cannot be traced back. An image in the second stanza
makes sense now, namely that of the gray toe on the statue (that is the father). Like the father's
background has the blemish of nazi Germany, the gray toe ridicules and ruins the majestic
appearance of the statue. The black shoe reappears as a (military) boot in 1. 49, when the father is
being called a nazi.

2. The Father - God, Nazi, Devil, Vampire
During the speaker's childhood, the father was obviously like God to her, in his omnipresence and
power. Now, this omnipresence is scary, the power overwhelming. The image of God is presented
with bitter mockery:

You died before I had time --
Ghastly statue with one gray toe
Big as a Frisco seal (7-1 0)
The father is not quite God, but only "a bag full of God." The image has a comic effect, and evokes
associations like "windbag." In this stanza, Plath uses an explicit image, namely a statue in order to
metaphorically describe the father. Statues are impressive, but they are only a copy of the real
person. The father becomes fake, intangible and inaccessible. Furthermore, the statue is heavy and
made out of marble. Marble is precious and expensive, but it is also hard and cold, qualities which
are transferred to the father through the metaphor.
The father's overwhelming omnipresence in the speaker's life is expressed through an implicit,
geographic image.
In the waters off beautiful Nauset. (1 1-1 3)
Plath want us to actually see the father spread out all over the continent, being everywhere, with his
toe dipping into the Pacific ("Frisco seal") and his head resting in the Atlantic Ocean. His toe is a
big, clumsy mammal. The Atlantic is called "freakish." If Plath had said for example "rough," she
would have lost the metaphorical implications of the adjective. The adjective here is an image, it is
transferred to the head resting in the water, the head of a freak. The waves of the Atlantic are
described in an assonance as "bean green." Bean green is a pale, almost olive green. Together with
reference to "Nauset," which sounds like nausea, it evokes the idea of vomiting.
The predominant image in the poem is that of the father as a nazi and the speaker as a Jew (1.32-
40). This implies an oppressive relationship and a language barrier. No matter whether the father is
really a nazi or only compared to nazi, "nazi" (as well as Jew) is an image in both cases according
to Kenner"s definition (the poet says what (s)he means in both cases). If the definition of image was
restricted categories like metaphor, simile, metonymy, synecdoche, nazi would only be an image in
the second case.
The father is characterized as a nazi in synecdoche:
With you Luftwaffe, your gobbledygoo.
Panzer-man, panzer-man, 0 You --

Not a God but a swastika
So black no sky could squeak through. (42-47)
and "a Meinkampflook" (1.65)
The poem contains several war images. In 1. 17-18, the wars in Europe are compared to rollers that
level everything like one big horrible force. In 1. 47, the sky is so black that we cannot see any blue
because of the the smoke and dust emerging from the battlefield, and the large numbers of war
planes. In a figurative sense, the father blackens the sky of the speakers life.
When she calls the father a "brute" (1.49-50), Plath revives a dead metaphor, since "brute"
(originally meaning "wild animal") has become a word for a violent person, which is the first
association we have when reading this stanza. However, the other meaning, "wild animal," is
evoked in 1. 56, when the speaker says that the father "Bit my pretty red heart in two." The idea of
biting leads to the later image of the vampire.
In line 53, the image of the devil is introduced -- note again the reference to the foot, which is
flawed like the suspicious origins of the father:

But no less a devil for that, . . .
The cleft in the foot, characteristic of the devil's hoofs, is compared to the cleft in the fathers chin.
The final image of the father (and the husband, who is like the father) is that of the vampire -- a
bloodsucking zombie who still haunts her long after his death, until she finally "kills" both her
husband and him forever with a "stake in your fat black heart" (76).

3. The Impossibility of Communication
"I never could talk to you" (1.24) -- this is the most important reason for the speaker's severe
difficulties with her father. The impossibility of communication is expressed through a physical
image -- "The tongue stuck in my jaw' (1.25). Plath takes the image further, linking the
incompatibility of father and daughter with the general idea of a language barrier (German), and
with a political context:

It stuck in a barb wire snare" (1.25-26)
The reader feels reminded of the Iron Curtain and the Berlin Wall, which consisted, among other
materials, of dangerous barbed wire fences. One single image is thus over-determined to link
different strings of thought in the poem. It is a physically and psychically painful image.
Plath plays with the dead metaphor "tongue" for language, by using the word in the sense of
language in line 16, and in the literal sense in line 25. The speaker's discomfort with the father's
mother tongue German is reinforced by this ambiguity of the word. The next image illustrates how
German sounds to the daughter:

Chuffing me off like a Jew. (1.31-33)
Since she obviously barely speaks German, it sounds like the chuffing of an engine to her, rather
harsh due to the frequent guttural and hissing sounds ("ch" or "sch" or palatal "@'and the many
consonants). Plath's skillful use of imagery allows her again to connect the sound of German with
the Holocaust with only a few words, i.e. political with private matters in only one image.
The image in 1.69-70, the telephone, is a symbol of communication -- the very basis of this
communication is destroyed, "off at the root," just like the father's ethnic background (see "root" as
in 1. 23). Again, a political, historical allusion is involved, namely the Red Telephone between the
Kremlin and the White House, but the telephone that links (or does not link) the speaker and her
father is black, the color associated with the father throughout the poem (1.2,47,55,65,69,76). Again
the image helps to visualize and clarify an abstract idea -- the voices "worm" through.
We can see and hear Plath's poem, which does not cloud the text but illuminates it, makes it more
accessible, while still enabling a very complex and economic use of language. I would like to cite
one more example out of a variety of images the poem provides:
It they pulled me out of the sack,
And they stuck me together with glue (1.56-57)
The speaker has attempted suicide, she has literally fallen apart. She was saved and "glued
together." This image implies more than just saving her life. When for example a precious vase
breaks and is glued together, the cracks will always be visible, the former beauty cannot be restored.
Similarly, the speaker will always have scars inside from what has been done to her, her psychic
unity is lost forever.

Sylvia Plath-Lady Lazarus Daddy

Uploaded by

Document Informationclick to expand document informationPoems

Document Informationclick to expand document information

Copyright:

Available Formats

Sylvia Plath-Lady Lazarus Daddy

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Sylvia Plath-Lady Lazarus Daddy

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Lady Lazarus

A sort of walking miracle, my skin

Peel off the napkin

The nose, the eye pits, the full set of teeth?

Soon, soon the flesh

And I a smiling woman.

This is Number Three.

What a million filaments.

Them unwrap me hand and foot--

These are my hands

Nevertheless, I am the same, identical woman.

The second time I meant

I do it so it feels like hell.

It's easy enough to do it in a cell.

Comeback in broad day

For the eyeing of my scars, there is a charge

And there is a charge, a very large charge

Or a piece of my hair or my clothes.

That melts to a shriek.

Herr god, Herr Lucifer

Out of the ash

Daddy, I have had to kill you.

And a head in the freakish Atlantic

In the German tongue, in the Polish town

Says there are a dozen or two.

It stuck in a barb wire snare.

The snows of the Tyrol, the clear beer of Vienna

Not God but a swastika

You stand at the blackboard, daddy,

Bit my pretty red heart in two.

But they pulled me out of the sack,

And a love of the rack and the screw.

If I've killed one man, I've killed two--

There's a stake in your fat black heart

Guinevara A. Nance and Judith P. Jones

Mutlu Konuk Blasing

Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar

Robert von Hallberg

Kathleen Margaret Lant

You might also like