Her legacy

Sylvia Plath was a great American author who committed suicide in 1963 at the age of thirty. She lived a troubled life having attempted suicide once before without success. Plath was a prolific writer that started writing at a very early age. Her first poem was published when she was only eight years old and while at college she wrote over four hundred poems. This was while she was still a teenager and later she went on to write many books and poems. It is said that her turbulent life influenced her work. This paper will examine one of her works “Daddy” and how much of her life is reflected in this poem as well as any other external forces that played a part as well.

The poem “Daddy” was published in 1966 in a book of poems by Sylvia Plath titled “Ariel”. It is a very dark poem in which Plath vents her rage at her father and then at her husband. She talks about killing her father and that he died before she could kill him herself. She went on to compare him to the Nazis and herself to the Jews. It would be easy to say that she truly hated him, but, it is also that she idolized him, put him on a pedestal and was deeply angry and hurt that he died so early in her life leaving her without the love and nurturing of a father figure.

But in reading Rough Magic: a biography of Sylvia Plath and The Bell Jar, there is no suggestion that Plath’s father abused her. If anything, he neglected her since he worked numerous hours as an etymologist and a college professor. The neglect and the fact that he died when she was young, severed any type of bond that she may have developed with him. She didn’t think of his death a natural end, but thought of it more as him leaving her in the world to fend for herself. His death changed her life drastically as her mother who couldn’t fend for herself and her two children uprooted the family and moved in with her parents in another town. It seems that this added to Plath’s feeling of abandonment by her father, as he not only left her, his death also disrupted her life.

This feeling persisted. At thirty years old she wrote the poem “Daddy”. Her age is evident in the line “For thirty years” (4) and the entire contents of the poem shows that she held strong to the belief that her father neglected her. It is also evident in her reading of the poem in a recording for BBC in 1962. One could almost hear the pain, sorrow and anger in her voice. When she read “Ghastly statue with one grey toe, Big as a Frisco seal, And a head in the freakish Atlantic” (9-11), I thought she was going to burst into tears.

Because of Plath’s early loss of her father and the lacked of a father figure in her life, she sought to fill the void by finding a man that she thought was just like him “I made a model of you” (64) and “I said I do, I do” (67). The man she refers to in her poem is poet Ted Hughes whom she married in 1957.

It was by no means a happy union. Plath’s feeling of desertion by her father created a deep void in her life and as such, it made her cling to her husband with a need for his undivided attention. Throughout her marriage she suffered from bouts of depression as well uncontrollable jealousy and rage.

But her jealousy which was driven by suspicion that her husband was cheating on her was not unfounded as she later learned that he was betraying her with another woman. How devastated she must have been. First her father left her, choosing death over her and then her husband choosing another woman over her. It her mind it must have seemed a repeat of her father’s death all over again. To be abandonment by yet another man whom she looked to for love, support and nurturing. Instead abused her trust and love with what must have seemed the ultimate betrayal.

And then one day she had had enough. She sealed off the kitchen, stuck her head in the oven and turned on the gas. That was how author Sylvia Plath died, by taking her own life. Plath had attempted suicide once before which she talks about in the poem “Daddy” when she said “At twenty I tried to die” (58).

The first man in her life, her father, was the reason for her attempted suicide when she was twenty years old. Her suicide was brought about because of her husband’s desertion and her resulting sense of hopelessness and despair. It seems that the men in her life were control figures. They controlled her thoughts and in the end her life. It is a strange thought indeed that through her suffering she produced such brilliant work and that if she was successful in her first suicide attempt the world would have suffered the loss of a great writer.

While Plath did not achieve any fame throughout her lifetime, she is now referred to as a feminist poet and is often referred to as a great American author. Her work is studied in not only universities in the United Stated but also around the world with heavy emphasis on the poem “Daddy”.

When reading “Daddy” my main thought was about the author’s relationship with the power figures in her life, her father and her husband. But, there is more to the poem than that, for “Daddy” because of its Holocaust imagery is one of the poems in Holocaust Poetry by Hilda Schiff.

The life of Sylvia Plath was far too short and turbulent, filled with loss and betrayal. She poured all of this into her writing and when she passed away, she not only left her life story but a legacy of creativity and survival, not through the flesh, but through the pen. The works that she left behind has made a mark on many and will undoubtedly continue to do so in the future.

Sylvia Plath

I have developed a slight obsession with author/poet Sylvia Plath since I read her poem "Daddy" for one of my classes. I recently saw the movie Sylvia which didn't do justice to the woman and I think painted Ted Hughes in rose colours. I wonder who wrote the script, hmmm.

Daddy

by: 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.

Beautiful Savannah

Many years ago I read "Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil". It had everything that one could hope to find in a dime novel and then some. I was completely captivated by the story and fell in love with Savannah. I visited shortly after and it was exactly as Berendt described. Breath taking and unlike anything I could have imaged in the United States. These are pictures from a few weeks ago when I my boyfriend and I drove through.