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.