'Daddy' Analysis by Sylvia Plath

  Best  foot  forward:  an  analysis  of  Sylvia  Plath’s  ‘Daddy’   In  his  memoirs,  Hitch-­‐22,  the  late  Anglo-­‐American  writer  Christopher  Hitchens   devotes  a  chapter  to  “Thinking  thrice  about  the  Jewish  question.”  An   international  socialist  devoted  to  the  works  of  Karl  Marx,  Leon  Trotsky,  Sigmund   Freud  and  Rosa  Luxembourg,  Hitchens  was  “pleased  to  find  that  I  was  pleased”   in  1988  when  his  brother  Peter  brought  the  news  that  their  long-­‐deceased   mother  was  Jewish.  Though  even  in  the  1930s  Britain  was  hardly  awash  with   anti-­‐Semitism,  Mother  Hitchens  had  decided  to  keep  her  heritage  secret  from   both  her  children  and  her  husband.  It  was  only  when  the  brothers’  maternal   grandmother  met  Peter’s  Jewish  girlfriend  that  the  news  emerged.  Reflecting  on   an  old  piece  he  had  written  about  his  clandestine  Semitic  roots,  Hitchens  writes,   “[I]t  was  largely  positive  and  even  upbeat  if  only  because  my  semi-­‐Semitism  was   on  my  mother’s  side  rather  than,  as  with  Sylvia  Plath,  a  distraught  paternal   bequest.”   The  smoke-­‐wreathed  old  hack  makes  numerous  references  to  Plath  and  her   ‘Daddy’  in  his  exploration  of  his  Jewish  ancestry,  but  to  say  that  her  Semitism   was  paternal  may  have  been  erroneous.  In  a  reading  of  ‘Daddy’  given  shortly   before  her  suicide,  Plath  said  of  the  poem’s  narrator,  “Her  case  is  complicated  by   the  fact  that  her  father  was…  a  Nazi  and  her  mother  very  possibly  part  Jewish.”   “Hang  on  a  second.  ‘Her’?”  a  vigilant  reader  may  ask.  “Isn’t  ‘Daddy’   autobiographical?”  We’d  like  to  think  so;  the  “confessional”  aspect  lends  the   poem  an  anguished  beauty.  Like  many  aspects  of  Plath’s  life,  though,  things  are   not  quite  so  simple.   Certainly  Plath  does  construct  much  of  the  poem  on  real  experiences  and  events.   Take  the  dominant  motif  –  the  foot.  Plath  begins  the  poem  by  saying  that  she   feels  as  if  she  has  “lived  like  a  foot”  in  the  “black  shoe”  of  her  father’s  shadow  for   the  past  30  years.  She  then  enlarges  the  feeling  of  inferiority  by  describing  her   dad  as  a  “Ghastly  statue  with  one  gray  toe  /  Big  as  a  Frisco  seal.”  That  “gray  toe”   of  her  father’s  was  the  result  of  diabetes,  a  disorder  that  Otto  Plath  himself   misdiagnosed  as  lung  cancer.  Only  when  his  foot  became  infected  did  he  consult   a  doctor,  by  which  time  it  was  too  late.  In  October  1940  his  gangrenous  leg  was   amputated  (“I  have  had  to  kill  you”),  and  he  died  a  few  weeks  later.  Sylvia  was   eight  years  old.  “There’s  man  all  over  for  you,”  says  Vladimir  in  Samuel  Beckett’s   1953  play  Waiting  for  Godot:  “Blaming  on  his  boots  the  faults  of  his  feet.”   In  the  marauding  “black  boot”  we  find  the  “brute  heart”  of  the  matter:   overbearing  yet  insufficient  paternal  nurture.  In  Hitch-­‐22  Hitchens  writes  that   for  all  his  faults  as  a  father  (“Confronted  with  infancy,  I  was  exceptionally  no   good…  I  was  really  marking  time  until  they  were  old  enough  to  be  able  to  hold  a   conversation”),  he  still  knew  enough  to  let  his  children  grow  up:   To  be  the  father  of  growing  daughters  is  to  understand  something  of  what   Yeats  evokes  with  his  imperishable  phrase  “terrible  beauty.”  Nothing  can   make  one  so  happily  exhilarated  or  so  frightened:  it’s  a  solid  lesson  in  the   limitations  of  self  to  realize  that  your  heart  is  running  around  inside   ©  Education  Umbrella,  2014  

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  someone  else’s  body.  It  also  makes  me  quite  astonishingly  calm  at  the   thought  of  death:  I  know  whom  I  would  die  to  protect  and  I  also   understand  that  nobody  but  a  lugubrious  serf  can  possibly  wish  for  a   father  who  never  goes  away.   Plath  has  the  worst  of  both  worlds:  her  father  was  oppressive  when  he  was  alive   (she  felt  “Barely  daring  to  breathe  or  Achoo,”  the  latter  act  perhaps  angrily   discouraged  by  an  entomologist  father  worried  about  his  specimens),  but  then   died  with  such  abruptness  and  bad  timing  that  his  daughter  was  left  traumatised.   ‘Daddy’  is  an  attempt  to  resurrect  repressed  memories  and  then  expunge  them.   The  first  stanza  establishes  the  pattern  of  childlike  repetition  (“You  do  not  do,   you  do  not  do”)  and  infant  reference  (beginning  with  ‘The  Old  Woman  Who   Lived  In  a  Shoe’).  The  Plath  household  was  quite  a  bit  better  than  the  shoe  of  the   childhood  nursery  rhyme;  unlike  the  Old  Woman’s  offspring,  Sylvia  and  her   brother  Warren  had  more  to  eat  than  just  “broth  without  bread.”  The  illusion   works  –  in  both  verses  the  father  is  absent  –  but  it  is  merely  the  first  of  Plath’s   many  towers  of  self-­‐pity.   To  the  infant  Plath,  Daddy  was  a  near-­‐immovable  (“Marble-­‐heavy”),  “ghastly   statue”  stretching  across  the  United  States,  with  that  infected  foot  in  San   Francisco  (“Frisco”  in  local  parlance)  and  his  head  in  the  “freakish  Atlantic”  off   the  coast  of  New  England,  where  the  Plath  children  were  raised.  The  reference  to   “beautiful  Nauset,”  an  area  encompassing  parts  of  modern-­‐day  Connecticut,   Rhode  Island  and  Massachusetts  and  once  inhabited  by  the  Nauset  or  Cape  Cod   Indians,  evokes  a  lost  paradise,  something  wild  and  savage  and  now  extinct.  (Just   to  the  southwest  of  Nauset  is  New  York,  the  setting  of  F.  Scott  Fitzgerald’s   novel  The  Great  Gatsby,  which  ends  with  the  narrator  musing  on  the  old  island   that  “flowered  once  for  Dutch  sailor’s  eyes-­‐-­‐a  fresh,  green  breast  of  the  New   World.”)   The  Nauset  people  had  their  myths  and  monsters;  and  just  as  they  were  slowly   decimated  by  white  Europeans,  so  Plath’s  Christian  faith  is  killed  by  the  death  of   her  father  –  “I  used  to  pray  to  recover  you.”  This  profession  of  godlessness  is   immediately  followed  by  the  first  use  of  the  “German  tongue”  –  “Ach,  du”:  Oh,   you.   Like  Plath,  Hitchens  could  trace  his  family  history  to  an  area  of  what  was  once   German  Prussia  and  is  now  Poland,  a  town  that  was  indeed,  “Scraped  flat  by  the   roller  /  Of  wars,  wars,  wars.”  The  history  of  Poland  in  the  first  half  of  the   20th  century  is  one  of  pogroms,  appalling  conflict,  acrimonious  and  opportunistic   land  grabs  and  shifting  borders,  in  which  the  Polish  people  were  not  always   innocent  victims:  a  fitting  background  for  a  woman  who  was  often  at  war  with   herself.   The  land  to  the  east  of  the  Oder  and  Neisse  (the  rivers  that  today  form  the   German-­‐Polish  border)  was  the  setting  for  the  start  of  the  Second  World  War.  In   1918,  following  its  defeat  in  the  Great  War,  Germany  had  been  forced  to  cede   much  of  this  territory  and  its  rich  soil  to  the  new  Polish  state,  which  had  barely   ©  Education  Umbrella,  2014  

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  caught  its  breath  before  going  to  war  with  Lithuania  and  Bolshevik  Russia  over   lingering  territorial  disputes.  Having  seen  off  its  neighbours,  Poland  would  enjoy   less  than  two  decades  of  independence  before  embittered  Germans,  led  by  Adolf   Hitler,  began  talking  of  the  need  for  Lebensraum  –  ‘living  space’  –  for  them  and   the  superior  German  people.  On  the  1st  of  September,  1939,  Nazi  Germany,  under   the  false  pretext  of  Polish  aggression,  launched  the  last  and  most  terrible  of  those   “wars,  wars,  wars.”   Had  he  not  emigrated  from  his  native  Germany  to  the  United  States  in  1900  at   the  age  of  15,  Otto  Plath  may  well  have  become  the  Nazi  his  daughter  Sylvia   imagines  him  to  be.  Otto  was  born  in  the  German  town  of  Grabow,  120  miles   northwest  of  Berlin.  ‘Grabow’  is  a  Slavic  name,  and  is  indeed  “common”  in  Poland   –  there  are  perhaps  not  “a  dozen  or  two,”  but  enough  to  confuse  someone   researching  family  heritage  without  the  benefit  of  Google  maps.  Thus,  ‘Daddy’  is   not  only  absent  from  the  present,  he  is  also  illusive  in  the  past;  and  Plath  cleverly   weds  this  blurred  genealogy  to  the  idea  that  her  father’s  stern  discipline  was   innate:  one  can’t  help  but  insert  “down”  after  “foot”  in  the  line  “I  never  could  tell   where  you/  Put  your  foot,  your  root.”   Why,  though,  does  Plath  refer  to  her  Polish  “friend”  by  the  derogatory  term   “Polack”?  Read  out  of  context  the  line  appears  absurd,  but  it  is  rendered  ironic   six  lines  later  by  the  overt  hostility  that  Plath  displays  towards  Poland’s  great   western  nemesis:   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     In  The  Bell  Jar,  her  only  novel,  Plath  writes,  “My  mother  spoke  German  during   her  childhood  in  America  and  was  stoned  for  it  during  the  First  World  War  by   the  children  at  school…  each  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.”  The  Bell  Jar,  like  ‘Daddy,’  was  only  semi-­‐autobiographical,  but   the  link  is  telling  enough.   Plath,  then,  is  torn:  she  wants  to  talk  to  her  father,  but  hates  his  native  tongue,  as   much  for  its  apparent  aesthetic  and  audible  inelegance  as  the  fact  that   throughout  her  childhood  it  was  the  language  of  the  enemy.  Having  thus  taken  us   back  to  German  Prussia,  the  self-­‐pitying  pinnacle  of  the  poem  is  inevitable:   An  engine,  an  engine   Chuffing  me  off  like  a  Jew.   A  Jew  to  Dachau,  Auschwitz,  Belsen.  

©  Education  Umbrella,  2014  

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  I  began  to  talk  like  a  Jew.   I  think  I  may  well  be  a  Jew.   A  touch  melodramatic,  yes,  but  at  least  not  wholly  fanciful;  there  was  a  sizable   Jewish  community  in  German  Grabow  prior  to  the  rise  of  the  Nazis.  One  of  the   Platts  (Otto  changed  his  name  to  ‘Plath’  upon  arrival  in  New  York  City,  pre-­‐ empting  the  British  Royal  family,  who  waited  until  the  First  World  War  before   changing  their  surname  to  hide  their  German  heritage)  may  have  suffered  the   fate  that  Hitler  warned  of  in  Mein  Kampf:  “The  black-­‐haired  Jewish  youth  lies  in   wait  for  hours  on  end,  satanically  glaring  at  and  spying  on  the  unsuspicious  girl   whom  he  plans  to  seduce,  adulterating  her  blood  and  removing  her  from  the   bosom  of  her  own  people.”  Hitler’s  rambling  autobiography  isn’t  quite  as  “Jew”   heavy  as  one  might  expect,  but  Plath’s  repetition  of  the  word  does  work  well  as   both  a  sly  rhyme  with  “you”  and  an  invocation  of  those  endless  Bavarian  beer-­‐ hall  discussions  of  der  Judenfrage  –  the  Jewish  question.   Godwin’s  law  states  that  the  longer  a  discussion  goes  on,  the  more  likely   someone  will  resort  to  a  comparison  to  Hitler  or  the  Nazis.  Plath  made  it  to  the   seventh  stanza  of  her  16-­‐stanza  poem  before  unleashing  the  National  Socialist   German  Workers’  Party;  and  once  the  (ahem)  train  had  left  the  station,  she   couldn’t  stop.  First  we  get,  “the  snows  of  the  Tyrol”  (a  mountainous  region  that   straddled  southern  Austria  and  northern  Italy);  “the  clear  beer  of  Vienna”  (the   capital  of  Austria,  where  Hitler  lived  for  eight  years  from  the  age  of  15  and   where,  having  been  rejected  by  the  city’s  renowned  art  university,  his  fascistic   and  anti-­‐Semitic  worldview  began  to  form),  neither  of  which  are  “pure”  or  “true”   (unlike  the  bloodline  of  the  German  people);  and  an  unspecified  “gipsy   ancestress”  (just  in  case  the  Nazis  should  doubt  Plath’s  racial  impurity).   Next  comes  the  “Luftwaffe”  (the  German  air  force);  her  father’s  “neat  mustache”   (not  a  reference  to  Charlie  Chaplin)  and  “Aryan  eye,  bright  blue”  (Daddy  did   indeed  have  a  mustache  and  blue  eyes:  poster  features  for  Nazi  race  myths);  and   the  German  army’s  staple  tank,  the  panzer  –  “Panzer  man”.   The  next  stanza  begins  with  the  ambiguous  line,  “Not  God  but  a  swastika  /  So   black  no  sky  could  squeak  through.”  Is  Plath  cancelling  out  her  earlier  line,  “a  bag   full  of  God”?  Or  is  she  referring  to  Hitler’s  attempts  to  usurp  the  role  of  the   almighty?  There’s  no  time  to  dwell  on  it,  for  the  next  line  is  the  first  and  only   intimation  of  Sylvia’s  mother,  who,  like  “every  woman,”  “adores  a  Fascist  /  The   boot  in  the  face.”  Aurelia  Plath,  née  Schober,  was  a  student  of  Otto’s  at  Boston   University.  The  daughter  of  Austrian  immigrants,  she  married  Otto  in  Reno,   Nevada  at  the  age  of  25.  Her  new  husband,  with  his  ominous  Gestapo  footwear   and  his  “Brute  /  brute  heart,”  was  46.   The  Nazi  analogy  is  less  about  Otto’s  German  heritage  than  about  something   hypnotically  powerful  and  colossal  withering  to  dust.  Like  Otto  Plath,  the  Third   Reich  died  a  quick  and  emphatic  death:  Dachau,  Auschwitz  and  Belsen  were   liberated;  the  Luftwaffe  and  the  panzers  were  destroyed;  the  myths  of  Aryan   superiority  were  debunked;  the  swastika  was  exposed  as  a  cheap  forgery;   central  Europe’s  great  fascist  corridor  crumbled;  and  that  man  with  the  “neat   ©  Education  Umbrella,  2014  

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  mustache”  and  the  “Meinkampf  look”  blew  his  brains  out  in  a  bunker  in  Berlin  as   the  Red  Army  closed  in.   Hitler  was  the  gangrenous,  “gray  toe”  of  Germany.  His  popularity  may   have  seemed  immense,  but  “the  villagers  never  liked”  him;  indeed,  during  the   war  he  escaped  several  assassination  attempts  by  people  in  his  own  party.  They   never  got  to  drive  a  stake  through  his  heart,  or  dance  and  stamp  on  his  corpse   (though  the  latter  ignominy  did  befall  Benito  Mussolini,  the  dictator  of  Fascist   Italy,  very  much  the  junior  partner  in  the  Axis  alliance),  but  in  May  1945,  as  they   surveyed  their  wrecked  country,  Germans  knew  that  Hitler  was  to  blame,  just  as   Plath  knows  that  her  tragic  love  life  (to  which  we  are  coming)  is  the  fault  of  her   father.   From  the  eleventh  stanza  onwards  the  message  becomes  more  black  and  white  –   or  rather,  black  and  red,  the  colours  of  Nazi  insignia:   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.     In  The  Bell  Jar  the  narrator,  Esther  Greenwood,  writes,  “My  German-­‐speaking   father,  dead  since  I  was  nine,  came  from  some  manic-­‐depressive  hamlet  in  the   black  heart  of  Prussia.”  As  well  as  being  a  German  speaker  from  Prussia,  Otto  had   a  cleft  in  his  chin,  an  indentation  that,  Plath  suggests,  would  have  worked  better   in  his  foot.  It’s  not  enough  that  her  father  had  to  have  his  foot  amputated;  he   needed  to  be  cloven-­‐hoofed  as  well.   If,  then,  daddy  is  a  Nazi  devil,  why  did  Plath  try  to  kill  herself  at  age  20  in  order  to   get  “back,  back,  back”  to  him?  Does  she,  like  her  mother,  adore  a  Fascist?  It  would   appear  so.  Having  being  “glued  back  together”  by  a  combination  of  electro-­‐shock   therapy,  counselling  and  anti-­‐depressants,  Plath  in  1956  married  the  poet  and   author  Ted  Hughes,  “a  man  in  black  with  a  Meinkampf  look.”  Again,  the  latter   comparison  is  not  to  be  taken  literally;  Fascists  tend  not  to  make  great  children’s   writers,  as  Hughes  was.  Like  Otto,  Hughes  was  not  a  zealously  right-­‐wing   nationalist,  but  he  was  capable  of  brutish  behaviour  worthy  of  those  black-­‐ booted  goose-­‐steppers.   When  Plath  said  “I  do,  I  do”  to  Hughes,  her  Oedipal  wanderings  were  complete.   She  had  found  the  man  to  torture  her.  Six  years  after  their  marriage,  Plath,  now  a   mother  of  two  and  resident  in  London,  discovered  that  her  husband  was  a   “vampire”  who  had  been  drinking  her  blood  for  “Seven  years”:  Ted  had  been   having  an  affair  with  (ironically  enough)  a  German  woman  who  had  escaped  the   Nazis  by  fleeing  to  British-­‐mandated  Palestine  (land  that  in  1948  would  become   the  state  of  Israel).  The  couple  separated;  and  Plath  moved  with  their  two   children  to  a  flat  at  23  Fitzroy  Road  in  the  Primrose  Hill  area  of  London,  where   the  poem  and  her  life  terminate.   ©  Education  Umbrella,  2014  

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  Plath’s  final  dwelling  is  notable  for  two  reasons.  First,  it  had  no  telephone.  (“The   black  telephone’s  off  at  the  root,  /  The  voices  just  can’t  worm  through.”)  Second,   it  had  once  been  the  home  of  the  Irish  poet  William  Butler  Yeats,  an  omen  that   Plath  considered  propitious.  On  the  11th  of  February,  1963,  as  she  turned  on  the   flat’s  gas  oven  and  placed  her  head  inside,  Plath  may  have  pictured  her  “bastard”   husband/father  while  contemplating  the  second  stanza  of  Yeats’  poem  ‘Easter   1916’:   That  woman’s  days  were  spent   In  ignorant  good-­‐will,   Her  nights  in  argument   Until  her  voice  grew  shrill.   What  voice  more  sweet  than  hers   When,  young  and  beautiful,   She  rode  to  harriers?   This  man  had  kept  a  school   And  rode  our  winged  horse;   This  other  his  helper  and  friend   Was  coming  into  his  force;   He  might  have  won  fame  in  the  end,   So  sensitive  his  nature  seemed,   So  daring  and  sweet  his  thought.   This  other  man  I  had  dreamed   A  drunken,  vainglorious  lout.   He  had  done  most  bitter  wrong   To  some  who  are  near  my  heart,   Yet  I  number  him  in  the  song   He,  too,  has  been  changed  in  his  turn,   Transformed  utterly:   A  terrible  beauty  is  born.  

©  Education  Umbrella,  2014  

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