Sylvia Plath’s “Daddy” and the Electra Complex

Damian Ionut An 3, Seria I, Gr.5

Sylvia Plath’s ―Daddy‖ and the Electra Complex

In Neo-Freudian psychology, the Electra complex, as proposed by Carl Gustav Jung, is a girl’s psychosexual competition with her mother for possession of her father. In the course of her psychosexual development, the complex is the girl's phallic stage; formation of a discrete sexual identity, a boy's analogous experience is the Oedipus complex. The Electra complex occurs in the third — phallic stage (ages 3–6) — of five psychosexual development stages: (i) the Oral, (ii) the Anal, (iii) the Phallic, (iv) the Latent, and (v) the Genital — in which the source libido pleasure is in a different erogenous zone of the infant’s body.1 Daddy is one of Sylvia Plath’s most famous poem, a poem which deals with the Electra complex.Even Sylvia admitted in an interview that her poem talks about this complex . The poem is spoken by a girl with an Electra complex. The 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 over before she is free of it.2 From the title we can see the love that the girl shares with his father, the noun ―daddy‖ being much more emotional than ―father‖ or ―dad‖. Zhang Fen-ling in ―The Ariel in the Bell Jar :Sylvia Plath and her Poems‖ notes that the poem is written in a tone of a little girl who has the Electra complex which can be seen in the 1 2

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electra_complex New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1967), pp. 81-82

repetitive structure of the words3.Eg:‖You do not do, you do not do…/Ich, ich, ich, ich…/An engine, an engine…‖ Even if in the beginning, the girl says that she wants to kills his father, we can se in the other lines, that , in fact, she doesn’t want this thing, she loves her father and she wants to be with him.She wants him back , and she starts to pray to get him back.‖ . I used to pray to recover you.‖When she is twenty years old, her love for his father is so big that she even would die to be next to him. “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.‖ Her father image is so powerful for her , that she transforms him in God ―Marble-heavy, a bag full of God,‖ and later in a nazi German‖ I thought every German was you.‖And because she sees her father as a German, she considers to be herself a Jew‖ I began to talk like a Jew./I think I may well be a Jew.‖ Also, I thing she considers herself to be a Jew to transfigure her role as a victim .She wants to emphasize her pain ,her misery, like a Jew who has been the victim of the Germans. The poem is full of trauma and pain.The line‖You do not do‖ expresses that the girl is still trying to to realise that she is forced to accept the truth that her father is gone. Her frustration of not being allowed to communicate with his father is described on the lines:‖ I never could talk to you. /The tongue stuck in my jaw.‖ After she realised that she can’t join her father through suicide, she decides to marry a man who looks like her father, who has the same characteristics:‖ 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.‖ ―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 far 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.‖The two stanzas present the ambivalence to his father, and this is a good ending for her to describe this kind of 3

http://web.ntpu.edu.tw/~shueng/sylvia%20plath.pdf

ambivalence. The first stanza I mentioned above is a love for her daddy, and by loving his daddy she married with his husband. Because she loves her daddy, she found the person like him. So, she says if she killed one man, she killed two. Two means to be her daddy and her husband. It is her daddy who drank her blood for a year, and seven years means the period of marriage which is indirectly cause by her daddy. The final stanza I mentioned above stands for the hate to her daddy, especially the final line- Daddy, Daddy, you bastard, I’m through. It’s the sentence that I love most because it presents the most hatred to his daddy, and she wrote it like that she got rid of her daddy’s trouble. Therefore, I think this two stanzas stand for the ambivalence.4 Plath’s final vicious name-calling, ―Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m through.‖ (80) prematurely ends the poem. Although Plath seemingly has put her dangerous, dark obsession with her father in the past, the metaphor of her extremely immense Electra complex lingers with ambiguity present throughout the entire poem. Readers can observe the residual consequences of clinging to a complex long after the physical end of emotional abuse through Plath’s strong yet ambiguous poem.5

4 5

http://www.sylviaplathforum.com/daddy.html http://mcavoydl.wordpress.com/2013/09/22/the-building-and-destruction-of-the-electra-complex/

WORKS CITED

EVELYN Y.HUANG: HER LOVE AND HATRED TO HER FATHER:THE CONTRADICTION IN SYLVIA PLATH’S ―DADDY‖, FLAL JUNIOR. NEW YORK:OXFORD UNIV.PRESS,1967),PP.81-81 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electra_complex http://www.sylviaplathforum.com/daddy.html http://mcavoydl.wordpress.com/2013/09/22/the-building-and-destruction-of-the-electracomplex/