English Language, Literature and Creative Writing Blog

  Plath's Electra Complex In psychoanalysis, an Electra complex is the female version of Freud's Oedipus complex. Jung posited that a daughter perceives her mother as a rival for the psychosexual energy of her father, and wants to possess the father. This unresolved desire sometimes manifests as negative fixation on the father or father figure. What did Plath mean that "Daddy" was 'spoken by a girl with an Electra complex'? In "Daddy," the speaker is father-fixated. She's a "daddy's girl" and uses the childlike, endearing term "daddy" seven times to describe the man whose memory tortures her. During the course of the poem, the speaker's goal shifts from an attempt to recover, reunite with, and marry her dead father to an attempt to kill his memory and terminate his dominance over her.  "Daddy" and the Holocaust As the poem progresses, the narrator identifies herself with the plight of the Jews during the Nazi...

  Stanza/Lines What It Means Lines 1-5: 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. The speaker says after 30 years, she will no longer live trapped inside the memory of her father. Her comparison of him to a shoe evokes the old nursery rhyme about an old woman who lives in a shoe, and the singsong repetition and the word "achoo" sounds similarly childish. The "you" to whom the poem is addressed is the absent father. Lines 6-10: 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 In line 6, the speaker shocks us with the assertion she has already murdered her father—figuratively. A "bag full of God" could mean he's in a body bag or that his body is just a bag. We get an image of how big he is in her eyes via the heavy, cold corpse so large that it span...

  Stanza-by-Stanza Analysis of Plath's  Daddy Stanza 1 :  A first line repeated, a declaration of intent, the first sounds of oo—this is the train setting off on its final death march. The black shoe is a metaphor for the father. Inside, trapped for 30 years, is the narrator, about to escape. Stanza 2: But she can only free herself by killing her "daddy," who does resemble the poet's actual father, Otto, who died when she was 8. His toe turned black from gangrene. He eventually had to have his leg amputated due to complications of diabetes. When young Plath heard this news, she said, "I'll never speak to God again." Here, the bizarre, surreal imagery builds up—his toe is as big as a seal, and the grotesque image of her father has fallen like a statue. Stanza 3:   The personal weaves in and out of the allegory. The statue's head is in the Atlantic, on the coast at Nauset Beach, Cape Cod, where the Plath family used to holiday. The father icon stretche...

  The publication of R. W. Emerson's Nature , an essay, in 1836 was the manifesto of a new movement, that was soon called "Transcendentalism". This text had a tremendous influence on many thinkers of the time. Transcendentalism inaugurated the American Renaissance, giving it both a necessary impulse as well as its foundations. It gave birth to many texts, essentially philosophical essays, which analyzed the intellectual, but also moral, social, religious and political situation of the USA in the 1830s, 40s and 50s, and advocated a resolutely independent spirit. Even if the Transcendentalists were essentially philosophers and thinkers, novelists such as Hawthorne or Melville, and poets such as Walt Whitman or Emily Dickinson also felt profundly indebted towards Transcendentalism which deeply influenced them in many different ways. The American Renaissance, which started in 1836 with Nature, lasted for several decades, until the beginning of the Civil War, in 1861, which ma...

  Dickinson was a dynamic poet in her fast-changing era. At that time where women were expected to put their ambitions at stake and serve their domestic life, Emily succeeded in balancing between the two. She was a prolific writer, writing to express her true perceptions and philosophies of life along with taking care of all her domestic responsibilities. She didn’t just write for writing sake, rather she poignantly raises the question about God, church, politics and society in general. We could imagine her helplessness while manipulating some of her excerpts according to societal norms in order to get them published. She went to Amherst Academy in her childhood and the academy had just begun to admit women.   She built a good circle of friends there. Dickinson wrote about her school, “We really have some most charming young women in school this term. I shan’t call them anything but women, for women they are in every sense of the word”. Just look at her emphasis on choosing th...

  Emily Dickinson did not provide titles to her poems. We do not find any reasons behind it but then, we consider the title as either the first line of the poem or the numbers allotted to them in Thomas H. Johnson’s standard edition of The Poems of Emily Dickinson. Emily Dickinson was born in the year 1830 at Amherst, in the Connecticut Valley, Massachusetts. She was devoted to her home and from her late twenties showed the trait of seclusion and hardly met any visitors. Because of this tendency, people in Amherst considered her an eccentric. She was a perceptive, critical, hard working person who knew how to balance between a busy family and writing. She regularly kept writing poems and neatly arranged them in chronological order. Her poetic oeuvre was a markedly individual style that uses skilful imagery. It includes the imagery of death, desire, despair, immortality, nature and hope. The distinctive features of her poems are: they lack titles, often use slant rhymes (half-rhyme)...