Some more observations on the poem “Daddy”

 

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 regime in Germany. There are many direct references to the holocaust in the poem.

Why does the poet use such a metaphor? Does it takes things one step too far? Is it acceptable to use such an event to drive home a personal message of pain and torment? Is it okay to appropriate someone else's pain?

Using the nightmarish scenario of the holocaust as a metaphor for the daughter's relationship with her German father does tap into historical depth and meaning. The poem is ironically depersonalized and taken beyond mere confession into archetypal father-daughter pathos.

Sylvia Plath has risked all by introducing the holocaust into the poem; only her astute use of rhythm, rhyme and lyric allows her to get away with it.

The Trial of Eichmann

Sylvia Plath undoubtedly knew about the Final Solution of the Nazis in World War II. The trial of Adolf Eichmann lasted from April 11, 1961 to December 15, 1961 and was shown on television, allowing the whole world to witness the horrors of the holocaust. (Plath wrote "Daddy" the following year.) As a leading instigator of death in the concentration camp gas chambers, the SS Lieutenant-Colonel became notorious as the 'desk-murderer'. He was found guilty by trial in Jerusalem, Israel, and sentenced to hang.

Poetic Devices Used in "Daddy"

• It has 16 stanzas, each with five lines, making a total of 80 lines.
• The meter is roughly tetrameter, four beats, but also uses pentameter with a mix of stresses.
• Thirty-seven lines are end-stopped and enjambment is frequently used.
• Metaphor and simile are present, as are half-rhymes, alliteration, and assonance. The father is compared to a black shoe, a bag full of God, a giant, cold, marble statue, a Nazi, a swastika, a fascist, a sadist, and a vampire.
• The speaker uses baby talk to describe truly dark and painful feelings. She calls him "daddy," she calls a sneeze "achoo," "gobbledygoo," she gets tongue-tied and stammery ("Ich, ich, ich, ich"), and uses singsong repetitions. The juxtaposition of innocence and pain emphasizes both.
• There's also the howling, mournful "choo choo" sound of a steam train throughout: "You do not do, you do not do," "achoo," black shoe, glue, you, do, du, "I do, I do," shoe, two, screw, through, gobbledygoo, Jew, blue.... This repeated "ooo-ooo" sound gives the poem momentum, energy, and conjures up the image of a train chuffing its way to the final destination (which, in this case, is a Nazi death camp).

Language

This poem is full of surreal imagery and allusion interspersed with scenes from the poet's childhood and a kind of dark cinematic language that borrows from nursery rhyme and song lyric. Every so often German is used, reflecting the fact that Plath's father, Otto, was from Germany and must have spoken in this language to Sylvia in her childhood