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The Ambivalence of Love and Hatred in "Daddy"

The poem "Daddy" by Sylvia Plath explores the speaker's complex feelings of love and hatred towards her deceased father. For 30 years, the speaker felt trapped by the weight of her father's memory after he died when she was a child. While she desires to rid herself of his influence, she also admits to praying to recover him. The poem compares the father to Hitler and the speaker to a Jew, conveying Plath's belief that she married her husband because he resembled her tyrannical father. In the end, the speaker declares she is finally free of her father's power over her.

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199 views1 page

The Ambivalence of Love and Hatred in "Daddy"

The poem "Daddy" by Sylvia Plath explores the speaker's complex feelings of love and hatred towards her deceased father. For 30 years, the speaker felt trapped by the weight of her father's memory after he died when she was a child. While she desires to rid herself of his influence, she also admits to praying to recover him. The poem compares the father to Hitler and the speaker to a Jew, conveying Plath's belief that she married her husband because he resembled her tyrannical father. In the end, the speaker declares she is finally free of her father's power over her.

Uploaded by

Jose Gremio
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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The Ambivalence of Love and Hatred in "Daddy"

In the almost confessional or autobiographical poem "Daddy" by Sylvia Plath, the speaker has an
obsession with her father who died when she was a child (just like Otto Plath, and his untimely death
when Plath was eight years old). The poem echoes some of the persona's mixed feelings about her
father, which sets a tone of ambivalence regarding her relationship with him.

For 30 years the speaker has been trapped and desires to rid herself of the weight of her father's
memory, a weight that has held her captive her entire life. It can also refer to Plath's father's foot
infection from untreated diabetes, which resulted in amputation.

"Daddy, I have had to kill you./ You died before I had time--"

These lines from the second stanza convey that she feels the need to separate herself abruptly from her
father and his memory.

Yet in the third stanza after a mention of Nauset (which is a fond reference to her childhood home near
the sea), she claims

"I used to pray to recover you,"

which shows that she has dubious feelings about cutting off their relationship.

devil, neat mustache, Aryan eye === all these point to the tyrannical German dictator Hitler's
resemblance to her father and herself to a Jew

the brute

Brute heart of a brute like you.

but still she chose a man who resembles her father:

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.

Stanza twelve has a reference to her (nearly successful) suicide attempt when the speaker was twenty,
calling it an attempt to get back to her father, even if only his bones. The poem has increasingly
desperate language that compares the father to Adolf Hitler and the daughter to a Jew, which
articulates Plath's belief that she married Ted Hughes because Hughes reminded her of her father.

Still, she finishes the poem with "Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I'm through." She has had enough, she has
fought through the binding love and hatred to win her freedom.

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