When thought about, family is widely imagined as a positive cornerstone of the foundation of an individual’s life. Families are imagined as consisting a mother and a father who raise their children from birth to adulthood to the best of their ability, usually resulting positively. Certain aspects of every family are different, making each family one of its own. One of these aspects can ultimately change a family forever and could alter the outcome of a child’s life and their profession. Parents are not aware all of the time that their decisions affect their children as much as they truly do. The choices taken by parents are choices that should be thought out very thoroughly so the outcome for their children’s lives will be positive. The idea …show more content…
In most of her poetry Plath wrote as the voice of a daughter and most centered around an issue with a father, which is why some say the father is her “muse” (420). Plath was especially trained in depicting the daughter as the victim and the father as the villain in her poetry (420). This shows that Plath felt sympathy for herself and wanted others to also. Rietz also made the statement, “Plath’s method in ‘Daddy’ was to create an image of her father so loathsome that she can reject it completely and kill the myth that outlived her father” (426). The “myth” of Otto Plath that Rietz makes mention of is the persona that Plath creates for her father based on tales she has heard about her father since she was young. This persona she knew of her father was not someone she was impressed with, but it was someone she obsessed over. Rietz included a statement in his article from Plath about her father stating, “He was an autocrat. I adored him and despised him and I probably wished many times that he were dead. When he obliged me and died, I imagined that I killed him” (417). The feeling of resentment toward her father in this statement is undeniable, but the wish of death upon him explains how deeply the resentment existed. It is very apparent how Plath felt about her father and it is also very apparent that he was an influence in her poetry. Rietz concludes his article by saying, “To a certain extent- and she seems to have been aware of this- Otto Plath was her muse
Specifically, both the context of the poem and Plath’s life. In “Daddy” Plath displays what is called an Electra complex. The Electra complex is similar to the Oedipus complex where the daughter feels an unyielding sense of affection towards her father. In the book “The Norton Introduction to Literature” by Kelly J. Mays, it goes more into detail about the Electra complex where despite Electra having a “tyrannical” father, “Electra persists in loving her deeply flawed father long after he is dead” (1100). In order to translate this complex into her writing, Plath chose to compare her flawed father to a well-known tyrannical force. By using this comparison we get a sense of what her relationship with her father was like. The Electra complex is also apparent throughout the poem, where in the beginning we see how her younger self associated her father with this god-like figure and despite the obvious fear Plath had for him through the line “I have always been scared of you,” (41) she wanted to end her life in order to “get back” to him (59). Supporting the notion that Plath did have an Electra complex with her father at least throughout her childhood.
According to Dyk, the family life has become complicated because of a number of stressors. These stressors include the difficulties that people face on a daily basis, in shape of physical, emotional and psychological needs. Moreover, while families have to maintain social relationships,
Family is the fundamental group of people that hones each individual into a social being and trains each person into a being that complies with various changes that may occur in one’s life. It aids in developing a person’s skills and attitude in relating to other people. If not for the family, growing and developing one’s self is a difficult and an almost impossible task to accomplish. In the article by Joan Patterson, known as Understanding Family Resilience, it had highlighted various information and explanations of how a family responds and should opt to act during times of adversity, or also known as family resilience. It is defined by McCubin, H and McCubin, M. as “characteristics, dimensions, and properties which help families to be resistant to disruption in the face of change and adaptive in the face of crisis situations.” Since change occurs on a daily basis and is entirely inevitable, the trait of a family to be flexible in adjusting is necessary. Events that may trigger changes are various crises and challenges or internal and external forces. Such occurrences that arise and are experienced by the family may draw most families to become hopeless and disoriented. In Patterson’s work, a clear explanation and citation of various instances to prove that such misfortunate events that could lead to the disorganization of a family can be avoided and be used as an opportunity to further strengthen the relationship founded in the family.
Throughout the poem, Plath contradicts herself, saying, ‘I was seven, I knew nothing’ yet she constantly talks of the past, remembering. Her tone is very dark and imposing, she uses many images of blindness, deafness and a severe lack of communication, ‘So the deaf and dumb/signal the blind, and are ignored’. Her use of enjambment shows her feelings and pain in some places, in other places it covers up her emotional state. She talks of her father being a German, a Nazi. Whilst her father may have originated from Germany, he was in no way a Nazi, or a fascist. He was a simple man who made sausages. ‘Lopping the sausages!’ However she used this against her father, who died when she was but eight, saying that she still had night mares, ‘They color1 my sleep,’ she also brings her father’s supposed Nazism up again, ‘Red, mottled, like cut necks./There was a silence!’. Plath also talks of her father being somewhat of a general in the militia, ‘A yew hedge of orders,’ also with this image she brings back her supposed vulnerability as a child, talking as if her father was going to send her away, ‘I am guilty of nothing.’ For all her claims of being vul...
Having a family is no easy task, especially when you are faced with many challenges that are unforeseen. Sometimes one imagines or hopes for an ideal family. The ideal family would consist of a spouse, one or two kids and live happily with little to no conflicts. The reality is that even if one tries to avoid conflict by all possible means, conflict is inevitable. Stressors and strengths within a family can be seen in almost every situation. Although stressors tend to be more noticeable than the strengths. Some of which will be discussed later on, although it will be mainly focused on the strength and stressors faced after a divorce for children. But if one focuses on the stressors more than the strengths, one will only see stressors rather than solutions.
Since she was so young she never got to work out her unsettled feelings with him. Even at age eight, she hid when he was around because she was fearful of him. When she was in his presence his strict and authoritarian figure had left an overpowering barrier between their relationship. Sadly enough by age eight Plath instead of making memories with her dad playing in the yard she resented him and wanted nothing to do with him (Kehoe). These deep-seated feelings played a major role in Plath’s poetry writings.
All children will go through changes as they grow from childhood to adulthood. This change is and significant part of one’s development, known as adolescence. The relationship a child has with his/her family is a big impact on why most young teenagers...
These four perspectives of assessment involve: communication, family structure, life cycle adjustments, and the impact of the social environment on the family. Family theorist have also further expended on the interaction of family and the social environment. Throughout this paper, I will apply the four perspectives of assessment to asses my family of origin; as well as, use various family systems theories to assess my experiences with family of origin in order to develop an awareness of how my experiences affected me, and to prevent them from interfering with my ability to provide my future clients with the best possible
The principle of family atmosphere is the combination of all forces within the family or all the relationships which exist between people. The concept specifies a family as a system which causes each family member to influence others within the family. The family atmosphere develops and the outcome is how family members relate to each other. The parents determine the family’s methods of relating and interacting. The parents are the models for children’s gender roles, how a children learn to partake in the world and their relationships with others. Children can experience the parent model in a va...
The Olson’s family experienced a shift in their life when John and Susan lost their jobs, and when their 3 year old daughter died in a car crash. According to Smith and Hamon (2012), a family is composed of many members who have their own roles and expectations, and when those roles or expectations are broken, families experience difficulties. (Smith, and Hamon 2012). Based on the Family Systems Theory, families need to be viewed as
In Plath’s poem “Daddy”, she relates her journey of coming to terms of her father’s image. The poem begins with “you do not, you do not”, which means that her father has not been much of a parent since she was raised “poor and white”. During the time she was staying raised in such a manner, she felt trapped, “barely daring to breathe or achoo.” Living in such condition drove the speaker to come to the illusion of killing her father, but he had “…died before I had time”. At this point of time she has mixed feelings about her father. He was “marble-heavy, a bag full of God”, a “Ghastly statue…” whom loomed over her to keep her in check of what she was doing. She “… used to pray to …” her father, but gives the “Ach, du” of pity.
Throughout Plath’s writings, a nonchalant tone of indifference shapes the content of most of her works. Imputed to Plath’s depression, the apathy found in her works both exemplifies and characterizes the mental health struggle. Diagnosed with Endogenous depression, Plath’s apathy supposedly arises from an internal stressor as opposed to an external one, and Plath describes her internal stressors and responses to them in her works. However, tragic events exacerbate Plath’s melancholia but serve as an sublime inspiration for her works. Plath “writes well, in snatches and stanzas, about the impersonal moments of personal experience, when the sense of everything beyond one’s selfhood dominates the mind”
Plath utilizes this allusion to Nazi Germany and Hitler to illustrate her father’s oppressive impact on her psyche. Plath compares herself to a Jew by writing “An engine, an engine/ Chudding me off like a Jew,” feeling victim to her father’s power like how the Jews were persecuted by the Nazis (“Daddy” Plath 31). She even aligns herself to “A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen” making parallels between Nazis sending Jews off to concentration camps and her relationship with her all-powerful father further emphasizing the brutality and suffering that she felt (“Daddy” Plath 33). Plath reveals her childhood recollections of her father in the first twelve stanzas of the poem through to her attempted suicide at twenty years old. These
A brief introduction to psychoanalysis is necessary before we can begin to interpret Plaths poems. Art is the expression of unconscious infantile desires and the strongest of these desires is the wish to “do away with his father and…to take his mother to wife” (Freud, “Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis 411).This is what Freud called the Oedipal conflict. For women the desire is of course reversed to killing the mother and marrying the father and is called the Electra complex. Children resolve this conflict by identifying with their same sex parent. Loss of a parent can prevent the normal resolution of the Oedipal conflict and result in a fixation or obsession with the lost object (object is the term used to define the internal representations of others). The desire to have the lost object back is also the desire for what Freud called primary narcissism. ...
Everyone is born into some form of family, with the family taking the responsibility of nurturing, teaching the norms or accepted behaviors within the family structure and within society. There are many types of families, which can be described as a set of relationships including parents and children and can include anyone related by blood or adoption. Family is the most important, “for it is within the family that the child is first socialized to serve the needs of the society and not only its own needs” (Goode, 1982).