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Literary devices in sylvia plath's daddy
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Revenge and Hatred in Plath's Daddy
The power of Plath's Daddy to threaten, shock and move the reader remains undiminished, years after it was written. To the unsuspecting reader, the experience of first reading "Daddy" is a confusion of discomfort, excitement and guilty pleasure, for the pleasures of revenge are said to be sweet, and this is a revenge poem of the first rank. Revenge upon whom? Father? Perhaps, more likely, upon her husband. And her aim was true, for if anything Plath wrote damaged Ted Hughes for posterity, "Daddy" is it. From this poem, we gather our indelible impressions of Hughes as a brute, a wife beater, a vampire, even an implied racist and murderer (if we extend the Hitler metaphor to its fullest implications) . . . on and on.
The controversial Holocaust imagery can be directly linked to the period in which the poem was written. In 1961, the entire world was riveted by the Jerusalem trial of Nazi SS Lieutenant Colonel Adolph Eichmann (who was executed in 1962, a few months before "Daddy" was written). This was the first televised trial in history, an...
The Holocaust was a vile and horrific event that took place in Germany under the dictatorship of Adolf Hitler, gruesomely taking the lives of around 6 million Jews. To compare one self’s experience to that of those gassed and subjected to atrocious conditions is unbecoming at the least. The vast majority agree with this notion as well, including Irving Howe. Irving Howe, writer of the article “The Plath Celebration: A Partial Dissent” describes making Plath’s comparison her life to that of a Jew in her poem “Daddy” as “monstrous” and “utterly disproportionate” (1082). While Howe makes a reasonable argument, I disagree when he states that “Sylvia Plath tries to enlarge upon the personal plight” (1082). Accusing Plath of using the
Before looking at what type of Government is best, it’s important to know about human nature because gives us an idea of the type of people, who would have the power in Government. Human nature deals with the distinguishing characteristics, including ways of thinking, feeling and act, which humans tend to have naturally, without any influence from the culture around them. Between both of them, Hobbes was the one that had a negative view of human nature. He believed that people were born to be bad and cruel and would act on behalf of their own best interests, like “Every man for himself” and that society could not exist exce...
Sylvia Plath’s jarring poem ‘Daddy’, is not only the exploration of her bitter and tumultuous relationship with her father, husband and perhaps the male species in general but is also a strong expression of resentment against the oppression of women by men and the violence and tyranny men can and have been held accountable for. Within the piece, the speaker creates a figurative image of her father by using metaphors to describe her relationship with him: “Not God but a Swastika” , he is a “… brute” , even likening him to leader of the Nazi Party; Adolf Hitler: “A man in black with a Meinkampf look .” Overall, the text is a telling recount of her hatred towards her father and her husband of “Seven years” and the tolling affect it has had on
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...
For John Locke in order to create an almost flawless form of government we must imagine a world without government. Without government we will retreat back into the state in which all men are naturally in, which Locke calls the state of nature. While in a state of nature, men would feel that they have complete freedom, and they won’t have to depend on any other man. Additionally, “the natural liberty of man is to be free from any superior power on earth and not to be under the will or legislative authority of man, but to have only the law of nature for his rule” (Dolling). So the law of nature governs the state of nature, and protects our fundamental rights. Furthermore, the execution of the law of nature is placed into the hands of every man. Under the law of nature every man has the right to punish another for any evil they commit against the law of nature. Despite man having the ability to freely do what they please while under the law of nature, their rights would unfortunately not be protected...
...ers. Against Hobbes, Locke argues that the ruler's rights as well as those of everyone are restrained by the laws of nature; the right to life, liberty, and property. The ruler's powers are given to him as a trust for the good of the citizens, and if the trust is broken his powers can be taken away. He believed that a monarchy with an assembly to hold the monarch to his trust was an ideal political arrangement. Unlike Hobbes he believed that principles of conduct were rational and humans could be trusted to follow those principles.
Plath, Sylvia. "Daddy." Poets.org. Academy of American Poets, n.d. Web. 01 Apr. 2014.
In Plath's "Daddy," written just before her death and published posthumously, the most readily accessible emotion is anger, and much of the poem is couched in autobiographical allusions. Plath's own father died of a gangrenous infection, caused by diabetes he refused to treat, when Plath was eight years old, and his death was "the crucial event of her childhood" (Baym 2743). Plath makes personal references to her father as a...
As England’s Poet Laureate, and recipient of both the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry and T.S. Eliot’s prize for poetry, Ted Hughes was an acclaimed poet. The shadow of Hughes late wife, Sylvia Plath, kept Hughes stagnant in his career, in which he was known as “Her Husband” (Middlebrook). Hughes most recent collection of poems, Birthday Letters, took him over twenty-five years to write, and contains poems which recount the marriage of the couple. Hughes wrote the poems as a loving gesture towards Sylvia, but the poems were misinterpreted as “an attempt to adjust the public record in the wake of her confession and the mass of commentary which has grown up around them” (Spurr 3). Hughes incorporated into his poetry the ideals of postmodernism, his somber life and relationships, simplistic formatting, imagery, and allusions. Hughes influenced the world through his animal images and multifarious tones.
“Daddy” contains allusions to World War 2 with images of a swastika in the sky (line 46-47) and references to German concentration camps, “A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen” (line 33). She states her father clearly to be a German man with “I thought every German was you” (line 29), “with your Luftwaffe” (line 42), “And your Aryan eye, bright blue” (line 44). Plath alludes to the popular anti-Semitism of her era in Germany depicted in lines 31-40. She then describes herself as a “Jew” to degrade herself against her German father. The diction of her lines “Chuffing me off like a Jew” (line 32) and “I think I may well be a Jew” (line 35) dehumanizes Jews in which she uses to also describe herself. To describe even more hatred towards her father, the multiple usages of the word “black” (lines 2, 51, 55, 65, 76) depicts her father as a dark menacing shadow in her life that has a evil dark “black” heart. She compares him to the man she married when Plath states, “I made a model of you” (line 64). She then describes that husband as a vampire that drank her blood (lines 72-74), because he reminded Plath of her father in the statement “They always knew it was you” (line 79). In Plath’s mind she only married her husband to be reminded of her father but soon realized it was a toxic relationship in line 80 in which she says “Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m through”.
In the poem, “Daddy,” Sylvia Plath shows her character to have a love for her father as well as an obvious sense of resentment and anger towards him. She sets the tone through the structure of the poem along with her use of certain diction, imagery, and metaphors/similes. The author, Sylvia Plath, chooses words that demonstrate the characters hatred and bitterness towards the oppression she is living with under the control of her father and later, her husband. Plath’s word choice includes many words that a child might use. There is also an integration of German words which help set the tone as well. She creates imagery through her use of metaphors and similes which allow the reader to connect certain ideas and convey the dark, depressing tone of the poem.
After reading the poem “Mad Girl’s Love Song” and doing some research on Plath, I came to find out that the poem was very similar to Plath’s personal life. The poem is basically about a young girl who fell in love and gave her all to a boy who never came back to love her. The young girl fell in a depression and made herself believe that she was making it all up. She still had hope that she and the boy could be happy someday, but it never happened and it drove her insane. Perhaps the boy could have been Plath’s husband, Hughes. Everything about the poem is so similar to her marriage with Hughes; the story makes the reader believe the poem could possibly be about Plath herself.
Daddy was written on October 12, 1962 by Sylvia Plath, shortly before her death, and published posthumously in Ariel in 1963. Throughout the poem it could be viewed from a feminist perspective, drawing attention to the misogynistic opinions and behaviours of the time it was written. Misonogy is A person who dislikes, despises, or is strongly prejudiced against women. It can be manifested in numerous ways, including sexual discrimination, denigration of women, violence against women, and sexual objectification of women.
Hobbes believes that without government and structure, humans are doomed to live their lives in chaos, like savages or even animals since “… in the nature of man we find three principal causes of quarrel: competition, diffidence, [and] glory…” (pg. 76, par. 6). He continues on this point, by stating that without government, man is in a constant state of war with each other. In this state, every man is each other’s enemy and the ideas of justice do not exist (pg. 76 par. 8). Without a ruler, each man is his own lawmaker. Henceforth, each man is, by nature, entitled to the right to protect himself. The idea of self-pre...
Sylvia wrote “Daddy” in 1963 about a girl’s emotional struggle with her German father who died and was like a monster. This father represents Sylvia’s own father who died when she was young. She wants to destroy him but he cannot come back to life. His death has caused Sylvia to have problems with all the men in her future including her former husband Ted, who she also refers to in the poem. This is the first type of literary criticism that stands out, feminist ...