Daddy Dearest
The language in the poem Daddy, by Sylvia Plath, reveals the author's struggle to escape the memory of her father, who died when she was only ten years old. The author's descriptions of her father compared him to God, a Nazi, the Devil, and a vampire. All of these images are overwhelming on their own, but when put together they are colossal and upsetting. Throughout this poem, Sylvia Plath creates a mounting tone of disgust and animosity aimed at her dominating father. This tone is demonstrated through Plath's use of metaphors and stylistic devices such as dialect and punctuation to describe her father. In order to get her point across, the author casts her father in different roles throughout the poem. In the beginning, the speaker's childhood memories of her father are God-like. Her father wasn't God, but just "a bag full of God" (504). While growing up, she must have seen her father as a very impressive and powerful man. The author goes on to depict her father as a "Ghastly statue with one gray toe" (504), showing that her father was an overwhelming force. The author most likely viewed her father as an unattainable man as well, since he died while she was still a young child. The narrator's feelings of abandonment an
To illustrate the amount of control her father had on her as a child, the author compares their relationship to that of a Jew and a Nazi. She states, "I began to talk like a Jew. / I think I may well be a Jew" (505). By portraying a German-Jew relationship within the poem, the narrator is able to express her feelings of bitterness and apprehension toward her father. Moreover, the narrator uses sarcasm to further demonstrate her hatred: "Every woman adores a Fascist" (505). Plath makes it abundantly clear that the relationship between the narrator and her father is one filled with pain and suffering. The style of the poem contributes a great deal to the tone. Sylvia Plath's word choice allows the reader to picture a woman who frequently slips in and out of a childlike dialect. This can be seen in the narrator's constant use of the word "Daddy." She also repeats lines like "You do not do, you do not do" (504) and "Daddy, daddy, you bastard" (506). The image of a frightened child is complete in line 41, when she says, "I have always been scared of you" (505). In contrast to the childish words used in the poem, the speaker's use of quotation marks expresses an attitude of authority and control. Since the narrat
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Approximate Word count = 826
Approximate Pages = 3 (250 words per page double spaced)
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