Daddy Flashcards
Daddy
- childlike, raw, uncomfortable
- Plath wrote five drafts of this poem the day after hughes left their home, Court Green, on 12 october. Very awar of the televised trials of adolf eichmann- uncomfortable with her own german roots
- suggest the poem is going to be innocent, childlike - playing with our expectations
- father is apostrophised
black shoe
- constrained and suffocated by a the ‘black shoe’ of her father
- Compare to old nursery rhyme abou the women who lived in a shoe (childlike)
- shoe- trampled on, kept down weight of body
Ghastly statue with one gray toe
Big as a Frisco seal
otto plath was eventually diagnosed with diabetes and stubbed his toe and died of an infection
And a head in the freakish Atlantic
monstrous size of father emphasised by the enjambmed description of him spanning the ocean and continent, from San Francisco to the Atlantic
Put your foot, your root,
I never could talk to you.
difficult to say - tongue twister
struggle with the language expressed through physical discomfort
Ich, ich, ich, ich,
individuality squashed by influence of struggle
A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen.
asyndetic ist suggests that the list could go on and is endless.
I have always been scared of you,
With your Luftwaffe
“Here is a poem spoken by a girl with an Electra complex. Her father died while she thought he was God. Her case is complicated by the fact that her father was also a nazi and her mother very possibly jewish. U the daughter the two strains marry and paralyses each other - she has to act out the awful little allegory once over before she is free of it” - Plath
Panzer-man, panzer-man
someone who drove nazi tanks
Every woman adores a Fascist
one of the most controversial lines in the poem
suggesting that any relationship witha. man bound to be one of domination of masochism
suggesting that women enjoy male violence in a relationship
A cleft in your chin instead of your foot
satin has a cleft in foot and her father has a dimple in his chin so comparing father to devil
At twenty I tried to die
she actually did try at aged 20 by overdosing
And they stuck me together with glue
like humpty dumpty
suggests she if fragile
I said I do, I do.
marriage to hughes
If I’ve killed one man, I’ve killed two
freeing herself of the burden’s of her father and Hughes
I’m through
worked through trauma and escaped the oppression
could be giving up
could be being free
George Steiner quote
‘the Guernica of modern poetry’ - George Steiner
(due to its disturbing imagery and theme of Nazi destruction like in the picasso painting)
Heather Clark quote
‘Plath’s notorious metaphorical appropriation of Jewishness may not have been a fantasy of victimisation, but rather a fantasy of purgation and purity: only by aligning her speaker with the enemy of the Germans could she reject her own Germanness, which, in the wake of the Holocaust, seemed like a curse.’ - Clark
