Plath - Daddy

Question 1

Daddy

Answer 1

Represents a psychic attempt to purge the ‘model’ of the father through direct confrontation

Question 2

Structure point one

Answer 2

1) The systematic structure of 16, 5-line stanzas

2) Mental process the narrator is working psychologically to dispossess the demon within her

3) Plath is not allowed to mourn her father’s death – never properly confronted the trauma

Question 3

Structure point two

Answer 3

1) Infantile title – Daddy

2) Cannot move on and still locked mentally in her child-like body

Question 4

Daddy critic

Answer 4

Larkin: Plath was a “horror poet”
- Emulated through the oppressive motifs of entrapment

Question 5

Daddy point one

Answer 5

“You do not do”
- Repetitive monosyllabism suggests infantile mocking of the oppressor echoed by the childish cadence of “oo”

Question 6

Daddy point two

Answer 6

Half-rhyme “shoe/do”

-Shamanic rhythm to chant the wicked spirits away as the narrator falls back into a fairytale paradigm through the story of the Old woman who lived in a shoe

-Plath married Ted Hughes a poignant believer in Shamanism accentuated in his poetry

Question 7

Daddy point three

Answer 7

-Freudian link to the Id – inductive impulsive desires that seek gratification through pleasure

-“Ich”

-Repetition – how the narrator is struggling to breathe – ensnared
Lost identity

-Post-war reflects the gas used on Jews
Shocked audience

Question 8

Daddy point four

Answer 8

Perhaps a call to the UW as 1950s America – Chauvinistic where women stayed at home and men worked (New Realism)

-Vampiric imagery “stake” driven through metaphorical “fat black heart”

-Monosyllabic simplicity reflects how narrator has become Clytemnestra rather than Electra as she destroys her male oppressors

-On the cusp of the second wave of Feminism and Betty Friedan’s Feminist Mystique