Plath’s Daddy Essay: Father and Husband as Vampires -- Plath Daddy Ess

Father and Husband as Vampires in Plaths DaddyThe poem Daddy by Sylvia Plath concludes with the exemplary scene of the speaker killing her vampire father. On an obvious level this represents Plaths struggle to deal with the haunting influence of her own father who died when she was a teensy girl. However, as Mary G. DeJong points out, Now that Plaths work is better known, Daddy is generally recognized as more than a confession of her personal feelings towards her father (34-35). In the background of the poem the scenes symbolism becomes ambiguous because mixed in with descriptions of the poets father are clear references to her husband, who left her for another woman as Daddy was being written. The bother for the reader is to figure out what Plath is saying about the connection between the figures of father and husband by tying them together in her poem. A jot lies in the final image she uses, the vampire. In todays movies and books vampires are portrayed as humans who have g ained immortality and power in exchange for the need for blood and scheme of sunlight and crosses. However, Plath wrote her poem in 1962, and since then our cultures image of the vampire has changed drastically. Historically, people who were transformed into vampires were no longer the same human beings. Instead, they became dickenss who retained only the material appearance of their former selves. Our interpretation of the poem is affected if we assume that when Plath wrote about a vampire she had in mind the older conception of a monster which took over the body of a now dead human. With this image in mind we will tend to look for ways the duality of father and husband in the poem correspond to the vampires dual i... ...the memory of her fathers equally painful though unintentional abandonment. Despite the mixing of father and husband in the rival of Daddy it is obvious which man Sylvia Plath is addressing with the poems last line, written during the breakup of her marriage a nd three months before her suicide Daddy, daddy, you bastard, Im through (80). Works Cited Cam, Heather. Daddy Sylvia Plaths Debt to Anne Sexton. the Statesn Literature 59 (1987) 429-32. DeJong, Mary G. Sylvia Plath and Sheila Ballantynes Imaginary Crimes. Studies in American Fiction 16 (1988) 27-38. Ramazani, Jahan. Daddy I Have Had to Kill You Plath, Rage, and the Modern Elegy. Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 108 (1993) 1142-56. Srivastava, K.G. Plaths Daddy. The Explicator 50 (1992) 126-28.