Feminism in Sylvia Plath’s Daddy
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Wolran Kim
March 2014



Sylvia Plath (1932-1963) was an American poet and novelist. Plath was probably favorably received by critics of psychoanalysis because of her unique style of confession. Self-consciousness about her unfortunate life is dissolved word by word in Plath’s poetry. The speaker in her poetry seems to be herself, and her violent words sound as insane songs by Muse. The presence of ‘father’ is a significant keyword in her poetry.

She witnessed her father’s death when she was eight years old, and this became the trauma of her lifetime. Plath’s grief from that, which she could not overcome, is shown in Daddy. "Daddy" was written shortly before Plath's suicide in 1962, and she seeks a way out to heal her wounds through ‘killing father’ in this poem. The speaker in Daddy creates many metaphors to describe her relationship with him such as black shoe, God, Nazi, Swastika, and vampire.

This poem shows the speaker’s struggle to declare that, no matter how terrible her father was and how much he remains in her mind, she is now through with him. Daddy may be approached by various themes such as gender, mortality, communication, and freedom, but this work will focus on gender and the patriarchy issues based on feminism. (The full text of Daddy is attached at the end of the essay.)

Feminism is the women’s movement that negatively views all discrimination and the unequal status of women due to their biological sex, and supports gender equality. The term feminism started being used in the 1980’s, and this is one of the notions, world-view and ideology towards social phenomena. Feminism is developed by or alongside liberalism, Marxism, socialism, and radicalism while seeking the causes of women’s oppression and a strategy for the liberation of women.

A feminist advocates or supports the rights and equality of women. A forty-nine-year-old Black lesbian feminist socialist mother, Audre Lorde, says in her essay, Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women Redefining Difference, “Certainly there are very real differences between us of race, age, and sex. But it is not those differences between us that are separating us. It is rather our refusal to recognize those differences, and to examine the distortions which result from our misnaming them and their effects upon human behavior and expectation” (855).

Lorde says that our separation is caused from misnaming and wrong expectations of our differences, not those differences. A mythical norm of Racism, Sexism, Ageism, Heterosexism, Elitism, and Classism is adhered as stereotypes in society. Refusing to recognize difference makes it impossible to see the root of all problems.

Before talking about Plath’s poem, Lorde’s point of connection between poetry and feminism in her essay is interesting, “poetry has been the major voice of poor, working-class, and Colored women” (855). Lorde says that poetry is often seen as a less rigorous or serious art form, and emphasizes that poetry is the most economical, requiring the least physical labor and material. Considering the economical efficiency of poetry, there is a curious relation between the literary genre of poetry and female as a gender minority.

In Plath’s, Daddy, the title intimates the father-daughter relationship, family system, male-female relationship, and also patriarchy. All human beings have fathers. Some may love him, some may hate him, or maybe some have never even met him. But father is a part of him or her. Lorde sees that whiteskin privilege is a major prop in a patriarchal power system (856).

Daddy is a part of this tradition, but it's not just about Plath's relationship with her father. It's also about topics such as death, love, fascism, brutality, war, marriage, femininity, and God. Daddy is a more affectionate name than “Father,” that is used by a little child when she is being cute. So, little girls are referred to as their fathers’ pets, Daddy’s little girl. Regardless of the sweet appellation, Plath’s poem is not lovable, but horrible. Feminism defines patriarchy as an unjust social system that is oppressive to women.

In the feminist theory, the concept of patriarchy often includes all the social mechanisms that reproduce male dominance over women. Feminist Carole Pateman says, “The patriarchal construction of the difference between masculinity and femininity is the political difference between freedom and subjection” (Allen, 2011). Hence, it is ironic that the speaker uses the word “Daddy” to describe her father’s characterizations such as a Nazi, devil, and vampire. The violent images of the speaker’s father gives a grotesque atmosphere mixed with the singsong rhyme and other childish aspects, like the word “gobbledygoo” in the ninth stanza. This pairing between the playfulness and the violence shows the speaker’s internal struggle between loving and hating her deceased father.

In the first stanza, “You do not do, you do not do” starts with declaring that she will no longer put up with the black shoe she has lived in for thirty years with poor, trapped, and scared feelings. She is comparing her father to a shoe that she's been living in very unhappily. The expression that she has been living in the black shoe is read as her life being under the suppression of a patriarchal system and the discrimination of gender differences. According to Marxism, women are oppressed in societies (including families), which can by no stretch of the imagination be described as Capitalism.

“The result of the capitalist production process is neither a mere produce (use-value) nor a commodity, that is, a use-value which has exchange-value” (Rubin 773). Thus, surplus value of women’s housework is taken away, and women are an inferior class than men in a patriarchal system. “The term [patriarchy] was introduced to distinguish the forces maintaining sexism from other social forces, such as capitalism” (Rubin 775). Daddy is an unhappy nursery rhyme that shows the father’s power indirectly.

The poem no longer seems like a nursery rhyme in the second stanza. “Daddy, I have had to kill you./ You died before I had time-”; the speaker tells her father that she has had to kill him, as if she is already murdered him. But he died before she “had time.” These lines could mean something like, “before I had time to get to know him,” or “before I could make him proud.” This violent sentiment that she had to kill her father is shocking. She might be angry about her father’s early death and this could also be a mixed emotion of love and hate toward her father.

“Marble-heave, a bag full of God”; this expression helps the readers imagine the stiff heaviness of a corpse, or even a marble gravestone. The "bag full of God" could refer to a body bag, or the speaker could be saying that the skin around our bodies is nothing but a bag. Either way, the image of her father as a bag full of God shows her conflicted feelings about him. Maybe her father controlled her world – a sort of God over her life.

Perhaps his death caused memories of him to have more control over the speaker's life – so he seems, to her, to be as powerful as God. “Patriarchy is a specific form of male dominance, and the use of the term ought to be confined to the Old Testament-type, pastoral nomads from whom the term comes, or groups like them” (Rubin 776). The almighty God is a positive notion, but controlling her life is a negative symbol of patriarchy concerning the gender issue between males and females.

Throughout Plath’s poem Daddy, the speaker is trapped by memories of her father with negative and violent words. The verse “I have always been scared of you” in the beginning of the ninth stanza switches back from describing herself as a victim to addressing her father. The German word for the air force of World War II “Luftwaffe” describes her father’s German characteristics. The following word “Gobbledygoo” is kind of a nonsense word, and gives a strange sound that a little girl might think of her father’s German speaking in the adult world. She never understands about the Nazis, war, grown-up businesses, or the complexity of the male gender.

The “neat mustache” and blue “Aryan eye” describe her father as very German physically. The mustache aligns her father with Hitler, and the term “Aryan” refers to Hitler’s perfect race of blond-haired, blue-eyed people who were seen as “superior” to the Jews and gypsies. The last line of this stanza “Panzer-man” continually refers to the patriarchy image. “Panzer” is armored forces and this violent appellation shows her father’s powerful interference or intervention into her life.

The speaker finds new direction in life making a model of her father, the man she claims is a Nazi and a devil. “I made a model of you” in the thirteenth stanza says that she creates a substitute for her father, probably by finding a real man whom she imagines is like her father. “A man in black with a Meinkampf look”; “black” could refer to a dark, negative, and evil image as in strictness and severity, and “Meinkampf” interestingly could mean “My Struggle (Mein Kampf)”

in German. The next stanza says “And I said I do, I do”; She marries him, confirming her wedding vows, “I do.” By marrying the man she modeled after her father, the speaker is fulfilling the Electra complex, which is like the female version of the Oedipus complex. Basically, the Electra complex is a theory that women seek men who are like their fathers, and the Oedipus complex theorizes that men seek women who are like their mothers. “The black telephone’s off at the root”; Here, “black” identifies the “man in black” from the previous stanza.

She finally overcomes her struggles toward her father and moves on to her new man, her husband. The phone is cut off, and no voices can get through. The father and daughter can no longer communicate. Once the speaker in this poem has escaped the confinement of her father, she ends up confined in marriage to a similar man.

The speaker sees her father as a vampire in the last two stanzas, and she makes sure that he is killed like a vampire with a stake to the heart; “There’s a stake in your fat black heart.” Her father is still “black” such as “A man in black” and “The black telephone.” Here, she kills her father not just physically but also in her memories of him. “They are dancing and stamping on you”; they, the villagers never liked the speaker’s father, and they are so happy that he is dead.

The speaker’s metaphor grows wider and deeper, that her father becomes a target of public hatred starting from her personal loathing. Finally, Sylvia Plath’s very famous verse in her poem, “Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m through” reaches its crescendo with her emotional climax. Rubin sees this verse as a feminist revolution and sexual expression; “A thoroughgoing feminist revolution would liberate more than women.

It would liberate forms of sexual expression, and it would liberate human personality from the straitjacket of gender” (Rubin 785). The speaker has threatened that she was through with her father before in the fourteenth stanza. But this repetition of the word “Daddy” and the addition of the word “bastard” make this condemnation final. This big verbal punch gives a dramatic ending scene in this poem.

The word “bastard” gives an awareness of female masculinity. Judith Halberstam describes masculinity in Female Masculinity, “Masculinity in this society inevitably conjures up notions of power and legitimacy and privilege” and “Masculinity seems to extend outward into patriarchy and inward into the family” (Halberstam 936).

Masculinity is often realized as a power and privilege in reality. In Daddy, the speaker finally seems to become the same position as her father through her masculine swearword “bastard.” This one word directly shows how the speaker is through and overcomes her father eventually. Also this word is concerned with the language choice of female masculinity. “Psychoanalysis posits a crucial relationship between language and desire such that language structures desire and expresses therefore both the fullness and the futility of human desire” (Halberstam 939). The word “bastard” has a big impact because of its masculinity, compared to the cute and pretty word “daddy.”

The speaker finishes her revenge with the word “bastard,” but the scars are left only for survivors. The father to Plath is her real father, the suppression of patriarchy, and also a fear of trauma. The imagery in this poem is conflicted, showing the speaker’s hateful and also mournful feelings towards her father. This poem applies to all men because of the metaphors and imagery that connect both the father and the husband to violence and war. Plath’s suicide could be a meeting again with her father and also the way of killing her father’s evil image inside her.

Feminism theories are diverse and may not be defined as one theory. In psychoanalytical feminism, Freud sees girls as boys without the penis. Thus, women are incomplete existences, and Gayle Rubin criticizes this because that is an idealization of women’s obedience. In Freudian theory, the violence of men toward women is men’s self-perfection through oppressing women and negating death and the roots that are symbolized by women’s wombs.

The ending of Daddy gives pathos rather than a relieved feeling, as in the speaker’s expression, “I’m through.” Is she really through? After throwing hatred with such a word like “bastard,” often there is only sympathy left. Audre Lorde’s remarks are reminiscent with her unpublished poem; “Change means growth, and growth can be painful.” “We have chosen each other/ and the edge of each others battles/ the war is the same/ if we lose someday/ women’s blood will congeal/ upon a dead planet/ if we win/ there is no telling/ we seek beyond history/ for a new and more possible meeting” (Lorde 860).