Sylvia Plath’s “Daddy” is about her relationship between full of metaphors of her relationship with her own father.
Plath takes revenge through her father’s death and husband’s death, for which she made into a model of her father. She has been tormented throughout with the hatred of her father and at the same time, her guilt for hating her father. In order for Plath to move on with her life, she had to erase her father from her thoughts. The poem “Daddy” shows the damage that surfaced through her life, and she claims to be finally done with him by claiming to be a Jew as in the lines “I began to talk like a Jew/I think I may well be a Jew”, in which made her father see her as a Nazi enemy. Verse thirteen the lines, “And they stuck me together with glue/And then I knew what to do/I made a model of you,” the finding of her husband, a “man in black with a Meinkampf look.”
Plath writes this poem to express herself, how her relationship with her father made an impact on her life up to the day she died. One way it made an impact, is her marriage to a man that was similar to her father. “Daddy” is about the emotional growth she lacked as she was growing up and the feeling of abandonment as a young child. If her father had remained into her adult life, she might have had the opportunity to deal with the anger and hatred she feels towards him.
The last line of the poem, “Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m through,” is a very strong and powerful statement. Finally finding closure, admitting, accepting the hatred and the way her father was.
Plath did not think highly of her father at all, in fact she says, “But no less a devil for that…” in the eleventh verse. If one would thinks about it, it is “like” he was a “Nazi Devil.” Then she decided that she wanted to die at the age of twenty, “At twenty I tried to die,” in order to get back at her father, or so she thought it would. Then realizing he would not have cared one way or another if she was dead or alive because she was dead before being dead.
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