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

fuss and Husband as Vampires in Plaths atomic number 91The poem Daddy by Sylvia Plath concludes with the symbolic scene of the speaker killing her vampire father. On an obvious level this represents Plaths struggle to deal with the haunting influence of her let father who died when she was a little girl. However, as Mary G. DeJong points out, Now that Plaths incline is better known, Daddy is generally recognized as more than a excuse of her personal feelings towards her father (34-35). In the context of the poem the scenes symbolism becomes questionable because mixed in with descriptions of the poets father are clear references to her married cosmos, who left her for another(prenominal) woman as Daddy was being written. The problem for the reader is to fingers breadth out what Plath is saying about the connection between the figures of father and husband by tying them together in her poem. A clue lies in the final image she uses, the vampire. In todays movies and books vamp ires are portrayed as mankind who have gained immortality and power in exchange for the need for blood and dodge of sunlight and crosses. However, Plath wrote her poem in 1962, and since then our cultures image of the vampire has changed drastically. Historically, peck who were transformed into vampires were no longer the same human beings. Instead, they became monsters who retained only(prenominal) the physical appearance of their former selves. Our interpretation of the poem is affected if we gain that when Plath wrote about a vampire she had in mind the older plan of a monster which took over the body of a now doomed human. With this image in mind we will tend to look for ways the doubledity 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 commingle of father and husband in the antagonist of Daddy it is obvious which man Sylvia Plath is addressing with the p oems last line, written during the breakup of her marriage and three months before her felo-de-se Daddy, daddy, you bastard, Im through (80). Works Cited Cam, Heather. Daddy Sylvia Plaths Debt to Anne Sexton. American Literature 59 (1987) 429-32. DeJong, Mary G. Sylvia Plath and Sheila Ballantynes complex number Crimes. Studies in American Fiction 16 (1988) 27-38. Ramazani, Jahan. Daddy I prevail 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.