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Essay / Vengeance and Hate in Sylvia Plath's Daddy - 595
Revenge and Hate in Plath's DaddyThe power of Plath's Daddy to threaten, shock, and move the reader remains intact, years after its writing. For the unsuspecting reader, the experience of first reading "Papa" is a confusion of discomfort, excitement and guilty pleasure, for the pleasures of revenge are said to be sweet, and it is a poem revenge of the first order. Revenge on whom? Father? Perhaps, more likely, on her husband. And her aim was true, because if anything Plath wrote damaged Ted Hughes for posterity, it was "Daddy." From this poem we gather our indelible impressions of Hughes as a bully, a wife beater, a vampire, even a racist and implicit murderer (if we extend the Hitler metaphor to all its implications). . . again and again. The controversial Holocaust imagery can be directly linked to the time period in which the poem was written. In 1961, the entire world was fascinated by the trial in Jerusalem of Nazi SS Lieutenant Colonel Adolph Eichmann (who was executed in 1962, a few months before “Daddy” was written). It was the first televised trial in history, a...