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Essay / "Dad: How the death of a close family member impacts an individual
In her poem “Daddy,” Sylvia Plath speaks to her deceased father, explaining how his death caused her pain throughout throughout her life and why she needs to “kill” him. Sylvia Plath's father died when she was very young. In her poem, she shows that over time, his absence has eaten away at her. The pain that has accumulated is expressed through a dramatic and grotesque tone that distorts it. his description of his father is grotesque. For example, she briefly describes her father as German before directly calling him a Nazi and a fascist. His distress is so great that his father's hunting memory takes on a supernatural presence, as if he were a ghost. that she needs to “kill”. In a sense she means she needs to remove him from her psyche, she can't think about him anymore because all he does is cause her pain. Plath uses these kinds of disturbing images and metaphors in “. Dad” to describe her distress and explain why she must metaphorically kill him to achieve peace. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get the original essay Plath begins by comparing her father to a god to describe how he is all-knowing and all-powerful over her. She describes him as a colossus, a “heavy marble [statue]” (Plath 8). Since Plath's father died when she was very young, we know that any interaction she had with him was through the perspective of a young child. As children, our parents dominate us physically and figuratively, but as we get older, we begin to view them as our equals. Because Plath never had the chance to grow old with her father, he always feels larger than life to her. Plath uses the image of a massive “Marble Heavy” statue to figuratively express how powerful he feels in relation to it. Its massive marble body is literally rock hard compared to its fleshy, puny body. She then begins to push this image toward the grotesque by describing her father's statue as "a horrible statue with a gray toe as big as a Frisco seal and a weird head in the Atlantic." (Plath 9) Plath implies that her statue is so gargantuan that its toe is equal to that of a "Frisco Seal", a massive stamp that could be found on the side of a boxcar that ran from San Francisco to St. Louis. She then suggests that even though the toe is in the western half of the country, the statue is so large that the head is in the "weird Atlantic." Plath likens her father to a massive statue to express how present her deceased father feels to her. Her father, figuratively and psychologically, stands over her life like a god. Plath reinforces this sense of her father's all-consuming presence by using direct phrasing and ghostly rhymes that echo a spiritual invocation. The opening line "You don't, you don't" (Plath 1) begins the repetition of an "ooooo" sound made by the words "tu" and "do". The sound is reminiscent of a ghostly wail, the presence of which makes his father seem less like a distant memory and more like a present ghost. Plath describes her father in this way to convey to the reader that his dominating presence is a pressing problem. Also, the phrase "You don't, you." don't” (Plath 1) is very declarative and sounds like it could be the start of a witch's spell. The declarative phrasing makes the poem feel like an exorcism speech. Plath doesn't tell us about her father, she calls her father's ghost with the intention of killing him. After describing thesize and extent of her father's ghostly presence, Plath uses Nazi analogies to portray him as brutal and abusive. reinforcing its grotesque tone. She begins by commenting on her father's German characteristics, then alludes to fascism and Nazi rule. She describes him as having a “neat mustache, an Aryan, bright blue eye. Panzer-man, panzer-man, O you” (Plath 45). Here, the images of a “neat mustache” and an Aryan blue eye are clear references to the image of a “real” German Nazi. Although Sylvia Plath is not Jewish, she refers to herself as such, implying, “I think I might just be Jewish” (Plath 35). By referencing the Nazi persecution of the Jewish people, Plath suggests that her father's abuse of her was comparable to that of the Nazis. Plath reinforces the idea of Nazi-style abuse by likening him to “[a] fascist, the boot in the face, the raw heart of a brute like you” (Plath 48-50). By describing him as a brutal fascist who "kicks [women] in the face", she very clearly accuses him of abusing her, suggesting to the reader that he may in fact have been psychologically abusive. Plath goes on to explain that when her father was alive she did not hate him, eventually revealing that in fact it was his absences that caused her pain. At one time, Plath “prayed to get [her father] back.” (Plath 14). Considering that at one point she prayed to "get him back", this implies that her hatred is new. From this we can infer that it was after he died, and needed to be reclaimed, that his hatred peaked. was alive, he wasn't violent and even after he died she prayed because she wanted him back. However, the pain of losing a parent at a young age set in and her father's image was tarnished by hatred for having abandoned her. she associates abandonment with abuse when she describes her ex-husband as a "man in black with a Meinkampf look, and a love of the rack and the screw". (Plath 65-67) By referring to her husband, Plath links him to alleged Nazi abuse. His "love of the rack and the screw" is a clear reference to torture, implying that he and his father physically abused her in 1963. Sylvia Plath's husband, Ted Hughes, divorced her for another woman (Guardian). Like her father, Hughes abandoned her, causing her intense pain that she compares to Nazi abuse. Plath then moves on to using vampire metaphors to describe how she was abandoned by her father. led her to depression. As an extension of her father, Plath's describes her husband as "the vampire who said he was [her father] and drank my blood for a year." (Plath 72-73). Like a vampire, her husband and the ghost of her father have drained her happiness, just like a vampire sucks the blood of a victim. Plath explains why she has to "kill" her father, she can't take this anymore. the stress her father caused her, it will suck the whole soul out of her if she doesn't do it. There is also a complex connection that is made here because, like a vampire, his father is dead but prays for the living. Finally, Plath symbolically describes how she is. “kills” his father, ending his suffering by driving “a stake through [his] big black heart” (Plath 76). By killing her father, she signifies that she has separated herself from him psychologically, completely removing him from her thoughts. Because she excludes something so important to her identity, a parent, we can understand how difficult this must be. The reader sees how difficult it was for her to "kill" her father by seeing how excited the figurative village is when he died. After her father's death, Plath reveals that "the villagers never liked [her father]. They dance and trample [his body]. They always knew it was [him]. (Plate 77-79). Pursuing. 2016.