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

Father and Husband as Vampires in Plaths protactiniumThe meter protoactinium by Sylvia Plath concludes with the symbolic scene of the speaker kill her vampire father. On an obvious level this represents Plaths struggle to deal with the pertinacious influence of her own father who died when she was a little girl. However, as bloody shame G. DeJong points out, Now that Plaths work is better known, daddy is generally recognized as more than than a confession of her personal feelings towards her father (34-35). In the context of the metrical composition the scenes symbolism becomes ambiguous because mixed in with descriptions of the poets father are exonerate references to her husband, who left her for another woman as Daddy was being written. The business for the reader is to figure out what Plath is saying about the connection amongst the figures of father and husband by tying them together in her poetry. A clue lies in the final two-base hit she uses, the vampire. In to days movies and books vampires are visualised as flowers who have gained immortality and power in exchange for the take up for blood and avoidance of sunlight and crosses. However, Plath wrote her poem in 1962, and since then our cultures image of the vampire has changed drastically. Historically, people who were transformed into vampires were no longer the same human beings. Instead, they became monsters who retained only the physical appearance of their former selves. Our interpretation of the poem is affected if we assume that when Plath wrote about a vampire she had in estimate the older conception of a monster which took over the body of a now dead human. With this image in mind we will tend to look for ways the duality of father and husband in the poem correspond to the vampires dual i... ...the memory of her fathers equally painful though unwilled abandonment. Despite the mixing of father and husband in the antagonist of Daddy it is obvious which man Sylvia Plath is ad dressing with the poems last line, written during the breakup of her marriage and trey months before her suicide 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 Imaginary Crimes. Studies in American Fiction 16 (1988) 27-38. Ramazani, Jahan. Daddy I Have Had to Kill You Plath, Rage, and the Modern Elegy. Publications of the Modern Language experience of America 108 (1993) 1142-56. Srivastava, K.G. Plaths Daddy. The Explicator 50 (1992) 126-28.