Plath`s life and argue for a biographical interpretation of her poem DADDY

Plath`s life and argue for a biographical interpretation of her poem DADDY

Biographical Influences on Plath '92s '93Daddy '94 Plath '92s famous poem '93Daddy '94 enjoys myriad biographical interpretations . The poem , as well as the literary tradition Plath is most closely associated with : Confessionalism , engender robust biographical interpretation due to their innately self-revelatory idiom Plath , even more so than other Confessional poets like Anne Sexton or Robert Lowell , explored the poetic possibilities of contemporaneous self-expression which involved intimate , sometimes deeply personal psychological and biographical revelation

Though biographical

and personal details proved essential to the composition and motifs of '93Daddy '94 as well as many other of Plath '92s well-known poems the works avoid turgidity by articulating through the Confessional (personal ) idiom , universally experienced themes : '93Plath 's writing captured the anger , the self-doubt , and the ambivalence that many intelligent and creative women were experiencing in the late 1960s and early 1970s as they became aware of the discrepancies between the potential they had begun to glimpse in themselves and the constrain (Annas 6

Interestingly , Plath her self noted , in a reading for the BBC , that '93Daddy '94 was '93spoken by a girl with an Electra complex . Her father died while she thought he was God . Her case is complicated by the fact that her father was also a Nazi and her mother very possibly part Jewish '94 (Plath , Nos .166-188 . These words express Plath '92s attempt to pace a narrative distance between herself and the speaker of the poem and seem to indicate that she felt such a distinction failed to be strongly apparent in the poem itself . This latter conclusion is understandable close inspection of Plath '92s diary , biographies , and the lines of '93Daddy '94 exhume a potent parallels between the events described in the poem and the events of Plath '92s life Plath Page -2-

Beginning with the most obvious parallel as well as the poem '92s central theme of a '93girl with an Electra complex '94 Plath '92s journals reveal that she , indeed , suffered personally from an '93Electra complex '94 While undergoing treatment with her psychologist Dr . Ruth Beuscher , Plath experienced a cathartic emotional climax during psychotherapy and recorded her subsequent thoughts

Among observations about her mother and father , Plath revealed that she carried a deep resentment against her mother '93I never knew the love of a father , the love of a steady blood-related man after the age of eight .[ .]My mother .came in one morning with tears of nobility in her eyes and told me he was gone for goods . I hate her for that '94 (Plath , 430

Plath also noted that her father was an '93ogre '94 and '93tyrant '94 and that he kept a hidden Nazi flag in his closet which he occasionally paraded in front of while dressed in Nazi regalia '93He wouldn '92t go to a doctor , wouldn '92t believe in God and heiled Hitler in the privacy of...