2.

"Daddy" by Sylvia Plath: A Study of Electra Complex of the Speaker

The Electra complex is a psychoanalytic term used to describe a girl's sense of competition with her
mother for the affections of her father. It is hard for one to overlook this recurrent theme in many of the
poems of Sylvia Plath (1932-63). In her poem "Daddy", the speaker's Electra complex is associated with
her ambivalent relationship and feelings towards her father.

The poem is colored with the elements taken from the author's personal life. At the age of eight, Plath
lost her father, Otto Emil Plath, a professor of biology who was famous for cultivating bees and suffered
from diabetes because of which his leg was amputated. Her father’s early death causes Plath to feel an
extreme longing for him; so deeply does she love him that she fails to accept the cruel reality.
Consequently, she denies his death as if she still envisioned him as alive within her mind. When her
father died, Plath was forbidden to assist in her father’s funeral, and such a prohibition becomes her
infantile trauma. Through the father’s early death, the poet attempts to reconstruct her father’s image
in her poems either by idealization or by depreciation.

The poem is spoken by a girl with an Electra complex. The 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. In the daughter the two strains marry and paralyze each other –she has to act out the awful little
allegory once over before she is free of it.

From the title we can see the love that the girl shares with his father, the noun “daddy” being much
more emotional than “father” or “dad”. Zhang Fen-ling in “The Ariel in the Bell Jar: Sylvia Plath and her
Poems” notes that the poem is written in a tone of a little girl who has the Electra complex which can be
seen in the repetitive structure of the words: "You do not do, you do not do…/Ich, ich, ich, ich…/An
engine, an engine…”

Even if in the beginning, the girl says that she wants to kills his father, we can see in the other lines, that,
in fact, she doesn’t want this thing, she loves her father and she wants to be with him.

"I used to pray to recover you."

She wants him back, and she starts to pray to get him back. When she is twenty years old, her love for
his father is so big that she even would die to be next to him.

"Bit my pretty red heart in two.

I was ten when they buried you.
At twenty I tried to die
And get back, back, back to you.
I thought even the bones would do."

Her father image is so powerful for her, that she transforms him in God “Marble-heavy, a bag full of
God,” and later in a Nazi German "I thought every German was you." And because she sees her father as
a German, she considers to be herself a Jew.

"I began to talk like a Jew.

I think I may well be a Jew."
It is possible that she considers herself to be a Jew to transfigure her role as a victim. She wants to
emphasize her pain, her misery, like a Jew who has been the victim of the Germans.

The poem is full of trauma and pain. Her frustration of not being allowed to communicate with his father
is described on the lines:

"I never could talk to you.

The tongue stuck in my jaw."

After she realized that she can’t join her father through suicide, she decides to marry a man who looks
like her father, who has the same characteristics.

"And then I knew what to do.

I made a model of you,
A man in black with a Meinkampf look

And a love of the rack and the screw.     

And I said I do, I do."

Plath agrees to marry a man resembling her Hitler-looking father. This marriage not working out either,
she metaphorically kills her vampire husband who sucked her blood to the drains for seven years.
Neither in reality did Plath's marriage end well since her husband, Ted Hughes, left her for another
woman.

The two stanzas present the ambivalence to his father. The first stanza is a love for her daddy, and by
loving his daddy she married with his husband. Because she loves her daddy, she found the person like
him. So, she says if she killed one man, she killed two. Two means to be her daddy and her husband. It is
her daddy who drank her blood for a year, and seven years means the period of marriage which is
indirectly cause by her daddy.

The final stanza stands for the hate to her daddy, especially the final line - "Daddy, Daddy, you bastard,
I’m through." It presents the most hatred to his daddy, and she wrote it like that she got rid of her
daddy’s trouble.

Although Plath seemingly has put her dangerous, dark obsession with her father in the past, the
metaphor of her extremely immense Electra complex lingers with ambiguity throughout the entire
poem.

3. "Lady Lazarus" As a Protest of a Woman against Male Domination

The title of the poem Sylvia Plath's poem "Lady Lazarus" alludes to the biblical character of Lazarus from
the New Testament who was raised by Jesus from the dead. The narrator describes her two previous
suicide attempts, of which one was just an accident at the age of ten and has just committed her third
suicide. She as well as Lazarus (or maybe Phoenix) raises from the dead which may be interpreted that
no matter how hard patriarchal society tries to oppress and humiliate women, they will rise and
eventually take revenge on men as can be seen in the very last stanza:
 Out of the ash
I rise with my red hair
And I eat men like air. (lines 82-84)

Moreover, Plath uses imagery of the Holocaust in order to emphasize dehumanization of women when
compared to Jewish prisoners in concentration camps:

A sort of walking miracle, my skin

Bright as a Nazi lampshade

My right food
A paperweight,
My face featureless, fine
A Jew linen. (4-9)

Such comparison may seem very strong, but it reflects Plath’s desperate feelings at that period of time
when she was left alone with two children. In the letter to her mother from October 21, 1962 she wrote:

Don’t talk to me about the world needing cheerful stuff! What the person out of Belsen – physical or
psychological – wants is nobody saying the birdies still go tweet-tweet, but the full knowledge that
somebody else been there and knows the worst, just what it is like. It is much more help for me, for
example, that people are divorced and go through hell, than to hear about happy marriages. Let the
Ladies’ Home Journal blither about those. (Plath, “Letters Home” 473).

The dehumanization of women can be further seen in the lines where the narrator is exhibited naked as
a Jewish prisoner. She contrasts her scarred and damaged body with that of the woman of the 1950s
who was supposed to present an immaculate appearance. The narrator wants the man to pay for those
things he takes for granted, she wants him to pay “for a word or a touch / or a bit of blood / or a piece of
my hair or my clothes” (lines 62-64). She feels that the woman already pays a high price for being
imprisoned at home, the narrator sees herself as the prisoner of her household whose only aim is to
survive every single day. The man, on the other hand, is free or can always take a different route, he
does not have to sacrifice anything. The narrator’s third suicide attempt is compared to the
extermination procedure in the gas chambers. However, when the narrator turns into ash she warns
men “do not think I underestimate your great concern” (68). It foreshadows her resurrection and her
revenge on men.

Plath’s confessional poems reflect the themes such as the objectification and dehumanization of
women, their oppression and a conflict between work and family life. However, their feelings of
dissatisfaction and frustration resulted in the emergence of the second wave of feminism. The radical
feminists attempted to free women from the image of the perfect housewife and mother as presented
by the mass media.

Plath as a writer was able to find words to express her feelings of anger and frustration, whereas most of
her female contemporaries could not define what was wrong with them. They had to wait for the
second wave of feminism to emerge and to address their “problem that has no name”. We will never
know if Plath would have been saved by the coming wave of feminism. What we do know is that her
poems were written to alarm and disturb people and that even fifty-five years after her death they
remain alive.