Introduction
A metaphor is a figure of speech in which two dissimilar things are said to be the same. When Sylvia Plath addresses a shoe in the first two lines of “Daddy,” the shoe refers to the metaphor’s tenor, the subject which is likened to the vehicle. This is her father, Otto Plath, who has enclosed and suffocated her as a shoe does a foot. In this poem, however, it soon becomes clear that she is not just referring to her father but also to her husband, Ted Hughes; and eventually the poem indicates that these two men are the secondary tenor; the primary tenor being the violent patriarchal culture of which the speaker and these men are a product.
Main body
Various metaphors are employed throughout the poem, drawn from mythology, religion, Fascism and Hollywood. In the first stanza the speaker says she has been oppressed by the memory of her father, a god-like colossus and altogether too much for her. She is awed by him, “barely daring to breathe or Achoo,” and yet she has to kill him or she will never be free from the tremendous burden she has to bear, that “marble-heavy” presence which in death toppled across the continent so that his head is in the freakish Atlantic and his gangrenous toe is as big and gray as a seal drying itself on a rock off the California coast.
Plath was eight when her father died, too young to kill his God-like image by growing out of it, and so she used to pray to recover him, to bring him back to life so she could love him again, and kill him to free herself.
This ambivalence runs like an electric current through the poem, communicated through the metaphors she employs. She admires her father, she loves him, she is obsessed with him and most of all she wants to explain him away. Her father, Otto Plath, was born in Grabow, in the eastern part of Germany, not far from Poland, that unfortunate country “scraped flat by the roller / Of wars, wars, wars,” and she blames him for the September, 1939 blitzkreig in which the German army swept through Poland and remained there for over five years, leaving only when they had razed its major cities to the ground.
His German background, now part of her psyche, horrifies her with its violent history, its obscene language where the word for “I,” “ich, ich, ich” sounds like someone choking to death but also a little like the sound of an engine “chuffing me off like a Jew / A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen,” relentlessly driving her to her death, just as the Nazis killed six million Jews and hundreds of thousands of gypsies and other undesirables. Her mother, Plath claims, was part-Jewish, so that the main conflict of the main plays itself out inside her, her metaphoric Jewish, gypsy exoticism with her Tarot cards and her “weird luck” making her the opposite of her father with his Aryan eyes cold blue, and his Luftwaffe, his gobbledygook, and that neat moustache that turn him into a metaphorical Panzer-man.
He intimidates her as much as the concentration camp commandants must have filled the Jews with fear, knowing that he held absolute power over their lives. Everything about him repulses her, his language reminds her of barbed wire, evoking an image of a prisoner trying to escape only to become entangled in the camp’s security fence. Yet there is love underlying the hate and anger, because at the stanza’s end she ends by addressing him directly and literally, saying “Oh you,” affectionately the way a lover would chide his or her beloved.
Now she decides that God is not the right vehicle and switches to the swastika metaphor, attributing that totalitarian, totalizing ideology to the tenor, which blankets her mind and which he imposes on her to possess her completely, to demand her total obedience and to extinguish her individuality. So how can she really hate him? “Every woman adores a Fascist, / The boot in the face …” she says, the man who must possess her because he loves her so much, the man who might hate her but hate is the obverse of love, and much better than indifference. The Fascist metamorphoses into a handsome devil with a cleft chin standing at the blackboard, Herr Professor who lectures while she listens, imposing his ideas now — much like the devil she married, that “black man who bit my pretty red heart in two.”
This is how she combines one tenor with the other, his successor, Ted Hughes. She tells her father that she once tried to die “and get back, back, back to you. / I thought even the bones would do,” but when she failed she made a model of him instead by marrying “a man in black with a Meinkampf look,” a dictator who might oust her father and impose his absolute rule over her heart. This new dictator can end the civil war raging inside her between the Germans and the Jews, restoring peace even if it that means she will still be dependent, never free.
If she is successful she can finally hang up that metaphorical black telephone through which his voice has been “worming” into her mind and heart for over twenty years. In that sense, this poem is a kind of exorcism, and in the last phase of that ritual the ambivalent and seemingly contradictory vehicles of God, Nazi and professor are resolved in that of the vampire. Hollywood vampires are darkly handsome, cold-hearted, their motives are always bloody and even though women know it they are compelled to offer their long, white necks to them. The vampire sinks his teeth deep into their delicate flesh and drinks their blood until they faint away, pale as death, completely conquered.
They die and yet they are immortal, vampires themselves now and as bloody-minded as the man she loves. For seven years Hughes drank her blood but, just as her father betrayed her by dying, he betrayed her by cheating on her. Now she must kill them both but she cannot do it alone because she no longer has the strength. Therefore she appeals to the villagers, who never liked these dominant alpha-males, to drive a wooden stake through the vampire’s heart.
Conclusion
This is where the personal turns global and where the primary tenor shows itself. Every woman adores a Fascist because his dominance could be mistaken for love. Plath wrote this poem in October, 1962 while the Cuban Missile Crisis threatened to end in the destruction of the planet, reminding her that the men in her life are not the problem. They, like her, are a product of a violent culture that puts war above love and in which the lust for destruction mirrors that for self-destruction.
Every woman must therefore hang a garlic necklace around her neck and carry a cross wherever she goes to deter the vampire so that eventually they will die out. Even more importantly, just as Plath has to overcome her dependence on overpowering men, she says we must kill the metaphorical vampire in ourselves if there is to be peace in the world and harmony in love.
Works Cited
Plath, Sylvia. “Daddy.” Eds. Ann and Samuel Charters. Literature and Its Writers. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2000.