Decoding Sylvia Plath's "Daddy": Discover the Layers of Meaning Beyond the Brute

by Julia Gordon-Bramer

Not your average literary criticism, Decoding Sylvia Plath’s “Daddy” talks you through complex information in a lively, conversational way.

Revised and expanded from the Fixed Stars Govern a Decoding Sylvia Plath system (2014, Stephen F. Austin State University Press), Decoding Sylvia Plath’s “Daddy” is an affordable, concise, comprehensive analysis of Plath’s poem “Daddy,” written in a playful spirit that brings Plath out of the ashes of mere depressive autobiography and into the fascinating world of mysticism—in which Plath and her husband Ted Hughes had an intense interest.

See what the academics have missed for over 50 years. Explore Plath’s “Daddy” and how it perfectly aligns to reflect the “mirrors” of tarot and Qabalah, alchemy, mythology, history and the world, astrology and astronomy, and the arts and humanities. Gordon-Bramer surprises us with startling new insights and connections that, once seen, simply cannot be denied. She builds a strong case that we have yet to recognize Plath for her real genius and that Plath remains as relevant as ever.

Back cover

“Daddy”: Not your average everyday Electra complex…
“You do not do” Sylvia Plath studies without her bedazzling poem “Daddy.” But do you get it?

…beyond the drama of anger and attraction from a daughter and wife?

Discover the parallel themes of Sigmund Freud, King Brutus, the London Stone, and other exciting facts within “Daddy” that scholars have missed for over 50 years

Poets & Judge for yourself how “Daddy” includes themes of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness , Joyce’s Finnegans Wake , and other literary works

Understand all themes and meanings beyond the superficial; learn why Plath used derogatory names and racism in “Daddy,” and enlighten your classmates to her higher goals

Save time with a complete class plan, discussion questions and more

Decoding Sylvia Plath’s “Daddy” is the first of a series of Decoding books presenting Plath in compelling, original context, interpreted by the Fixed Stars Govern a Decoding Sylvia Plath system, by author Julia Gordon-Bramer.

What readers are saying about Decoding Sylvia Plath’s “Daddy”:

“I am fascinated and intrigued by Julia Gordon-Bramer’s wildly and dizzyingly original readings of Sylvia Plath’s poems. Not only does she make me realize that I need to go back and read the poems again, she comes pretty close to convincing me that I have really never read them at all.”
—Troy Jollimore, National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry, Guggenheim Fellowship for Creative Arts Recipient

“Julia Gordon-Bramer’s Decoding Sylvia Plath’s ‘Daddy’ presents the iconic poet in full three-dimensional view. Or six-dimensional, if you prefer. This Sylvia Plath is far more than the depressive, suicidal drama queen and father-hater depicted in easier accounts of the poet’s life. Plath emerges as the genius’s genius. Ms. Bramer’s tone adds enjoyment to her already rigorous and penetrating work.”
—Robert Nazarene, founding editor, The American Journal of Poetry

“This is a friendly, conversational approach so that students won't feel overwhelmed, and it talks about topics that other guides don't, allowing students to make original, insightful commentary on the work. The study guide is a worthwhile, useful investment for students.”
—Cathleen Allyn Conway, editor, Plath An Interdisciplinary Journal for Plath Studies

101 pages

Author Julia Gordon-Bramer is a cross between Gregg Braden, who brings spirituality to science, and Jen Sincero, who brings spirituality to being a “Badass.” With personality, clarity, and wit, this author, poet, scholar, professor and professional tarot card reader has spent the last decade interpreting Sylvia Plath’s work through mysticism.

112 pages, Paperback

Published October 6, 2017

About the author

Julia Gordon-Bramer is a professional tarot card reader, Sylvia Plath scholar, award-winning writer and poet, and former professor of Humanities and of Graduate Creative Writing at Lindenwood University. She is the author of several books and, in 2013, was voted St. Louis' Best Local Poet. She lives in St. Louis, Missouri.

Reviews

[Joe · Rating 5 out of 5]

Professional tarot card reader Julia Gordon-Bramer, in addition to being an acclaimed writer and former professor of creative writing, is a scholar of and advocate for the great American poet, Sylvia Plath. Focusing on "Daddy," probably Plath's best-known poem, this short book by Gordon-Bramer punches above its weight, and will likely knock many readers off their feet with its original, compelling message.

By combining her expertise in tarot with a wide-ranging examination of Plath's work and life, the author has brought to light previously unnoted breadths and brilliancies in the work of this iconic literary figure--a figure that many admirers, both lay and academic, have assumed they understood sufficiently for several decades now. But their comfortable assurance that they "got" Plath--as, essentially, an extremely talented depressive--was due to their staying on the well-trod narrative path of the poet's dramatic and tragic life story, which ended with her suicide in early 1963. With "Decoding Sylvia Plath's 'Daddy' " and other similar Plathian studies of hers, Julia Gordon-Bramer has blazed a new trail.

Her good humor and enthusiasm in pointing out to us what she's uncovered is hard to resist, like a forest guide taking you by the hand and energetically leading you to untraversed ways--grinning over her shoulder while pulling you along: "That really cool view I mentioned? Yeah, it's just up here. Come on! Let me show you!"

And the views ARE cool! Different chapters are devoted to different "mirrors," or ways of reflecting the poem(s') various "[six] corresponding qabalistic subjects...Tarot and Qabalah, Alchemy, Mythology, History and the World, Astrology and Astronomy, and the Arts and Humanities." ). Each of the forty poems in "Ariel" conform to this pattern, says the author. ("Ariel" is Plath's last book of poems. Use "Ariel: The Restored Edition"--Plath's preferred order/inclusions. It was thus--because it was designed to be by the poet for those who could see--the one that yielded up to the author its abundant crop of meanings--call it "a dawn of cornflowers!" [The last line of "Poppies in October."]).


Using insights gained from years of painstaking research at Indiana University's Plath Archives (for example: examining marginalia scribbled by the poet in the books she owned and read.), and the epiphanic flashes of realization that inevitably follow such a concentrated gathering of knowledge, the author has unveiled a previously uncelebrated, profoundly mystical, and even more poetically impressive Sylvia Plath. She has revealed a visionary artist so steeped in occult (relax: The word really just means "hidden": Hypnotism, astrology, tarot, etc--it is decidedly not some "satanic" practice!) matters and spiritual explorations that it seems astonishing so many scholars before her had missed it. Then again, it may have taken a literary prospector with the wit and grit of a Gordon-Bramer, already a maven of tarot, and in the bargain a mystic herself, to mine that which was always there: Plath's deeper veins of meaning.

"The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper." Once you've read her book, you can easily imagine the author smiling with satisfaction when realizing how apt this quotation from W.B. Yeats would be for use as an epigraph with which to begin it.

Perhaps the controlling idea behind "Decoding Sylvia Plath's 'Daddy' " is that Plath-as-mystic-artist incorporated a dizzying number of ideas into her poems, and did so with such intent, skill, and precision that, even for her 160+ IQ, she must be regarded as blindingly brilliant (A "genius's genius," as the author calls her). The other side of the coin being that others have been blind TO such brilliance, choosing not to see Yeats's "magic things" woven into Plath's verses, either from not having, or, tellingly, not wanting to have, their "senses grow sharper."

Further, the author's theme is that, in unlocking the mysteries of Plath's verse, we can better reflect that the universe itself is a sort of ever-being-written poem--one also filled with hidden meanings woven into it, but discernable to those open to recognizing the connections between and oneness within them. Whether these meanings are found in the grasping of a Jungian synchronistic event (p.9), the breathtaking aptness of a drawn tarot card, or the meditation on the Qabalah (Oversimplified, but "Qabalah" is: a Jewish and, later, Western mystical tradition that seeks spiritual transformation via an understanding of existential mysteries, often using "occult" practices like tarot), they await our discovery, Gordon-Bramer affirms.

The Qabalah, it should be noted, plays a huge part in her analysis of Plath's poetry, but it is too involved to go into here (Though I have not yet read it all, the author's "Fixed Stars Govern a Life..." is THE source for all these ideas. It is astounding in ambition, scope, and execution. Uncertainty about review policies prevent my giving further info, but google, and ye shall find! A very useful one-page summary of her system is given on p. 89).

However, I WILL mention Qabalah in the context of praising Gordon-Bramer's tone throughout the book. It is refreshingly informal for an academic work, and this makes it not only fun, but at times very usefully mnemonic. For instance, while explaining that Qabalah (using the "Hermetic" spelling) is "the mother of all occult sciences," she observes that there is " a tarot card for every station and path on the Qabalah's Tree of Life [The Tree of Life essentially= a map of the soul's journey from birth to death]...Think of the tarot as Qabalah flash cards" (!) (p. 13).

Soon after, the author links this with Plath, who she realized was--amazingly!--seeding all forty of her poems found in her last collection, "Ariel" (of which "Daddy" is just one) with references to and correlations with the Qabalah. Therefore, Gordon-Bramer urges, think of "Plath's poems [as] the flash cards for the flash cards." (!!) There. The concept compacted. Put a bow on it.

In "Daddy," Plath literally mentions tarot (and alludes to mystical eastern European traditions) in lines 38-39:
"With my gypsy ancestress and my weird luck/And my taroc pack, and my taroc pack."
("Taroc" meaning "tarot." By the way, hearing Plath read this [and other poems she recorded] is absolutely encouraged. For this listener, the way she says "weird luck" here conjures an image of her wryly tossing her head to the side very slightly, while half-smiling, just so--a hint of knowing, amused exasperation. Love it.)

Speaking of the way Plath says things, the rhythm of "the tree of life and the tree of life" (From Plath's "The Munich Mannequins," referenced by the author on p. 24 in relation to Qabalah's Tree of Life) is, when said aloud especially, uncannily similar to the above "And my taroc pack, and my taroc pack." Especially considering the "flash cards for the flash cards" phenomenon here, it would be interesting to know if the author agrees that Plath may have been deliberately echoing herself here, associating tarot with Qabalah, in another "clue," or meanings-across-poems moment. Hmmm? (Perhaps we can quote Plath's poetic heroine Emily D. here: "...And they will differ--if they do/As syllable from Sound--" ;)

I can see I've lost the plot of this review, and am now in the weeds. So be it. On I trudge. And now that I'm in that territory where reviewers feel compelled to just ignore the author under discussion and present THEIR OWN interpretation of the subject at hand, I have also detected another "rhythmic echo," and this one may be Plath imitating her beloved Yeats (She took her life in a house Yeats had once lived in (she moved there because he'd lived there). When we realize that she told her mother she saw moving there as a sort of "rebirth," and when we reflect on Yeats's cyclical theory of history (a la Vico), it's hard not to be touched by the situation...

In "Black Rook in Rainy Weather," it's her "The wait's begun again" [i.e., the wait for something beautifully meaningful to appear again and spark her angsty soul) in the poem's final lines below.
****************************************
Of sorts. Miracles occur.
If you care to call those spasmodic
Tricks of radiance
Miracles. The wait's begun again,
The long wait for the angel,

For that rare, random descent.
****************************************

So Plath's "The wait's begun again." makes me think of Yeats's "The Second Coming," and hear his line: "The darkness drops again..." Especially because both of those phrases announce that a sort of visionary flash (Yeats: "surely some revelation is at hand...Plath: "...I only know that a rook/Ordering its black feathers can so shine/As to seize my senses...") has just ended, and that now is a time for reflection. Anyhow, there's that observation.

On another personal note, I have just come away from reading Plath's poem, "Mystic," which I had not encountered before (It's in one of the "inaccurate" versions of Ariel, apparently!), and I wholeheartedly recommend it! I am often deeply moved by poetry, but seldom actually cry from reading it (especially now that I don't drink, ha). This one did it, though. "I remember/The dead smell of sun on wood cabins...", etc. Actual tears.
To echo a line from the poem at hand: Three tears, if you want to know....

I am hardly expert in Plath's poetry, despite my recently re-discovered adoration of it (Decades ago, I had a "Plath Phase" in college!), and so can not speak to how this system holds up to other poems, but Gordon-Bramer's evidence for her interpretive system when it comes to "Daddy" is quite convincing indeed. There are way too many examples of this that she provides to cite here, but here are a couple to be going on with. First, to correspond with the (in)famous lines (48-50)from "Daddy":

"Every woman adores a fascist,
The boot in the face, the brute
Brute heart of a brute like you."

I'll compact it greatly, but in "Fourth Mirror: History & World Events" (Chapter 7), she shows that Brutus was a mythical King of Britain, and Plath had a Middle-English poetic accounting of him, Wynner and Wastoure" in her personal library that she had read. Brutus is shown to have been sympathetic to the plight of the Jews of his (ancient) time (thus playing into/with some of the fascist/Nazi references in "Daddy") The connections deepen as we are shown the artifact known as the "Brutus stone," and the "London Stone" in Britain. There is a striking physical resemblance of the stone(s) to Plath's "Ghastly statue with one grey toe" (line 9, and the British spelling of the color, interestingly). From there we are drawn to the stone's connections with the great British mystic and poet, William Blake, and his poem, "Jerusalem," which harkens back towards ancient Qabalah traditions, and even perhaps harkens forward with a mention of Primrose Hill, where Plath and her husband, renowned poet Ted Hughes (and who also of course figures in the poem), first lived, and where Plath later died. Whew! Right? Quite the tour of layered meanings! Incidentally, Gordon-Bramer is sensitive to, and sensibly handles, unfair accusations of Plath having been insensitive to the Holocaust, "appropriating" others' cultures/suffering, etc. Quite the contrary, she shows.

One of the most convincing demonstrations of the author's system is the "Arts & Humanities" chapter, where we can see how Plath included elements from Western literature (especially Conrad's "Heart of Darkness" and cultural influences (notably Freud, of whom Plath was a voracious reader). But it's the children's book, "The Silver Pencil," about a young girl who loses her father and wants to become a writer, that may be the most striking example of Plath's "sleight-of-mind" here, in embedding her little meaning-gems within the quilt of her poems. The biographical similarities between the girl in the story and Plath herself are remarkable, especially with respect to both of their "Daddies." Gordon-Bramer herself can't hold back, at one point exclaiming, quite endearingly: "I mean, come on! How much more Plathian can you get?" (!) In googling "The Silver Pencil," I was intrigued to see that Plath's quasi-autobiographical novel, "The Bell Jar," has a scene where a Dr (wait for it!) Gordon "twiddled a silver pencil."

It is not a perfect book--hardly any are. One zit would be that "Veni, Vidi, Vici" is not found in Shakespeare's play, "Julius Caesar," as the author asserts, but has in fact long been attributed to Caesar himself.

Another quibble is Chapter Six: "Third Mirror: Mythology." I had trouble keeping up with all the characters! This may well be because I have never been very good at or, frankly, all that into "keeping up" with mythological figures: they all seem to blur into one another after a while. I think Edith Hamilton's "Mythology" ruined it for me. I could never focus on her storytelling. Though I do recall loving the Joseph Campbell that I've read. And, as the author points out, the psychological motivations of the humanized Greek gods ring true, and are thus interesting.

But this chapter had a lot of the tarot Queens and mythological queens--and kings--to keep in mind, and, in a crowd, they wandered out of mine.. Interesting in themselves, like the individual tarot cards/figures are, but I struggle with linear thinking, lol!...Attempts were made, but I had trouble seeing specific relationships to the poem.

Finally, the book's ending section is devoted to a "Teaching Guide" for classroom use, ideal for both high school and college students. It would be fantastic to have a professor as excited about her subject and eager to riff ideas as Julia Gordon-Bramer clearly is! In fact, there are at least nine testimonials FROM her past students that come after the Bibliography and "Specific References by Section" pages that sing the praises of her aforementioned book, and ground-breaking analytical method, "Fixed Stars Govern a Life"--opening their eyes to the intricate mysteries of Plath's poetry, but also to those of poetry itself.

Some of her proposed exercises are wonderful, such as "Rewrite 'Daddy,' changing the tense to simple past or future...Does it still work in meter and rhythm? Do the feeling and meaning still come across?" (p. 87). Or, she suggests, change the enjambment (you may google it, but she explains that term well as well) of the poem. Does it still work well? Read "Daddy" aloud, in front of the class, but each student should consciously try to 'perform" it differently. What does each vocalization add? Or take away?

Obviously, these are all excellent exercises for ANY poem! It is almost inevitable that such fun and freewheeling "playing" with poetry (which is itself a "playing" with language) will produce epiphanies, and yield new meanings and insights--some of them no doubt legit, lol! I can only hope some form of this is being employed in our schools today!

The main thing to keep in mind, again, is that, with this book, Gordon-Bramer has delivered Sylvia Plath from the fate of being thought of as an extremely gifted basket case to--now--an incredibly ingenious, though troubled, poet and mystic--a visionary artist whose suffering was clearly real (that she was able to render it in verse of such magisterial anguish is a miracle of talent)--but whose life should be judged not only on her death and that which led up to it, but her amazing contributions to art while she was with us. Another female writer of genius superficially remembered for her suicide, Virginia Woolf, also comes to mind in this regard. Or Vincent van Gogh. "Oh, the painter who cut his own ear off? Who shot himself in the chest?" Well, yes, but ALSO the visionary artist who made incredible innovations in the use of color to convey strong emotions, and who further developed the textured brushwork known as "impasto" to give a sense of movement to many of his paintings. Of course, sensationalism is often easier to pitch, and grasp.

Another disappointing result of this idea of "glamorous" artists' pain is the expectation among many aspiring poets, etc that they "must" suffer, or be found "inauthentic." And so, the spectacle, at any given open-mic night reading, of a pouting, black-clad, possibly beret-wearing figure mounting the stage to bewail how unfair Existence is, while demonstrating how unfair their own existence is to good poetry..."Oh! How Life Burns, how my heart waddles in despair--a penguin in pain, baking under an angry sun, like a dropped french fry even the seagulls scoff at--OH! why was **I** made so much more sensitive than the common clod? Oh, my skin itself is a rash, an affront--how it sears me! oh! Oh!" yadda yadda...

Camille Paglia, the contrarian public intellectual, inevitable provocateur and lover of discussing Western civilization and its artistic/cultural discontents and achievements, has included--as far as I can tell--a fairly traditional interpretation of "Daddy" in her excellent collection of critical appreciations: "Break, Blow, Burn: Camille Paglia Reads Forty-Three of the World's Best Poems." She addresses the usual "Daddy issues" and feminist concerns, though she says that an emphasis on Plath as "feminist martyr" has "driven away some readers, and stunted literary criticism of her work. Plath's erudite engagement with canonical male writers, for example, has too often been minimized or suppressed" (p. 167).

At the end of her piece--shot through as usual with her trenchant, even incandescent observations--she makes the following proposition: Alas, she does not recognize the multiple layers of meanings in Plath's work uncovered by Gordon-Bramer (maybe, again, because not schooled enough in mysticism, tarot, etc, as the author is), but she does say that, as "Daddy" has the same "sneering sardonicism and piercing propulsiveness" of Bob Dylan's 1965 (two years after she died) epoch-changing "Like a Rolling Stone," she nominates Sylvia Plath "as the first female rocker."

At first I was toying with saying that would then make our author "her publicist," or "her manager," or some such. But a more apt, and accurate, honorific for Julia Gordon-Bramer in relation to Sylvia Plath is: "her Champion."

[Steven Critelli · Rating 3 out of 5]

While awaiting the delivery of Julia Gordon-Bramer's Fixed Stars Govern a Life: Decoding Sylvia Plath (2014, Stephen F. Austin State University Press), I purchased this boutique study which expands the author's original analysis of Sylvia Plath's "Daddy." Gordon-Bramer proposes to "decode" the poem by using six lenses which she calls "mirrors": (1) Tarot and Qabalah, (2) Alchemy, (3) Mythology, (4) History, (5) Astrology and Astronomy and (6) Arts and Humanities. Given the undisputed biographical testament, there is no question that Plath relied on these sources as the raw material for her poems, and Gordon-Bramer's mining of this vein is useful. Her analysis, however, is like a poetic extension of "six degrees of separation" that seeks all possible connections, some of which are plausible and others not very. Oftentimes, in fact-checking Gordon-Bramer's points I found inaccuracies where her thesis seemed to overwhelm the judiciousness of her research. For example, in search of an astrological reference for the line, "My Pollack friend/says there are a dozen or two" (re: the name of the German town where Daddy was born), Gordon-Bramer says that the source may be found in the Scutum constellation with its "dozen" stars. But Scutum has thousands if not millions of stars according to the online sources I checked. Now why Scutum? Well, because it was initially named for the Polish King Sobieski who "won a great battle against the Ottoman Empire" and Plath's father was named "Otto." In similar fashion, Gordon-Bramer unearths inference upon inference where connections are virtually wished into existence. Some of the connections seem provocative, if somwhat tenuous, e.g., these lines: "Ghastly statue with one grey toe" (referring to Freud's statue in Hampstead because of Plath's own psychoanalysis and the Brutus Stone in Totnes where Plath lived with Ted Hughes); "Where it pours bean green over blue/In the waters off beautiful Nauset,"(British Navy uniforms were blue, German Nazi uniforms were bean green, and in 1918 a German sub fired on the town of Orleans, Massachusetts at Nauset Beach), and "I used to pray to recover you" (the end of psychoanalysis is recovery, and this is also the plea of Penelope, the "ever-wanting" wife of Odysseus). We welcome these where new vistas of meaning click into place, and discard the chaff. The great omission in the book, though, is that, in her zeal to show Plath's artistry and find greater depth in her work, the author appears to subvert many important biographical details, all references being equal, and hence doesn't elicit the unified neural network that the poem travels on. Knowing one important connection (e.g., that Plath was married to Hughes for seven years) does not prohibit Gordon-Bramer from seeking other far less likely relationships (queens in matrilineal societies took consorts for seven years) that would be more than a stretch for most literary critics. It might be time to return to Seamus Heaney's essay, "The indefatigable hoof-taps," which stated that "Daddy" was "so entangled in biographical circumstances and rampages so permissively through the history of other people's sorrows that it overdraws its rights to our sympathy," and decide whether Plath ill-advisably used race to write a very literary form of poison pen letter on account of her husband's affair with a Jewish woman, and in the process conflated Hughes with all father figures, viz., Freud, God, Otto Plath and Hitler, to call down the wrath of Western Civilization. That the poem possesses a multilateral allusiveness only confirms the old saw that "Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned." In all, I enjoy any kind of jam session that produces new discoveries in Plath research, and there are a few here that make the reading well worth it, though the resulting analysis we take away from this book should be tempered with less speculative conclusions.

[Carl Rollyson · Rating 5 out of 5]

For beginning students of Plath, and for seasoned scholars of her work, this volume should be a pleasure to read, to contemplate, and to argue with. The range of references in Plath’s work to mythology, religion, politics, current events, and history is astounding. And the author guides us through the wealth of allusions to arcane but also essential texts with good humor and enthusiasm. To read Plath biographically can be stimulating and insightful, but without the kind of grounding in Plath’s own reading that Gordon-Bramer provides, too often the poetry is seen only in biographical terms. In Gordon-Bramer’s book, history is reflected in the prism of Plath’s poetry, and her life becomes only one of her many sources. Above all, Plath emerges as a world class poet, aware of European and African history and literature, making her own work just possibly, as Gordon-Bramer claims, fit to be placed beside the achievements of illustrious predecessors such as Conrad and Joyce.

[S · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am interviewing author for http://betterthanstarbucks.org coming issue. Stay tuned! I've re-read the entire Kindle edition closely! Never see a thorough analysis from one poem !