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Sylvia Plath as Electra
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SYLVIA PLATH AS ELECTRA by Alejandro Villa Vásquez
While the poetry of Sylvia Plath is rife with experiences of unresolved love and sensuous imagination, “Daddy,” written in the months before her death, is the ideal case study for Freudian analysis. Described by the poet in a 1962 BBC interview as one girl’s confrontation with the unresolved Electra complex manifested in the wake of her father’s untimely death, “Daddy” is a blueprint for the processes of sublimation, fomentation of psychical trauma and its subsequent talking cure, as well as experiences that, Plath felt, were unique to women in her society for the roles they play in familial and social relations. The poem is further complicated by references to the Holocaust, and Plath states in the same BBC interview that the narrator of the poem also tries to mend the rift between her Nazi father and Jewish mother, exploring victimhood on a larger scale...
The poem is most likely her attempt to resolve the trauma that resulted from the initial impact of her father’s death. Her enormous body of writing suggests that she pursued this art form to master it—to gain control of her painful experiences. Ultimately, the execution of a poem like “Daddy” is meant to provide catharsis of the psychical residue left behind by trauma. It is but one of countless poems that strongly suggest poetry has often provided a remedy for the cathexes that form in response to traumatic experiences. But it can be argued, at least in the case of Sylvia Plath, that “Daddy” was not enough to cure her of this neurosis.
Placed in biographical context, the initial trauma endured by the patient was the abrupt death of her father, when she was still a small child. While these are stanzas of poetry, I firmly believe their confessional nature provides uninhibited insight into the patient’s neuroses. Freud mentioned throughout his writings that a prominent characteristic of deep-seated psychical trauma is the suddenness with which the first shock occurs. It makes the impact more disorientating—Plath did not know that her father was going to die, nor did she have the slightest idea that such a fate could become of her father. At that point in psychological development, the patient as a child conceived of her father as an immortal and benevolent character.... the psychical residue left from an encounter with death significantly changed the subject’s attitude toward life. Going years without confronting the agony of her father’s death, the psychical residue had perniciously affected the patient, giving her a propensity to write brooding poetry and, arguably, engage in unfruitful relationships with men that only further turned her inward. Suffering from this neurosis, the patient attended to her impassioned thoughts by validating them through writing. The poetry the patient wrote was her method of a talking cure. Through “Daddy,” for example, the poet was able to relive all parts of her relationship with and the life of her father...
Poetry was her way out of her own mind, turning to the world for or better or worse to explore everything she felt toward her father, and herself. “Daddy” is a poem of abreaction. She ventured into the deepest recesses of her undying devotion to her father. The use of (slant) rhyme is the uplifting but unsettling undercurrent of love that flows even deeper than all the misery the patient has felt because of her father.
She further admits that “If I’ve killed one man, I’ve killed two— / The vampire who said he was you / And drank my blood for a year, / Seven years, if you want to know. / Daddy, you can lie back now.” These two men that she mentions almost at the end of the poem are mysterious. It is likely that one of these men is her father, the precipitator of her anguish. Recently, literary scholars have said that the other man the narrator has killed is an archetypical derelict husband. In real life, the patient had to endure a very turbulent relationship to a man she met while studying in England, fellow poet Ted Hughes. The latter was an adulterer and some accounts by the patient claim that he was violent with her. That single line about doing away with two men is telling. The narrator isn’t killing both at the same time; she says that if she has succeeded in laying one of them to rest, then she has done so with the other. She sees these two figures as the same, as manifestations of each other. These two men are guilty of the same God-like mastery over her and negligence of her feelings. Considering that the poem was written well after the revelation of her husband’s infidelity, it means that the patient intertwined two of the most influential men in her life into the same executioner. What this means is that the psychic trauma of her father’s death and subsequent lack of a male presence made her look for a companion that could simulate the feelings of paternal love that went unfounded. This in itself is stereotypically Freudian, but not without reason.
The poem is further complicated when one analyzes it from the standpoint of group psychology. In the poem, she aligns herself with being Jewish. According to the note, the patient was Jewish on her mother’s side, while her father, she suggests in the same note, may have had a past with Nazi Germany. This, she felt, was a conflict that she had to resolve in the theater of her own mind on behalf of her parents. According to Donald Moss in his work Hating in the First Person Plural, people often align themselves with victims in their attempts to sympathize, and have much more difficulty admitting any proximity to the tormentors.7 The patient easily imbued her traitorous father—and by proxy, her husband—with a guilt only comparable to the guilt of the Nazis; but she could not have completed the allegory if she didn’t associate herself with the tormentor’s victim: Jewish people. It suited the patient to write from the perspective of a Jewish woman being tormented by the memory of an evil man who is also a Nazi and who also happens to be her father. In part the analogy effaces the speaker and the father, and makes them extensions of their respective associations, Jews and Nazis. It makes it easier to celebrate her triumph over her monstrous father, because he becomes inextricably tied to the ferociously violent entity that was the Nazi party. It’s befitting then, that the last stanza includes the line “They are dancing and stamping on you.” These villagers, perhaps Jews overcome with joy that the Nazi threat has been vanquished, are celebrating on the grave of a wrongdoer, a person who was a bad man, and an even worse father.
Plath was damned if she did, damned if she didn’t. If she hadn’t resolved the complex feelings caused by her father’s demise, then she would have spent the rest of her life feeding the unstoppable drive toward mastery over the only thing that could give her release from her own feelings. But if she had successfully abreacted, then she might have feared losing the drive that very well may have kept her alive. Sylvia Plath, for better or worse, was a patient dependent on the impetus of pain resolution. She may have vanquished everything that stood in her way, even herself.https://confluence.gallatin.nyu.edu/c...
By Sylvia Plath
You do not do, you do not do
Any more, black shoe
In which I have lived like a foot
For thirty years, poor and white,
Barely daring to breathe or Achoo.
Daddy, I have had to kill you.
You died before I had time——
Marble-heavy, a bag full of God,
Ghastly statue with one gray toe
Big as a Frisco seal
And a head in the freakish Atlantic
Where it pours bean green over blue
In the waters off beautiful Nauset.
I used to pray to recover you.
Ach, du.
In the German tongue, in the Polish town
Scraped flat by the roller
Of wars, wars, wars.
But the name of the town is common.
My Polack friend
Says there are a dozen or two.
So I never could tell where you
Put your foot, your root,
I never could talk to you.
The tongue stuck in my jaw.
It stuck in a barb wire snare.
Ich, ich, ich, ich,
I could hardly speak.
I thought every German was you.
And the language obscene
An engine, an engine
Chuffing me off like a Jew.
A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen.
I began to talk like a Jew.
I think I may well be a Jew.
The snows of the Tyrol, the clear beer of Vienna
Are not very pure or true.
With my gipsy ancestress and my weird luck
And my Taroc pack and my Taroc pack
I may be a bit of a Jew.
I have always been scared of you,
With your Luftwaffe, your gobbledygoo.
And your neat mustache
And your Aryan eye, bright blue.
Panzer-man, panzer-man, O You——
Not God but a swastika
So black no sky could squeak through.
Every woman adores a Fascist,
The boot in the face, the brute
Brute heart of a brute like you.
You stand at the blackboard, daddy,
In the picture I have of you,
A cleft in your chin instead of your foot
But no less a devil for that, no not
Any less the black man who
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.
But they pulled me out of the sack,
And they stuck me together with glue.
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.
So daddy, I’m finally through.
The black telephone’s off at the root,
The voices just can’t worm through.
If I’ve killed one man, I’ve killed two——
The vampire who said he was you
And drank my blood for a year,
Seven years, if you want to know.
Daddy, you can lie back now.
There’s a stake in your fat black heart
And the villagers never liked you.
They are dancing and stamping on you.
They always knew it was you.
Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m through.