Daddy-+Critical+deconstruction

=//**__Electra Complex in Daddy__**//= = = = = =Sylvia Plath composed her most famous-and infamous-poem "Daddy" at a time in her life when she must certainly have been contemplating suicide, or at the very least was in the grip of a devastating depression. At this point Plath, abandoned by husband Ted Hughes, was living alone with her two children in an apartment formerly occupied by William Butler Yeats. England was experiencing its most bitterly cold winter since the Year Without a Summer and Sylvia Plath was moving incessantly toward tidying up the profound emotions that served as the driving before behind her greatest artistic expression. The ultimate expression of those conflicting emotions are expressed in "Daddy" in an outburst of vitriol and pained condemnation of male abandonment. Although the poem seems most obvious on its literal level to be directed toward Plath's own father, a close examination reveals that much of the venom is directed not toward her own daddy, but to the daddy of her children, her husband Ted Hughes, whom Plath confused as a reincarnated version of her father in vampire form.=

=The Electra Complex is at the center of the poem as Plath works to intertwine the figures of her own father and her husband. The Electra Complex is a psychological term to describe what is most easily explained as the female equivalent of the Oedipus Complex in which a daughter comes to view her father as the first sexual attraction in her life and then proceeds to repress those feelings only to have them subconsciously bubble to the surface in the form of falling in love with a man who reminds her of her father. The poet herself stated that the poem is about a woman (presumably herself) who seems to have an Electra Complex regarding her father that she cannot entirely admit to. Further blurring the line between father and husband is that both men would abandon her; startlingly, Plath's relationship with both men lasted almost the exact same length of time. Plath's father died when she was just eight year old and her suicide came roughly the same amount of time after first meeting Hughes. The primary difference, of course, is that as an eight year old child, Sylvia barely had time to know and understand her father. For that reason, the real focus of the vehemence in the poem must certainly be her husband, who acts as a substitute for the father she never knew.= = = = = = = =The first half of the poem sets the stage for her look back toward a literal representation of her father that will shortly transform into the symbolic representation of Ted Hughes. Plath announces that she has been trying to deal with her father's real-and completely unavoidable-abandonment for thirty years by comparing it to a shoe she has been wearing since a child: "You do not do, you not do/ any more, black shoe" (LL, 1-2). The second stanza starts with two lines that are both shocking and yet ironic, as Plath states "Daddy, I have had to kill you. / You died before I had time." (LL, 6-7). Plath casts a decidedly modern context upon the age-old conflict between parents and children by use of a metaphorical transformation so that "the aggressive back talk of the poem is aimed not merely at the patriarch of the title but at the cultural construction of masculinity that is first enacted by the father and later reproduced in the vampire husband who also tortures and abandons the daughter"(Van Dyne 49). In the modern age, the father has died before his time and so Plath essentially has to "kill" him through the words of her poetry. But this death is not complete; her father will, through Plath's poetry and emotions, rise from the grave as a vampire who cannot then be killed except by a stake through the heart.=

=The conventional acceptance that this poem is literally about Plath's father stems primarily from its title and the imagery of the first half, but as it moves toward its climax the focus intensifies as the symbolic father-figure becomes the object of Plath's intense emotions. The sense of cruelty that leads Plath to her most hyperbolic accusations and the later images that compare her difficulties to those of a Holocaust victim seem unlikely to be directed at a man she barely knew. Indeed, lines such as "Every woman adores a Fascist, / The boot in the face, the brute / Brute heart of a brute like you," are far more likely to be directed toward a husband than a father; even a father that didn't die when the child was so young. The idea that every woman loves a fascist contains hints of domestic truth rather than familial truth; it is every child's natural inclination to defy and rebel. On the other hand, marriage in the 1950s was promoted not as an relationship of equality or total authority, but as one of freedom within the constraints of husband-dominated oppression. Still, the poem is about the rebirth of the father into a not-quite-dead vampire symbol personified by her father, so it is important to understand the full import of such obvious references to Plath's actual father and the life she led before meeting Hughes.= = = = = = = =It is Plath's usage of the metaphor of the vampire myth that unlocks the mystery of why a poem titled "Daddy" is actually about her husband. A vampire is a dead person yet not quite that dead person; he may take on different forms, even difference species (Frost 10). "Daddy" exists as an exercise in coming to terms with the realization of the father reincarnated after death, but taking a new shape. As a result, the mixing of father with husband becomes not just understandable, but necessary. Plath's memory of her father is far more literal in the poem than her description of her husband. This is because Plath confuses the two; she sees her father but seethes at her husband.= =In fact, it will not be until the very climax of the moment that Plath recognizes reveals that the monster is not her father at all, but her husband. With the words= = = = = ="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." (LL 71-74)= = = = = =Plath admits that the two men have combined into one in her mind, with her husband metaphorically claiming to be her father. The admission that he drank her blood for seven years coincides with the length of her marriage to Hughes. It is not Plath's own dead father whom she must drive a stake through; he is already long dead. The daddy that receives the brunt of Plath's anger is the father of her own children, reborn as the vampire looking to suck the life out of the angst that has haunted since the loss of her father when she too young to fully comprehend the conflicting emotions that his loss dealt to her unformed psyche.=

==Frost, Brian J. //The Monster with a Thousand Faces : Guises// //of the Vampire in Myth and Literature//. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1989. ==

Plath, Sylvia. "Daddy." //Ariel.// Harper & Row, NY: 1966.
==Van Dyne, Susan R. //Sylvia Plath's Ariel Poems. Sylvia// //Plath's Ariel Poems//. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1993. ==