Plath’s Daddy Essays: Allegory in Plath’s Daddy :: Plath Daddy Essays

Allegory in Plaths Daddy In her poetry Daddy, Plath artfully intermixes the factually true with the emotionally true. in that respect are scraps of her own life here, plainly the poem is lots bigger than that, and goes beyond the face-value interpretation that is it nothing but a self-indulgent literary vengeance spree. Daddy works on both a biographical/personal level for Plath, but also on an allegoric level as well.I see this poem as a dual testament to Plaths (and all womens) struggle against male power, authority, influence, etc. She never had time to define her feminine self in opposition to her cause, in the context of this male relationship, or legitimately break free of it, because of his wrong(p) death. She first resented his being emotionally absent in her life, and then physically absent. In her journals she admits how she struggles in her relationships with men because of this lack. Accounts by both Plath and Aurelia, assert that her father was quite the stereoty pical authoritarian male, and although she loved him, she came to hate what he stand for and how he had treated Aurelia and her. Many women of that time, (and all times) can understand this dynamic---loving men, but hating how they treat us and view us and exploit us--- consciously or unconsciously, on either a personal, or societal level.Taken from this perspective, the final solution/victim analogy takes on a whole different slant. earlier than referring (exploitatively) to the personal sufferings of one individual woman, it can allegorically represent the mass, diachronic victimization of women by patriarchy, which has been well-documented (witch hysteria) and which continues (female circumscision) She says every woman adores a Fascist in boots--all women in some way participate (if only in their passivity, in refusing to reject the roles that society attempts to force upon them) in this social and cultural situation.The child-voice of the poem can represent,on a deeper level, that innocence young girls lose as they puzzle women and find themselves being chuffed off like a Jew, oft reluctantly or unknowingly, into the expected roles for women in marriage and childbearing---when fairy bosh expectations of love crash into the reality of the Sisyphian tasks of dishes, cooking,cleaning,laundry, child care, when so many women bemuse their dreams and identities erased under the daily grind of domesticity---a different sort of confinement, slavery, suppression, another and raw different kind of death and destruction of the spirit.