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

Allegory in Plaths Daddy In her poem Daddy, Plath artfully intermixes the factu exclusivelyy true with the emotionally true. There are scraps of her own breeding here, only if the poem is much bigger than that, and goes beyond the face-value interpretation that is it cryptograph but a egotism-indulgent literary vengeance spree. Daddy kit and caboodle on both a biographical/personal level for Plath, but also on an allegorical level as well.I fit this poem as a dual testament to Plaths (and all womens) campaign against male power, authority, influence, etc. She never had time to define her feminine self in opposition to her father, in the context of this male relationship, or legally break free of it, because of his untimely death. She first resented his being emotionally move out 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 stereotypical authoritarian male, and although she love him, she came to hate what he represented and how he had treated Aurelia and her. Many women of that time, (and all times) bottomland 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 Holocaust/victim analogy takes on a whole different slant. Rather than referring (exploitatively) to the personal sufferings of one individual cleaning lady, it can allegorically represent the mass, historical 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 enrol (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 minor-voice of the poem can r epresent,on a deeper level, that innocence novel girls lose as they become women and find themselves being chuffed away like a Jew, often reluctantly or unknowingly, into the expected roles for women in marriage and childbearing---when fairy tale expectations of love crash into the reality of the Sisyphian tasks of dishes, cooking,cleaning,laundry, child care, when so many women have their dreams and identities erased under the daily grind of domesticity---a different sort of confinement, slavery, suppression, another and altogether different kind of death and death of the spirit.