This famously disturbing poem follows the transformation of a dead father figure from a boot into a Nazi, and many other people and things. Eek.
Plath's traumatized speaker declares repeatedly that she's "finally through," with an insistence that's as childlike as it is disturbing. But it's not at all clear that this speaker will succeed in keeping the ghost of Daddy at bay. After all, he's haunted her for her whole life, and keeps haunting her still.
Let's consider how psychoanalytic lit crit might help us uncover some new meanings in this always-creepy piece.
- How might "Daddy" be read as both an homage to and a critique of some of the founding myths of psychoanalysis? (Hint: it may help to think not only about Oedipus, but also about the "primal father" whose murder is staged in works like Freud's Moses and Monotheism. And… go.)
- In a powerful reading of Plath's text, the critic Jacqueline Rose has argued that "what is most striking about 'Daddy' is its mobility of fantasy, the extent to which it takes up psychic positions which, it is often argued, if they cannot be clearly distinguished, lead to the collapse of morality itself. Plath, on the other hand, moves from one position to the other, implicating them in each other, forcing the reader to enter into something which she or he is often willing to consider only on the condition of seeing it as something in which, psychically no less than historically, she or he plays absolutely no part." Where and how do you see this "implicating" happening in the poem? Why do you think Plath might have wanted to produce discomfort in her reader? Especially when discomfort is so… discomforting.