Plath’s Daddy Essays: Loss and Trauma -- Daddy Essays

Loss and Trauma in Plaths Daddy In addition to the anger and violence, Daddy is also pervaded by a strong sense of loss and trauma. The repeated You do not do of the first sentence suggests a speaker that is still battling a truth she only deep has been forced to accept. After all, this is the same persona who in an earlier poem spends her hours attempting to reconstruct the broken pieces of her colossus father. After 30 years of labor she admits to being none the wiser and married to shadow, only she remains faithful to her calling. With Daddy not only is the futility of her former efforts acknowledged, but the conditions that forced them upon her are manically denounced. At the same time, and this seems to fire her fury, she admits to her own willing self-deception. The father whom she previously related to the Oresteia and the Roman Forum is now revealed as a panzer man with a Meinkampf look. But she doesnt simply stop at her own complicity. Every woman, she announces loves a Fascist/The boot in the face, the brute/Brute heart of ...