Daddy

Sylvia Plath’s poem “ Daddy,” compares the father who abandoned her in untimely death to a Nazi and a brute. Otto Plath died of gangrene when Sylvia was eight, which could have possibly been avoided by prompt treatment for diabetes and admission of the reality of his condition to his family (Axelrod.)

When Sylvia later writes in “ Daddy:”

Daddy, I have had to kill you.

You died before I had time

It means she is feeling like an abuse victim in a Hollywood film. Her father was so awful to her, and eventually she would have had to kill him literally or through cutting him out of her life. Instead, he died before she had time to choose whether she could love him through his abuse, or lack of love that is noted in her own poetic words as follows:

Every woman adores a Fascist,
The boot in the face, the brute
Brute heart of a brute like you.

Despite comparing her now absent father to a Nazi and her sentence of a life without him as to suffering in a concentration camp, she still maintains to adore her captor and the stoic, harsh man she remembers him as. This could well be the reason that Plath was attracted to abusive men, such as her first sexual encounter that hospitalized her, and Ted Hughes who eventually chose another woman over her and their children (Sylvia Plath.”

The experience of “ Daddy” is universal, as many women have lost not-so-loving and loving fathers and even lovers and found their hearts and souls stained by both the good and bad attributes. Even the most ferocious Nazi soldier had someone out there who both loved his good side, feared his bad attributes, but like a child waited for him to come home.