Daughter-Father Relationship in Plath's Poetry - Essay Example

The Daughter/Father Relationship Poetry has a beautiful ability to pull ideas and emotions out from the depths of one’s being with only a few short lines and a well-chosen metaphor. The effect of a poem, however, depends on the ability of the poet to present their ideas with strong imagery. This effectively paints a mental image for the reader (or listener) that cannot be denied and therefore begins to conjure up a sense of sympathy with the emotional response the poet has to the subject. While poetry, like literature, can be used for a variety of purposes, poetry such as that created by Sylvia Plath as expressed in her poem “Daddy” and Sharon Olds as seen in her poem “The Chute” struggle instead to communicate the complicated love/hate emotions they had for their fathers to very different effect. Plath’s “Daddy” is written in first person as a letter to her father, who has been dead for 20 years. Although it is not clear who the dominating figure of verse 1 has been, his identity and the concept that this is a letter emerges in the second verse, “Daddy, I have had to kill you, / You died before I had time” (6-7). The story that emerges in the subsequent lines is of a woman who has lived in fear and awe of her father for as long as she can remember. The fear is evident in her metaphor of him as “Marble-heavy, a bag full of God, / Ghastly statue with one gray toe / Big as a Frisco seal” (8-10). Later, she compares her fear of her father to the fear the Jews felt for the Nazis, seeing herself as being shipped off to the concentration camps and describing her father’s appearance in terms of the perfect Aryan. “But no less a devil for that, no not / Any less the black man who / Bit my pretty red heart in two” (54-56). Finally, her description of the man she married as the model of her father indicates his deep cruelty because he has a “love of the rack and the screw” (66). She ends the poem by indicating her father has been an evil vampire, sucking her life dry and finally buried with a stake in his heart to the delight of the villagers. Her beginning and end of the poem, each expressed in terms of anger and fear, leave no doubt that her fear outweighed any other emotions she had of her father. However, Plath also provides plenty of clues that her love for her father was almost as strong as her fear of him. Although she is writing against him, defying her fear of him, she seems almost breathless as she allows the thoughts of the poem to be interrupted by line breaks and allows one thought to blend almost seamlessly into another. She opens the poem with her anger toward her father, but her analogy of the heartless statue in verse 2 bleeds into a memory of a beautiful vacation she took in which she “used to pray to recover you” (14). This memory leads into a memory of trying to find her father’s roots, which further suggests the concept of recapturing the person she loved. But the name of the town he came from was too common for her to determine the correct one, “So I never could tell where you / Put your foot, your root, / I never could talk to you (22-24). The way she places mention of his death just after the line about his biting her heart in two brings into question whether her broken heart was the result of his cruelty or his death. Her attempted suicide is described as an effort to get back to him just as is her marriage to a man who is just like what she remembers. Sharon Olds also speaks of her father in rather ambiguous terms throughout her poem “The Chute.” Rather than jumping from thought to thought and metaphor to metaphor as Plath does, Olds keeps her thoughts completely focused upon the idea of the laundry chute that her father built when she was young and through which he found a unique means of fixing the doorbell. Although she doesn’t provide a specific reference to his character at first, she evokes a sense of menace in the way in which she describes the chute itself: “my father built a / hole down through the center of the house. / It started in the upstairs closet, a / black, square mouth like a well / with a lid on it, it plummeted down / behind the kitchen wall, and the raw / pine cloaca tip of it was / down in the basement where the twisted wicker / basket lay on the cement floor” (1-9). It isn’t until the final line of this quote is reached that one truly realizes the author is talking about a laundry chute rather than a twisted means of torture hidden in a closet. A hint of her father ringing the doorbell over and over again while he stood outside covered in blood pulls a further sense of dread from the reader, which is then followed by her description of the way in which “he’d select a kid, and take that kid by the / ankles and slowly feed that kid / down the chute” (26-28), joking the entire time that he would let go. Like Plath, Olds carefully breaks her sentences up among the lines of the poem to heighten the sense of dread and fear brought out by this sadistic father. While there are significant hints that the father is perhaps cruel and evil, Olds also includes several indications that her father was not truly bad. The fear is explained away in the conception of the deed rather than the act of the father: “We thought it was such an honor to be chosen, / and like all honors it was mostly terror” (35-36). And while it is mentioned that his threats to let go created yet more terror, the author indicates that this was a thought that had not also crossed the mind of the child: “how could you trust him? And then if you were / his, half him, your left hand maybe and your / left foot dipped in the gleaming / murky liquor of his nature, how could you / trust yourself? What would if feel like / to be on the side of life?” (46-51). Rather than condemning her father for the somewhat sadistic humor he displays in his pretending to let go, Olds indicates that the kids understood it as part of their own daring nature, thus waking them up to who they were inside. “so although it’s a story with some cruelty in it, / finally it’s a story of love / and release, the way the father pulls you out of nothing / and stands there foolishly grinning” (57-60). Olds, in these final lines, ensures her readers understand her meaning, explicitly defining her poem about a laundry chute as a metaphor for the ultimate expression of love a father can provide for his children. Although each poem conveys strong yet conflicting emotions about the relationship between a daughter and her father, the poems by Plath and Olds come to very different conclusions. Each writing with the same style, allowing their thoughts to be interrupted by line and verse breaks, these poets place their breaks in such a way as to highlight the overall impression they wish to make. Plath ends her lines with images and thoughts of evil while Olds allows her lines to end with questions that are answered in a surprising way or images of hope and light. In addition, through the poem, each poet comes to her own conclusion regarding the final relationship she will have with her father. Olds recognizes the deep love her father felt for her despite his rather reckless spirit while Plath finds it necessary to bury her father as an evil thing that has haunted her for too long already. In each poem, the reader can identify at least to some extent with the emotions being expressed thanks to the clear images that are presented as a means of evoking similar thoughts and feelings as those felt by the author. Read More