Daddy: Literary & Historical Context

Confessional Poetry

Confessional poetry had an influential role in the development of midcentury American verse, and Plath was one of its key figures. The literary critic M. L. Rosenthal first coined the term “confessional poetry” in his review of Robert Lowell’s 1959 book, Life Studies. Lowell’s book consisted of poems written in a direct and colloquial style, and which discussed his personal experiences with marriage and mental illness. Though Rosenthal well understood that every poet draws on their own life, he found something new in the poems’ naked honesty. Lowell had effectively stripped away the polite veneer of social life to reveal the ugly reality that hides underneath, in our most personal and intimate experiences.

Life Studies won the National Book Award for Poetry in 1960, and confessional poetry went on to dominate the decade that followed. Significantly, the enthusiasm for confessional poetry was primarily about critical reception. It was critics, not poets, who classified the autobiographical work of Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath, and others as “confessional.” However, many poets, including Elizabeth Bishop and Adrienne Rich, rejected the designation when applied to their own work. Today, it remains up for debate whether confessional poetry was really something new, or just an extension of the lyric tradition of first-person narrators.

The Feminist Critique of Patriarchy

In “Daddy,” the speaker’s father may be interpreted as the symbolic “Father” that feminists have identified with the patriarchy. By the time Plath’s poem was first published, in 1965, the feminist movement had been alive for the better part of a century and was beginning its so-called “second wave.” Second-wave feminism got its impetus in part from Betty Friedan’s bestselling 1963 book, The Feminine Mystique. Freidan’s book challenged the idea, dominant at the time, that women derived fulfillment primarily from domestic life as wives and mothers. By contrast, Friedan argued, women were unhappy with the limitations that prevented them from pursuing their own self-fulfillment. The many barriers to women’s self-fulfillment can be understood in relation to the concept of patriarchy. This term refers to a way of organizing families and societies that invests men with the greatest amount of power and privilege. In the mid-twentieth century, when Plath lived and wrote, traditional ideals related to the family were firmly patriarchal and hence centered on the father. Second-wave feminists critiqued this systemic privileging of men in the interest of ending women’s gender-based oppression and advancing their desires for intellectual and political autonomy.