Sylvia Plath wrote her controversial poem “Daddy” in 1962, during the furiously productive period that preceded her death by suicide in February 1963. “Daddy” features a first-person speaker who addresses her deceased father. Despite having died twenty years prior, his memory continues to haunt the speaker, who is now a thirty-year-old woman. The nature of the relationship the speaker had with her father isn’t entirely clear to the reader. Even so, it’s evident that she has strong and conflicting feelings about him. She seems to have longed for her father during her young adult years, to the extent that she tried to “get back, back, back” to him (line 59) by attempting suicide at twenty. However, after she recovered from the attempt on her life, her relationship with his memory soured. Addressing the man from her present vantage, the speaker depicts her German-born father as a fascist and a Nazi. She also likens her suffering under his patriarchal cruelty to the Jewish peoples’ torment during the Holocaust, an obviously overwrought comparison that nonetheless conveys how the speaker views her own trauma. She hopes to abolish this trauma by symbolically “killing” her father, who, like a vampire, continues to drain her lifeblood long after his death.

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