Daddy: Analysis of the Speaker

The speaker of “Daddy” is a thirty-year-old woman who is addressing her father. Despite having died when the speaker was ten, this man has continued to have an outsized influence on her life and her psychic well-being. As she indicates in the poem’s twelfth stanza, the early loss of her father proved challenging for her to process. Whether due to grief-induced longing or trauma (or both), the speaker attempted suicide at the age of twenty in an effort to “get back, back, back” (line 59) to her father. However, as she recovered from her failed attempt, her father’s memory seems to have become a pure source of torment. Indeed, she says her father was a man with “a love of the rack and the screw” (line 66), and she associates him with the violent and fascistic behavior of the Nazis. Although we readers don’t get much insight into the facts of the relationship between father and daughter, in lines 48–50, the speaker strongly implies that he expressed himself through violence:

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

Regardless of whether his violence was physical or emotional or both, he was clearly a traumatic presence in the speaker’s life, and he remains so twenty years after his death.

Just as the speaker describes her father as a German “panzer-man” (line 45), a “brute” (49), and a “devil” (54), she casts herself as a “Jew” who suffers acutely under her father’s cruel “Aryan eye, bright blue” (44). The speaker’s identification with the victims of the Holocaust has caused many readers and critics discomfort, as such a comparison effectively minimizes the systematic suffering inherent in one of the most devastating chapters in human history. The speaker speculates in the eighth stanza that she may have a “gipsy ancestress” (line 38), which could make her “a bit of a Jew” (40). But regardless of her lineage, the speaker has not actually been subjected to the horrors of the Nazi genocide, making her identification with victimized Jewish men and women both surprising and controversial. The speaker’s overstatement does however succeed in indicating the intensity of her feelings; indeed, the reality of these strong feelings causes her anguish, and it has done so “for thirty years” (line 4). At the time of speaking, however, the speaker finally feels ready to disburden herself of her father’s memory and break free from ongoing oppression. It is for this reason that she claims that she’s had to kill her father: “There’s a stake in your fat black heart” (line 76).