Daddy: Themes | SparkNotes

Themes are the fundamental and often universal ideas explored in a literary work.

The Haunting of Memory

One of the key themes of “Daddy” relates to the haunting of memory. The poem’s speaker is a thirty-year-old woman who continues to feel haunted by the memory of her father. Even though he died twenty years prior, she still feels oppressed by him. The speaker initially references her father’s legacy in the opening stanza, where she uses a “black shoe” (line 2) to symbolize the oppressive conditions of her life. The blackness of this shoe links to later images of her father as, for example, “a man in black with a Meinkampf look” (line 65). The fact that the speaker feels ready to kick this black shoe off indicates her willingness to be free of his oppressive influence. Yet it isn’t until near the end of the poem that the speaker evokes a literal sense of haunting. In the penultimate stanza, still addressing her father, the speaker claims to have killed “the vampire who said he was you / And drank my blood for a year” (lines 72–73). Here, the speaker imagines her father as a living corpse who survives in his undead state by drinking her blood and sapping her vitality—a terrifying symbol of his haunting presence.

The Fascistic Nature of the Patriarchy

The speaker’s father can be interpreted as the symbolic “Father” that feminists have identified with the patriarchy. The term patriarchy refers to a way of organizing families and societies that invests elder males with the greatest amount of power and privilege. In the mid-twentieth century, when Plath wrote this poem, traditional ideals related to the family were firmly patriarchal and hence centered on the father. For the speaker, this patriarchal father figure is essentially fascistic, which she demonstrates in her account of her own “daddy.” According to the speaker, her German father had a fascistic and brutish personality that made him similar to the Nazis. She evokes this personality in lines 48–50, where she links his behavior to that of other patriarchal men:

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

In these lines, the speaker implicitly blames women for desiring fascistic and brutal men like her father. Because they don’t reject such men outright, they ultimately help maintain the oppressive structure of the patriarchy. Significantly, the speaker doesn’t absolve herself of guilt. Despite wanting to symbolically “kill” her father, she recognizes that she’s helping to keep his memory alive.

The Outsized Torment of Trauma

Although we readers don’t have a lot of specific insight into the speaker’s relationship with her father, what’s clear is that she is still processing her feelings about him twenty years after his death. In the poem’s middle stanzas, when the speaker reflects on her father’s German heritage, she sets up a controversial paradigm in which she identifies herself as a Jew suffering at the hands of the Nazis:

[My tongue] stuck in a barb wire snare.
Ich, ich, ich, ich,
I could hardly speak.
I thought every German was you.
And the language obscene

An engine, an engine
Chuffing me off like a Jew.
A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen.
I began to talk like a Jew.
I think I may well be a Jew.

In these lines (26–35), the speaker explicitly likens herself to the Jewish victims of the Holocaust, whom the Nazis systematically murdered in concentrations camps like Dachau, Auschwitz, and Bergen-Belsen. Regardless of how poorly her father may have treated her, it’s clearly not reasonable for the speaker to compare her oppression to the genocidal extermination of millions; the comparison is grossly overstated. However, what one might take away from these words beyond their literal meaning is the general spirit of her grievance. That is, by overstating her case she effectively conveys the intensity of her feelings about her father, and her memory of his brutishness. This intensity, in turn, indicates an unprocessed and unhealed trauma that continues to cause outsized torment.

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