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The Trap of Love and Abuseby Petra Pfisterer
The American Medical Association estimates that over four million women are victims of domestic violence each year. One out of every four women is likely to be abused by a partner. Very often these women have dysfunctional relationships with their fathers, and unfortunately they marry men with the same abusive character. The trauma that results from physical as well as psychological abuse is due to the strong and inexplicable feelings of love the victims foster for the evildoers. Apart from the physical violence, the disillusion about what their loved partner or father should or shouldn’t do is mental torture, and it haunts the affected girls and women to an unbearable degree. Sylvia Plath’s poem “Daddy” describes very vividly and comprehensibly how devastatingly male dominance can influence a woman’s life. While she is attacking her father and her husband on a symbolic level, the speaker is actually worshipping them. Although she is a victim of circumstance, she is still speaking out against male domination.
Her father was obviously unapproachable and authoritarian. She remembers how she has always been scared of him, his Aryan bright blue eyes, his neat mustache and especially his difficult and “obscene” (l.30) mother language. German was hard for her to speak and she uses German vocabulary for armor to describe him and the distance she felt towards this man who was “marble-heavy, a bag full of God” (l.8). It seems like she worshipped him like an icon or a statue that is not to be touched and never going to show any feelings.
Furthermore, the symbol of the black shoe contributes to the cold-hearted picture she is drawing of him, black connoting death and darkness throughout the whole poem. Instead of a pair of shoes she refers to only one shoe, which not only symbolizes the father’s amputated leg, “the ghastly statue’s one gray toe” (l.9), but it is also a metaphor for the heavy feelings of loneliness and grief she has felt since the death of the adored father figure. She felt trapped like a foot in this black shoe. She always wanted this man to be her loving father, but he didn’t live up to her expectations and died before she even had the chance to tell him how much she needed him to be alive and be there for her.
After he abandoned her, she felt more than lonely. As she was only a child at the time of his death, the use of an offended child’s voice and the assonance of the whining sound “oo” at the end of almost every line of the poem, such as do, shoe, you, achoo, blue, du, Jew, true, boggledygoo and through convey her deep grief and sadness very intensly. Nobody cries like this over somebody they don’t love, but grief can also turn into anger and uncontrolled madness: the speaker felt as if an evil train was “chuffing [her] off like a Jew” (l. 32). This onomatopoeic bitter hyperbole describes the destruction that came over her. Her father’s death destroyed her life just like his fellow countrymen destroyed a whole culture. First she resented his emotional absence in her life, than the physical one.
To fill the void she married a man whom she thought to be like her father, but he was even darker. She loved this devil (l. 54) just like she loved her father, but she was eager to compare their evilness to defend her decision to have said “I do, I do” (l. 67) not only to vow her unconditional love, but also to accept all the torture awaiting her: “a love of the rack and the screw” (l.66). When she claimed that “every woman loves a fascist in boots” (l.48), she referred to the passive role that women play by refusing to reject the roles that society attempts to force upon them. Even though this vampire “bit her pretty red heart in two” (l.55), she endured seven years of abuse and was abandoned again. So this replica was as imperfect and as cruel as her father. The pattern had repeated itself, and only then was she able to realize the connection.
To overcome her extremely hurt feelings and the haunting images of her father, she had to condemn both men. The slaying of the vampire symbolizes the release of all her frustration and anger, but the real culprit is her father, the “bastard” (l.80) who had influenced her whole life to an unbearable extent. In this work of rage she addresses her father through apostrophe to reproach him that because of him she was so desperate to create another father in her husband. The callous father’s heavy dominance combined with her unfulfilled longing for fatherly love even made her commit suicide. Only when she didn’t succeed in joining him this way, her last resort to solve the dilemma was to find a suitable replacement. After this plan failed as well, the killing of the idolized picture felt like the final way to end the haunting past.
She felt betrayed in every aspect, and she was angry that it took her so many years to see what everybody else around her had seen: “And the villagers never liked you” (l. 77) / ”They always knew it was you” (l. 79). Most abuse victims are blind for a long time and live in absolute denial. The awareness of what is really happening dawns on them mostly when it is too late. Hence, Plath’s Holocaust analogy allegorically represents the historical victimization of women by patriarchy, which has already been documented in the witch hunts and continues today with female circumcision, stoning, discrimination and suppression of women in many countries and cultures.
The western world has its share in domestic abuse and many women feel trapped just like in this powerful poem, depicting the powerlessness of their situation.
Unfortunately, it seems quite comprehensible that Sylvia Plath once more committed suicide three months after she had written this poem. Obviously she came to the conclusion that she just couldn’t live without the two men that have dominated her life so extensively. She couldn’t help but follow her father’s tracks to finally be close to him even though she claimed in the poem that she was through with him. Maybe she was through with him, but probably not with her husband. Unlike her father and unlike the vampire in her poem, he was still alive; worse, he was living with another woman. This must have been the absolute dead end for her. If only she would have realized that she could have found a new role as a spokeswoman for injustices committed against women. This might have given her a new sense to live and continue her beautiful and expressive work of art.
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