The Unhealthy Role of Two Dads

Sylvia Plath’s poem “Daddy” and Regina Barreca’s poem “Nighttime Fires” are both being told by young women looking back at their early childhood years. Both poems involve the relationship between a father and his child. Plath’s poem explores the relationship of a dominating father and his daughter; and her struggle to break free from those memories and the ties that are keeping her bound. Barreca’s poem is also about a father and daughter, but more so of the unhealthy deteriorating life of the father.

In Sylvia Plath’s poem “Daddy” the reader needs only to read a few lines to understand the speaker’s overwhelming feelings of being oppressed by her father and later by other men. Plath writes in the first stanza,

You do not do, you do not do

Any more, black shoe

In which I have lived like a foot

For thirty years, poor and white.

Barely daring to breathe or Achoo.

Typically speaking the imagery of living like a foot in a shoe would give a sense of protection from the cold, unknown world. But Plath describes the shoe being the color black, connoting death. The frequent use of the word black forces the reader to see that the relationship with the daughter and father is very damaging.

In the second stanza Plath writes “ Daddy, I have had to kill you,/ You died before I had time-/ Marble-heavy, a bag full of gold,”(lines6-8) the imagery of marble and gold is that of beauty, expensive and rare. However, in “Daddy”

the connotations are that of heaviness and control. A little later in the poem her father is compared to a German. Plath states in lines 29-30, and “I could hardy speak./I thought every German was you.” And then Plath uses this metaphor in the seventh stanza

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.

The powerful feeling one gets from reading this is so overwhelming. We can’t help but remember the awful stories we’ve heard, pictures seen and the millions of Jews who lost their lives in concentration camps. To know that the daughter has the same feelings of torture and hopelessness as the Jews is dreadful to ones ears.

The daughter has great fear of her father and not only thought every German was him, but compares him to Hitler when she says, “And your Aryan eye, bright blue.” The connotation being used with Aryan is that of superiority. Aryan was a term used by Hitler for his race being a master race and that the “Jewish-Semitic” race was a threat to Germany’s Aryan civilization. This line makes us think that maybe she was a threat to her father as the Jews were to the Nazis, therefore, he controlled her every movement and thought.

On the other hand, the poem tells us the father dies and the daughter is crushed by his death. The reader feels her pain when she exclaims that the death “Bit [her] pretty red heart in two./I was ten when they buried you./At twenty I tried to die.” (lines 56-58) It would seem apparent that it is finally time to be free from his control, nevertheless, the daughter only finds her father’s image in another man. We know this from the following comment, “And then I knew what to do. / I made a model of you, / A man in black with a Meinkampf look”,(lines 63-65) the word black appears once again, to remind us of death.

Her use of “Meinkampf,” literally “my struggle,” is a direct reference to the title of Hitler’s autobiography. That word alone lets us know that she thinks of her husband after her father whom she compares to Hitler in the earlier stanzas.

The second to last stanza the father/husband are both compared to vampires. Men who have metaphorically sucked her blood the same way vampires suck the blood from their victims.

“If I’ve killed one man, I’ve killed two-

The vampire who said he was you.

And drank my blood for a year,

Seven years, if you want to know.

Daddy, you can lie back now

They are dancing and stamping on you.

The vampire imagery also reinforces the blood loss and the savagery of the concentration camps.

In closing, we get a sense the daughter finally comes to terms with her life with father and husband.