Slyvia Plath Father

Sylvia Plath, though a talented student and a virtuosic poet, spent the majority of her life combating severe depression, leading to her successful suicide at the tragically young age of thirty. Slyvia Plath found herself at a young age writing but often compared her fathers attitude to one of a nazi. Her relationship with her father was destructive both mentally and physically for the young woman. Otto Plath (her father) passed away when she was only 8 years old, but still had lasting effects on her life. Plath experienced many mental issues, leading to her death. One of the roots of this mental and emotional instability, as seen in Daddy and Lady Lazarus, can be attributed to Plath’s destructive relationship with her father and the years

“I have always been scared of you, / With your Luftwaffe, your gobbledygoo. / And your neat mustache / And your Aryan eye, bright blue. / Panzer-man, panzer-man, O You -” (41-45, Daddy). In these lines, Plath refers to her father’s time spent as a tank operator, and the trauma it inflicted on him over the years. This trauma was in turn passed along to her, who was not even ten years old at the time. She symbolizes this with her innocent and childish references to ‘Daddy’, ‘gobbledygoo’ and ‘Achoo’. The rationalization of her concentration-camp-Jew comparison is much more believable when told through the lips of a traumatized eight year old. Slyvia Plaths father Otto, was actually a Nazi soilder, and when she says she might as well be a jew, she is saying that her father might as well have killed her. Plath sees Nazis the same way she saw her father: sadistic, controlling, and manipulative, and she connotes these traits with those of all men. Examples can be drawn countlessly from both poems. “Lady Lazarus” captures how men view women as aesthetically-appealing objects, showing little concern for any internal flaws. Plath refers to the men as “The peanut-crunching crowd” (26) observing “the big strip tease” (29). This is a criticism of the male obsession with women as sexual objects. “I am your opus, / I am your valuable” (67-68). After her failed suicide, she felt as though she were merely seen as a specimen of sorts, rather than a real human being – an equal – with severe, distressing emotional