It tends to be the trend for women who have had traumatic childhoods to be attracted to men who epitomize their emptiness felt as children. Women who have had unaffectionate or absent fathers, adulterous husbands or boyfriends, or relatives who molested them seem to become involved in relationships with men who, instead of being the opposite of the monsters in their lives, are the exact replicas of these ugly men. Sylvia Plaths poem Daddy is a perfect example of this unfortunate trend. In this poem, she speaks directly to her dead father and her husband who has been cheating on her, as the poem so indicates. The first two stanzas, lines 1-10, tell the readers that Plath, for thirty years, has been afraid of her father, so scared that she dares not to breathe or Achoo. She has been living in fear, although she announces that hes already dead. It is obvious that she believes that her father continues to control her life from the grave. She says that she has had to kill him, but hes already dead, indicating her initial promise to forget him. She calls him a bag full of God, telling us that she considers her father a very strong, omnipotent being, someone who is superior in her eyes.In the middle of the poem, she begins to refer to herself as a Jew, and her father the German, who began chuffing me off like a Jewto Dachau, Auschwitz, Belson. What Plaths intent here is to allow us to understand that her father was a German, and she relates his behavior as a person to a Nazi. But later, she becomes more enraged, and strips the title of God from her father, and labels him a swastika and a brute. Every woman adores a Fascist is Plaths way of describing her feelings toward her father, since he was German. It also explains that women tend to fall into that tragic sequence where an absent father or a brutal father is the reason women attract violent men the boot in the face, the brute brute heart of a brute like you.In stanza 11, we ...
