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foot forward: an analysis of Sylvia Plaths Daddy

In his memoirs, Hitch-22, the late Anglo-American writer Christopher Hitchens
devotes a chapter to Thinking thrice about the Jewish question. An
international socialist devoted to the works of Karl Marx, Leon Trotsky, Sigmund
Freud and Rosa Luxembourg, Hitchens was pleased to find that I was pleased
in 1988 when his brother Peter brought the news that their long-deceased
mother was Jewish. Though even in the 1930s Britain was hardly awash with
anti-Semitism, Mother Hitchens had decided to keep her heritage secret from
both her children and her husband. It was only when the brothers maternal
grandmother met Peters Jewish girlfriend that the news emerged. Reflecting on
an old piece he had written about his clandestine Semitic roots, Hitchens writes,
[I]t was largely positive and even upbeat if only because my semi-Semitism was
on my mothers side rather than, as with Sylvia Plath, a distraught paternal
bequest.
The smoke-wreathed old hack makes numerous references to Plath and her
Daddy in his exploration of his Jewish ancestry, but to say that her Semitism
was paternal may have been erroneous. In a reading of Daddy given shortly
before her suicide, Plath said of the poems narrator, Her case is complicated by
the fact that her father was a Nazi and her mother very possibly part Jewish.
Hang on a second. Her? a vigilant reader may ask. Isnt Daddy
autobiographical? Wed like to think so; the confessional aspect lends the
poem an anguished beauty. Like many aspects of Plaths life, though, things are
not quite so simple.
Certainly Plath does construct much of the poem on real experiences and events.
Take the dominant motif the foot. Plath begins the poem by saying that she
feels as if she has lived like a foot in the black shoe of her fathers shadow for
the past 30 years. She then enlarges the feeling of inferiority by describing her
dad as a Ghastly statue with one gray toe / Big as a Frisco seal. That gray toe
of her fathers was the result of diabetes, a disorder that Otto Plath himself
misdiagnosed as lung cancer. Only when his foot became infected did he consult
a doctor, by which time it was too late. In October 1940 his gangrenous leg was
amputated (I have had to kill you), and he died a few weeks later. Sylvia was
eight years old. Theres man all over for you, says Vladimir in Samuel Becketts
1953 play Waiting for Godot: Blaming on his boots the faults of his feet.
In the marauding black boot we find the brute heart of the matter:
overbearing yet insufficient paternal nurture. In Hitch-22 Hitchens writes that
for all his faults as a father (Confronted with infancy, I was exceptionally no
good I was really marking time until they were old enough to be able to hold a
conversation), he still knew enough to let his children grow up:
To be the father of growing daughters is to understand something of what
Yeats evokes with his imperishable phrase terrible beauty. Nothing can
make one so happily exhilarated or so frightened: its a solid lesson in the
limitations of self to realize that your heart is running around inside
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someone elses body. It also makes me quite astonishingly calm at the
thought of death: I know whom I would die to protect and I also
understand that nobody but a lugubrious serf can possibly wish for a
father who never goes away.
Plath has the worst of both worlds: her father was oppressive when he was alive
(she felt Barely daring to breathe or Achoo, the latter act perhaps angrily
discouraged by an entomologist father worried about his specimens), but then
died with such abruptness and bad timing that his daughter was left traumatised.
Daddy is an attempt to resurrect repressed memories and then expunge them.
The first stanza establishes the pattern of childlike repetition (You do not do,
you do not do) and infant reference (beginning with The Old Woman Who
Lived In a Shoe). The Plath household was quite a bit better than the shoe of the
childhood nursery rhyme; unlike the Old Womans offspring, Sylvia and her
brother Warren had more to eat than just broth without bread. The illusion
works in both verses the father is absent but it is merely the first of Plaths
many towers of self-pity.
To the infant Plath, Daddy was a near-immovable (Marble-heavy), ghastly
statue stretching across the United States, with that infected foot in San
Francisco (Frisco in local parlance) and his head in the freakish Atlantic off
the coast of New England, where the Plath children were raised. The reference to
beautiful Nauset, an area encompassing parts of modern-day Connecticut,
Rhode Island and Massachusetts and once inhabited by the Nauset or Cape Cod
Indians, evokes a lost paradise, something wild and savage and now extinct. (Just
to the southwest of Nauset is New York, the setting of F. Scott Fitzgeralds
novel The Great Gatsby, which ends with the narrator musing on the old island
that flowered once for Dutch sailors eyes--a fresh, green breast of the New
World.)
The Nauset people had their myths and monsters; and just as they were slowly
decimated by white Europeans, so Plaths Christian faith is killed by the death of
her father I used to pray to recover you. This profession of godlessness is
immediately followed by the first use of the German tongue Ach, du: Oh,
you.
Like Plath, Hitchens could trace his family history to an area of what was once
German Prussia and is now Poland, a town that was indeed, Scraped flat by the
roller / Of wars, wars, wars. The history of Poland in the first half of the
20th century is one of pogroms, appalling conflict, acrimonious and opportunistic
land grabs and shifting borders, in which the Polish people were not always
innocent victims: a fitting background for a woman who was often at war with
herself.
The land to the east of the Oder and Neisse (the rivers that today form the
German-Polish border) was the setting for the start of the Second World War. In
1918, following its defeat in the Great War, Germany had been forced to cede
much of this territory and its rich soil to the new Polish state, which had barely
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caught its breath before going to war with Lithuania and Bolshevik Russia over
lingering territorial disputes. Having seen off its neighbours, Poland would enjoy
less than two decades of independence before embittered Germans, led by Adolf
Hitler, began talking of the need for Lebensraum living space for them and
the superior German people. On the 1st of September, 1939, Nazi Germany, under
the false pretext of Polish aggression, launched the last and most terrible of those
wars, wars, wars.
Had he not emigrated from his native Germany to the United States in 1900 at
the age of 15, Otto Plath may well have become the Nazi his daughter Sylvia
imagines him to be. Otto was born in the German town of Grabow, 120 miles
northwest of Berlin. Grabow is a Slavic name, and is indeed common in Poland
there are perhaps not a dozen or two, but enough to confuse someone
researching family heritage without the benefit of Google maps. Thus, Daddy is
not only absent from the present, he is also illusive in the past; and Plath cleverly
weds this blurred genealogy to the idea that her fathers stern discipline was
innate: one cant help but insert down after foot in the line I never could tell
where you/ Put your foot, your root.
Why, though, does Plath refer to her Polish friend by the derogatory term
Polack? Read out of context the line appears absurd, but it is rendered ironic
six lines later by the overt hostility that Plath displays towards Polands great
western nemesis:
I never could talk to you.
The tongue stuck in my jaw.
It stuck in a barb wire snare.
Ich, ich, ich, ich,
I could hardly speak.
I thought every German was you.
And the language obscene
In The Bell Jar, her only novel, Plath writes, My mother spoke German during
her childhood in America and was stoned for it during the First World War by
the children at school each time I picked up a German dictionary or a German
book, the very sight of those dense, black, barbed-wire letters made my mind
shut like a clam. The Bell Jar, like Daddy, was only semi-autobiographical, but
the link is telling enough.
Plath, then, is torn: she wants to talk to her father, but hates his native tongue, as
much for its apparent aesthetic and audible inelegance as the fact that
throughout her childhood it was the language of the enemy. Having thus taken us
back to German Prussia, the self-pitying pinnacle of the poem is inevitable:
An engine, an engine
Chuffing me off like a Jew.
A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen.

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I began to talk like a Jew.
I think I may well be a Jew.
A touch melodramatic, yes, but at least not wholly fanciful; there was a sizable
Jewish community in German Grabow prior to the rise of the Nazis. One of the
Platts (Otto changed his name to Plath upon arrival in New York City, pre-
empting the British Royal family, who waited until the First World War before
changing their surname to hide their German heritage) may have suffered the
fate that Hitler warned of in Mein Kampf: The black-haired Jewish youth lies in
wait for hours on end, satanically glaring at and spying on the unsuspicious girl
whom he plans to seduce, adulterating her blood and removing her from the
bosom of her own people. Hitlers rambling autobiography isnt quite as Jew
heavy as one might expect, but Plaths repetition of the word does work well as
both a sly rhyme with you and an invocation of those endless Bavarian beer-
hall discussions of der Judenfrage the Jewish question.
Godwins law states that the longer a discussion goes on, the more likely
someone will resort to a comparison to Hitler or the Nazis. Plath made it to the
seventh stanza of her 16-stanza poem before unleashing the National Socialist
German Workers Party; and once the (ahem) train had left the station, she
couldnt stop. First we get, the snows of the Tyrol (a mountainous region that
straddled southern Austria and northern Italy); the clear beer of Vienna (the
capital of Austria, where Hitler lived for eight years from the age of 15 and
where, having been rejected by the citys renowned art university, his fascistic
and anti-Semitic worldview began to form), neither of which are pure or true
(unlike the bloodline of the German people); and an unspecified gipsy
ancestress (just in case the Nazis should doubt Plaths racial impurity).
Next comes the Luftwaffe (the German air force); her fathers neat mustache
(not a reference to Charlie Chaplin) and Aryan eye, bright blue (Daddy did
indeed have a mustache and blue eyes: poster features for Nazi race myths); and
the German armys staple tank, the panzer Panzer man.
The next stanza begins with the ambiguous line, Not God but a swastika / So
black no sky could squeak through. Is Plath cancelling out her earlier line, a bag
full of God? Or is she referring to Hitlers attempts to usurp the role of the
almighty? Theres no time to dwell on it, for the next line is the first and only
intimation of Sylvias mother, who, like every woman, adores a Fascist / The
boot in the face. Aurelia Plath, ne Schober, was a student of Ottos at Boston
University. The daughter of Austrian immigrants, she married Otto in Reno,
Nevada at the age of 25. Her new husband, with his ominous Gestapo footwear
and his Brute / brute heart, was 46.
The Nazi analogy is less about Ottos German heritage than about something
hypnotically powerful and colossal withering to dust. Like Otto Plath, the Third
Reich died a quick and emphatic death: Dachau, Auschwitz and Belsen were
liberated; the Luftwaffe and the panzers were destroyed; the myths of Aryan
superiority were debunked; the swastika was exposed as a cheap forgery;
central Europes great fascist corridor crumbled; and that man with the neat
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mustache and the Meinkampf look blew his brains out in a bunker in Berlin as
the Red Army closed in.
Hitler was the gangrenous, gray toe of Germany. His popularity may
have seemed immense, but the villagers never liked him; indeed, during the
war he escaped several assassination attempts by people in his own party. They
never got to drive a stake through his heart, or dance and stamp on his corpse
(though the latter ignominy did befall Benito Mussolini, the dictator of Fascist
Italy, very much the junior partner in the Axis alliance), but in May 1945, as they
surveyed their wrecked country, Germans knew that Hitler was to blame, just as
Plath knows that her tragic love life (to which we are coming) is the fault of her
father.
From the eleventh stanza onwards the message becomes more black and white
or rather, black and red, the colours of Nazi insignia:
You stand at the blackboard, daddy,
In the picture I have of you,
A cleft in your chin instead of your foot
But no less a devil for that, no not
Any less the black man who
Bit my pretty red heart in two.
In The Bell Jar the narrator, Esther Greenwood, writes, My German-speaking
father, dead since I was nine, came from some manic-depressive hamlet in the
black heart of Prussia. As well as being a German speaker from Prussia, Otto had
a cleft in his chin, an indentation that, Plath suggests, would have worked better
in his foot. Its not enough that her father had to have his foot amputated; he
needed to be cloven-hoofed as well.
If, then, daddy is a Nazi devil, why did Plath try to kill herself at age 20 in order to
get back, back, back to him? Does she, like her mother, adore a Fascist? It would
appear so. Having being glued back together by a combination of electro-shock
therapy, counselling and anti-depressants, Plath in 1956 married the poet and
author Ted Hughes, a man in black with a Meinkampf look. Again, the latter
comparison is not to be taken literally; Fascists tend not to make great childrens
writers, as Hughes was. Like Otto, Hughes was not a zealously right-wing
nationalist, but he was capable of brutish behaviour worthy of those black-
booted goose-steppers.
When Plath said I do, I do to Hughes, her Oedipal wanderings were complete.
She had found the man to torture her. Six years after their marriage, Plath, now a
mother of two and resident in London, discovered that her husband was a
vampire who had been drinking her blood for Seven years: Ted had been
having an affair with (ironically enough) a German woman who had escaped the
Nazis by fleeing to British-mandated Palestine (land that in 1948 would become
the state of Israel). The couple separated; and Plath moved with their two
children to a flat at 23 Fitzroy Road in the Primrose Hill area of London, where
the poem and her life terminate.
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Plaths final dwelling is notable for two reasons. First, it had no telephone. (The
black telephones off at the root, / The voices just cant worm through.) Second,
it had once been the home of the Irish poet William Butler Yeats, an omen that
Plath considered propitious. On the 11th of February, 1963, as she turned on the
flats gas oven and placed her head inside, Plath may have pictured her bastard
husband/father while contemplating the second stanza of Yeats poem Easter
1916:
That womans days were spent
In ignorant good-will,
Her nights in argument
Until her voice grew shrill.
What voice more sweet than hers
When, young and beautiful,
She rode to harriers?
This man had kept a school
And rode our winged horse;
This other his helper and friend
Was coming into his force;
He might have won fame in the end,
So sensitive his nature seemed,
So daring and sweet his thought.
This other man I had dreamed
A drunken, vainglorious lout.
He had done most bitter wrong
To some who are near my heart,
Yet I number him in the song
He, too, has been changed in his turn,
Transformed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.

Education Umbrella, 2014