Sylvia Plath's 'Daddy': Identities, Selves and Others: HOW LOVE KILLS US ALL

The Poem 'Daddy' (her most confessional poem) was written by Sylvia Plath just four months before she committed suicide in her London home in February 1963. She was just 30 years old. It explores Identities, Selves and Others and how they create and destroy one another. In a 1962 BBC interview she describes it as one girl’s confrontation with the unresolved Electra complex manifested in the wake of her fathers untimely death.

The term ‘Electra Complex' is taken from Greek Mythology, where the princess Electra plots the killing of her own mother, the Queen Clytemnestra, who is responsible for the murder of her father, Agamemnon after his return from the Trojan War.

In his 'Theory of Psychoanalysis' Carl Jung proposes the theory of The Electra complex to elucidate the state of affairs when young girls compete for the ownership and affections of their fathers in competition with their mothers - and when this natural development is somehow thwarted.

In a young girls psychosexual development, according to this theory, there are several natural stages that she must experience to attain 'Individuation'. When this natural development (with the father figure central to it) is dashed, the Electra complex manifests with all its trappings of neuroses - emotional and psychological maladjustments and traumas.

In modern verbiage, we refer to this as ‘Daddy Issues’, but that is to make light of a potentially, deeply traumatic reality which is liable to effect her very sense of self.

This early death of her father was probably Sylvia's greatest trauma and haunted her throughout her life.

The poem 'Daddy' was both the Climax and the Denouement to this pain of unbearable proportions.

The controversial-ised figure of Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath's husband has been largely left out of this essay since, in terms of her inner-workings and for the purposes of this essay, Hughes is taken to be a Psychological extension of her Father, Otto Plath.

The line: 'the Vampire who said he was you' (in reference to Ted Hughes) was probably suggested to Sylvia Plath by her Entomologist Father, Otto Plath's study and work on parasitic Muscid Larvae of the San Francisco Bay region which suck the blood of nesting birds.


RECOMMENDED READING:

Ariel by Sylvia Plath: (includes the Poem 'Daddy'): Faber Modern Classics (Faber Poetry): https://amzn.to/33BxrRI

The Colossus By Sylvia Plath: (Faber Poetry): https://amzn.to/3iICfJn

The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath: (her only novel): (Faber & Faber): https://amzn.to/36D8sPS

The Journals of Sylvia Plath: https://amzn.to/36DxH4y

A Collection of the Letters of Sylvia Plath Volume I: 1940–1956: https://amzn.to/33zv1mn

A Collection of the Letters of Sylvia Plath Volume II: 1956 – 1963: https://amzn.to/3jBfLLs

Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath: https://amzn.to/36AvmHx

The Theory of Psychoanalysis (for an introduction to the Electra complex), by Carl Gustav Jung: https://amzn.to/2Ssemei

The Freud Reader by Sigmund Freud (for an Introduction to the Oedipus complex - the forerunner to the Electra complex): (Vintage Classics): https://amzn.to/3d1kZxs


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