2. Having read several of the cultural contexts for Plath in your text, explain how one best informs your reading and understanding of "Daddy".
After reading the cultural contexts for Plath in the text and some other information in Wikipedia I came away with a different understanding of Plath's poem "Daddy". As I understand it Sylvia Plath thought her father died too early in her life, she was only eight (8) years old. Her father was 21 years senior to her mother so that makes Otto 55 when he died, of course it was from complications of diabetes after his foot was amputated. At first in the poem I thought she was very angry at him because he was a nazi and a 'panzer tank man' talking about the death camps during WWII, but then I read he died in 1940 way before we had any idea's about those death camps, yet Plath brings it up in her poem.
"Chuffling me off like a Jew.
A Jew to Dachau, Aschwitz, Belsen.
I began to talk like a Jew.
I think I may be a Jew."
In the interview with Sylvia Plath she talks about becoming more interested with history and war. She does refer to WWI in the interview and maybe that is where the references are coming from about her father, I don't think he was in WWII I think he would have been too old. I think she combined WWI & WWII. She was born in 1932 and her father died in 1940 so he most likely told her stories of Germany and the First Great War, America was not in the war at that time but it was in Europe. I wonder what her father told her of the fatherland and Germany? Was she really trying to reach her "Daddy" I think we can only speculate and thorize about that.
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ReplyDeleteI don't think her father had anything to do with World War 2. I get the impression from Plath's poem that she is feeling repressed by her father and later her husband and is using the historical idea of the Nazis oppressing the Jews to show society oppressing her. I assume her father wasn't in the German military because she refers to him as both luftwaffe and panzer man. The luftwaffe was the German air-force and a Panzer man would be a tank commander. The poem fascinates me that it seams to be a crossover between her reality and the fiction that only existed in Plath's mind.
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