My Conspiracy After Re-reading Daddy and The Bell Jar
When I first read Sylvia Plath’s poem “Daddy,” I was extremely shocked by its use of Nazi and Holocaust imagery to describe her relationship with her father, comparing him to a Nazi and herself to a Jewish victim. It took me some time to get over the shock and confusion of why she chose to write this way, since I had pictured Plath as a really demure, kind, and gentle lady. But as I thought about this, I decided to do a little research into her life and take a closer look at The Bell Jar and “Daddy” side by side. From The Bell Jar and the discovery of Ted Hughes’s affair with Assia Wevill, to “Daddy,” I began to see it as a layered act of revenge, or at least some kind of silent confrontation, or silent acknowledgment. It made me wonder : What if “Daddy” is not only about her father, but about the three figures who wounded her most- her father, her husband, and the woman with whom he betrayed her? In The Bell Jar , Plath’s protagonist, Esther Gr...