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 Greenwood, describes her father’s death as a defining trauma. She confesses, “I thought how strange it had never occurred to me before that I was only purely happy until I was nine years old” (Plath 39). While she was able to experience him for some years, she feels his absence. Even though her father did not choose to leave her, he did die, and that emotional abandonment takes on a deeper role in “Daddy.” It becomes a kind of fury: “Daddy, I have had to kill you.”

    The shocking Nazi and Holocaust imagery in “Daddy” intensifies this. Plath writes, “I began to talk like a Jew. / I think I may well be a Jew.” She portrays herself as a victim and the father as a tyrant : “I have always been scared of you.” At first, I thought this was only about her father. But after some digging into her life and the events that took place in the 2 years before her death, it got me thinking. 

    Assia Wevill was born in Berlin to a Jewish family and fled Nazi Germany as a child before settling in Britain. I found this connection striking. In “Daddy,” Plath associates the male figure with Nazism, yet the woman who had entered her marriage was herself a refugee from the Nazis. Even though Wevill herself was Jewish and a refugee from the Nazis, it is possible that Plath still viewed her as a kind of oppressor in her own personal life. Instead of openly naming Hughes or Wevill, Plath turns this into an extreme metaphor.

    The name “Esther” deepens the conspiracy. Assia’s middle name was Esther. Plath’s protagonist in The Bell Jar, written in 1961 before she discovered the affair in summer 1962, is also named Esther. Chronologically, this appears coincidental. It is also possible that Plath had considered other names for her protagonist but ultimately chose “Esther” because it felt right for the character at the time. Even though the novel is semi-autobiographical, the name is not Sylvia. In the novel, Esther feels trapped: “I felt like a racehorse in a world without racetracks” (Plath 40), and most famously, she describes life under the bell jar as suffocating and distorted.

    What if Esther (Wevill) is not the trapped one, but the one who “controls” the jar? What if Plath is the glass itself; rigid, enclosing, unable to bend or escape while another Esther moves freely outside? Instead of naming her husband directly, especially since he was publicly known, Plath could be using the name “Esther” as an indirect reference. It’s a name hidden in plain sight that only a few would recognize.

    When Plath ends the poem with, “Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m through,” it feels less like silent grief and more like a final break. Because she never names the affair directly, the war imagery could act as camouflage for the feelings she associates with it.

    Maybe these connections are just coincidences, or maybe they show patterns that Plath did not even fully realize herself. The strict father, the Nazi imagery, the name Esther, and the idea of the bell jar all seem to echo each other in more than one way. Of course, I might be getting a little ahead of myself, but these are just my thoughts and interpretations. 

I would really love to hear what you think!