Literature Foundation 2009
Week 11
for next week: historicism
Sylvia Plath's famous poem Daddy is about a state of mind, and early childhood relationships, and is therefore amenable to Freudian analysis (and it consciously calls on Freudian themes). But it is also full of imagery from the then recent events of the Second World War. Its other focus is on Plath's disastrous relationship with her husband Ted Hughes, who had recently left her for another woman. It is thus about the intersection of the personal and the pollitical.
Please search and annotate for yourselves the references to the Nazi phenomenon in Daddy, and also background in her marriage.
We will look at this poem in the light of internal and external history. Remember that the actual history that this poem contains is not that of the holocaust; it is that of a non-Jewish American woman living in intellectual/bohemian circles in England in the early 60's. And her attitude to the holocaust.
