Examine Plaths Presentation Of Parentchild Relationships Essay

Examine Plath.s Presentation Of Parent-child Relationships Essay, Research Paper

Plath deals

with the themes she chooses to write about, such as death, suicide and

depression, in a very interesting fashion. However, out of all her themes, the

one that is the most interesting is her presentation of relationships between

parents and children. The way in which she deals with this theme is very

different to her other poetry. She breaks many of the rules that were laid down

by poets before her, such as the romantics. These series of poets stressed the idea

of family and the importance of parents to children and vice versa. As a

result, the vast majority of poets that wrote about these relationships

thereafter presented them in a very idealistic manner, implying family harmony

and lack of conflict. Therefore, when Plath started to write about family

relationships in a decidedly unromantic and disturbing style, some were

shocked. Instead of her poems being about the healthiness of relationships

between parents and children, they are about the darker, less talked about

side. It is mainly due to this difference between her and some previous

presentations of parent-child relationships that makes her poetry tackling the

subject interesting.. As with most of

Plath.s other material, her method of dealing with this theme is by no means

straightforward. This is shown in the fact that there are two types of

parent-child relationships presented in her poetry. The first relationship is

written with the speaker as a progeny.

discussing her own parents, and the second explores the relationship

between the speaker and her own children. Generally this speaker is Plath

discussing her own relationships. We know this due to the amount of

autobiographical material we have of Plath.s life present in such texts as her

novel, .The Bell Jar., the many interviews she did and the letters that have

been published since her death. The way in which she presents these two

different kinds of relationships contrast widely in tone, imagery and

language.. When Plath is writing about

her own parents and her relationship with them the tone of the writing is very

dark, depressing and full of anger. Possibly the most interesting poem tackling

this matter is .Daddy. which she wrote in 1962. In this poem Plath lays bare

the tortured relationship between her and her father. She talks of having to

live in a .black shoe. for thirty years, cowering, .poor and white/Barely

daring to breathe or Achoo.. By describing herself as .poor and white., she

creates a stark contrast to the .black shoe.. It is as if she has been stifled,

starved of nutrition and sunlight by her all enveloping father. She is .poor.,

not in the sense of material value, but spiritually. She has had all feeling

and emotion sapped from her by the presence of her father. .The strange childhood imagery in the echo of the well-known

nursery rhyme (.The Old Woman Who Lived in a Shoe.) is carried on throughout

the rest of the poem. For example the repetitions (.You do not do, you do not

do.) and the rigid assonances (.Barely daring.) sound like another nursery

rhyme, albeit a rather twisted one. This kind of imagery suggests that she is

in some way rooted in her childhood past. We then learn that this is due to the

overbearing influence her .Daddy. had, and still has, on her. He is described

as huge, .marble heavy., even his toe is as .Big as a Frisco seal.. This

imagery would suggest that her father represented to her a big and rather

threatening presence. This is backed up by Plath.s comparison of her father to

a Nazi oppressor, .With your Luftwaffe.., .And your Aryan eye, bright

blue./Panzer man, panzer man, O you. This is interesting as we

know that her father, although Austrian was not actually a Nazi, so even a

tenuous racial link is enough to cast him as a Nazi murderer in her eyes. To

her, he is obviously so close to a Nazi in his actions, that she sees him as

one. She then casts herself as the oppressed Jew being .chuffed off.to Dachau,

Auschwitz, Belsen. Her usage of .chuffed. obviously refers to the Nazi.s

transport of the Jews to the death camps by train, but it also harks back to

the childhood imagery, in that it is a very childish word with associations

childhood games. Despite all this anger,

Plath still voices a wish to rejoin him. She was .ten when they buried (him).,

and mentions that .at twenty (she) tried to die/ To get back, back, back to

(him).. This shows that although her father was an overbearing, dominant,

almost stifling presence in her life, he was also a very important one. Even in

death he retains his power over her life and the only way in which she can

escape him is to die and join him. The poem ends with threats of another

suicide attempt. She cuts herself off so she can be left alone to die. The last

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