Allusions In Sylvia Plath's Daddy

Have you ever felt loss so deep that everything you see is different just because that person is gone? In Mother by Ted Kooser the speaker’s mother’s death made his world view more sorrowful. Through this view of the world Kooser uses symbolism, personification, and imagery to show the speaker’s feelings about his mother dying.

Unlike “From Childhood,” set within the home of the mother and son, this mother-son-duo is at a party. This mother is persistent in taking her son away from his surroundings and reeling him in to her—keeping an eye on him is simply not enough. Nowlan writes, “The touch of her hand embarrasses him” (Nowlan, 390). Taking the term overbearing to new extremes, the mother is not content unless her hands are physically on her son. While it is completely normal for a mother to have protective instincts and to watch over their children, the level of overbearing the mother in the poem reaches is radical.

The novel Beloved by Toni Morrison fundamentally relies on the relationship between the former slave Sethe and the daughter she murdered as an infant, only known to the reader as Beloved. In one scene, Beloved is attempting to make Sethe feel guilty as Sethe argues that her attempted murder of her children was out of love, and that she intended for them to be “together on the other side.” Beloved’s response, in which she points out that, after she “died,” “ghosts without skin stuck their fingers in her and said beloved in the dark and bitch in the light,” shatters the intensely loving, devoted tone that Sethe attempts to establish in favor of a more dramatic, graphic tone and creates intense juxtaposition, a device which is continually used throughout the text. (254) The phrase “ghosts without skin,” overall, exemplifies Beloved’s immature perspective.

Sylvia Plath’s “Daddy” and Theodore Roethke’s “My Papa’s Waltz” are similar because they focus on the same subject. However, they differ in how the speakers’ feel about their relationship with their parent(s). In Plath’s “Daddy”, the speaker is a daughter thinking about how her father treated her. She tells about how she felt trapped by him and how she tried to ‘kill’ him, line 6 of the poem, but he dies before she has a chance. The ending of Plath’s poem implies that she got married to a man like her father.

There are also images of their parents being killed by lions that keep appearing in the nursery because of thoughts how furious they are at their parents for not letting them do what they want. The author in this story uses foreshadowing, hyperboles, and a metaphor to show the negative effects of parents spoiling their children. The author uses foreshadowing to show the negative effects of parents spoiling their children by using repetition of the word “death” and things related to it. For example, one part of the text states, “Death thoughts.

We can identify a characteristic of gender roles through the eyes of the persona. The nurturing nature of the mother can be seen when she ‘dried [the child’s] tearful face’. Contrasting to the father who ‘whistling, [comes] home from work’, through the alliteration portrayed through the father as the bread winner of the family and thereby the guardian of the household. By drawing attention to these gender roles in the context of childhood memory, the persona is subliminally implying the permanent repeated display of gender roles throughout generations and how it has not changed. However, this observation is downplayed by refocusing on the childhood memories as the combinations of events ‘milk and story-books / the gathered flowers / my mother’s golden brown hair’, psychoanalytically reveals the significance of childhood memories in their ability to evoke nostalgic and pleasing emotions to distract the audiences thoughts on gender roles.

Meanwhile the children were naive, everything that their father would say and do they believed. The narrator and his brothers’ were filled with preconceived thoughts of their father and their family’s relationship dynamics. Their father’s abusive actions were not only towards their mother, but also directed towards them. As a child, this could have clogged up their definition of

More specifically, the protagonist recalls herself as a young girl being held “by the hand” by a “woman with Kool”, who purchases for her a “Mason Mint” subsequently takes her to a cabin but abandons her, being “nowhere to be seen” at the moment of the young girl’s experience with the harrowing symptoms of presumed oral sex, therefore allowing for the assumption of her mother (the “woman with Kool”) being the person prompting her to partake in unpleasant sexual encounters at a tender age. Furthermore, the metaphor that she feels devoid of “arms or legs” lying in the cabin, in concert with the reference mentioned previously of her feeling like a girl in a sideshow (essentially like a puppet), fortifies this idea of her having no agency over herself, of being controlled and exploited by her

"My mom and I got in a fight and she told me she was going to kill me," she recalls. "And I wrapped a belt around my neck and told her I would do it for her. I ended up in a psychiatric hospital and from there I went to foster care." The author appeals to emotion by trying to get as personal as possible as she could to

It is parallel to the absence of parents in one’s youth, especially in a world where loss of innocence runs rampant. As a result, the monster ultimately curses his maker for enduring misery without a guiding

The daughters statement was clearly just her opinion on her mother passing not with any back up evidence which would of gave the mother a more solid thought on just her passing. So the speaker doesn’t seem so enthusiastic about the way her family judges her value, her worth, or her performance. The mother seems in distress which is also just like a student being graded in school and they don’t meet the standards that are set for them by others. The irony here is that rather than parents mark their children, it is the children and father who is marking her, which is the commonly thought to be the most important figure in the household and family.

This made her poetry written during this time more positive and her new and improved poetic skills were easily attained (Kroll 1). However, according to the authors of Plath, Sylvia 1932 – 1963 include in their biography of her that “some of Plath’s poems hint at darker forces in her marriage; her Newnham tutor later commented on ‘the passionate rage which has since come to be recognized as the dominating emotion of her poetry’ (Wagner 84)” (Brown and Taylor 1). Things took a sudden turn one day when she finds out he had been having an affair and abandons her. This sent her into another pit of depression, however this time she does not survive.

The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath is a semi-autobiographical novel in which Plath relays her own experiences through protagonist Esther Greenwood by highlighting the struggles she faced in navigating societal expectations, depression, and her own desires. Having spent time in college and later in multiple mental health institutions, Plath tells her story through Esther in a way that blends fiction and reality. Through Esther, we see Plath’s own interpretations of her triumphs, failures, values, and the slow but seemingly inevitable diminishment of her mental health.

The book A Child Called ‘it’ is a thrilling story of a man named Dave, who is the author himself. Dave Pelzer is an American writer who mainly writes his autobiographies which focuses on his journey towards hardships and safe heavens. In 1995 he released the book “A Child Called ‘It’” which covers the gruesome memories of his childhood and his abusive mother and brothers; this has shocked the world due to his torturous childhood that filled the world with hate, love and hope. I received the book as a birthday present given to me by my best friend who I shared my secrets and my dark past. Upon reading his novel, I was filled with utterly disbelief onto how someone could hurt such a young child so atrociously and so heartless without feeling any guilt, especially when his own mother was the one doing so.

Even when she realized the reality of her father, she still tries to go back to him. In lines 58-61 “At twenty I tried to die…………… /And they stuck me together with glue” Plath uses imagery to show that even as bad as Hitler, she will always look up to her