Themes of Daddy

DADDY

 THEME OF GENDER

"Daddy" is not only an exploration of the speaker's relationship with her father and husband, but of women's relationships with men in general. It was written in the 1960s, a time when feminists fought for women's rights and made big progress in the way that gender was viewed in society. Though this poem does not address feminism blatantly, it is a powerful statement from a female against males. It's not limited to addressing one male, but any male who has suppressed, betrayed, or, perhaps worst of all, died and left behind their daughters and wives.

With my gipsy ancestress and my weird luck
And my Taroc pack and my Taroc pack
I may be a bit of a Jew. (lines 37-40)

These lines align gypsies with Jews – groups that were both persecuted during the Holocaust. In this poem, gypsies and Jewish people are aligned with the female speaker, and German Nazis are aligned with her father and husband. Thus, women are portrayed as victims and men are portrayed as persecutors.

I made a model of you,
A man in black with a Meinkampf look

And a love of the rack and the screw.
And I said I do, I do. (lines 64-67)

These lines set up the woman in the poem as suffering from the Electra complex, which theorizes that women seek men like their fathers. The speaker here is fulfilling the Electra complex by taking women's so-called adoration of fascists a little further by  marrying one who is just like her father.

DADDY THEME OF MORTALITY

The speaker of "Daddy" is obsessed with mortality – her father's mortality, and her own. When the speaker's father dies, she sees killing herself as a way to become reunited with him. She also declares that she has to kill him. This poem explores the paradoxes of death, the afterlife, and memories of the past. After all, "Daddy" is addressed to a dead person.

Daddy, I have had to kill you.
You died before I had time – (lines 6-7)

Here we get our first paradoxical look at mortality. It's not possible to kill someone who's already dead, but you can count on our speaker to try. These lines reveal the core of this poem – the speaker's father died, and she still hasn't coped with it.

But they pulled me out of the sack,
And they stuck me together with glue. (lines 61-62)

Rather than showing us more of this speaker's obsession with death, these lines demonstrate the resilience of life. Unfortunately for our speaker, it's not a happy life that she's restored to. She feels like she's been pulled out of a sack and stuck together haphazardly.

DADDY THEME OF THE SUPERNATURAL

As we noted under the mortality theme, "Daddy" is addressed to someone who is dead, which already makes the poem pretty supernatural. But it goes even further: there are vampires, devils, and a statue that crosses the entire United States. The speaker, when she tries to die, is even stuck back together with glue. The supernatural elements of this poem make it eerie, and fascinating to read.

Marble-heavy, a bag full of God,
Ghastly statue with one gray toe
Big as a Frisco seal

And a head in the freakish Atlantic (lines 8-11)

These lines start us off with something pretty supernatural: a bag of God/statue that stretches across the entire United States. This image is pretty creepy. Just try to imagine a huge, Godly, ghastly statue stretched across the country. These lines set the tone of the entire poem – it's not bound by the limits of reality.

DADDY THEME OF LANGUAGE AND COMMUNICATION

The speaker of "Daddy" is addressing her dead father, who she had problems talking to even when he was alive. Maybe this is because he was a German immigrant and couldn't speak English well, or maybe it was because she was scared of him, but in any case, the German language plays into her difficulties. At the end of the poem, the speaker cuts off communications with her father for good. The speaker's struggle to communicate with her father causes her great suffering, demonstrating the power of language.

Daddy, I have had to kill you. (line 6)

This line is the first direct address (or apostrophe) that lets us know that this entire poem is written to the speaker's father. Throughout the poem, the speaker returns to this "you," saying "Daddy," just to remind us that, hey, we're talking to somebody here! This entire poem is a communication to the speaker's father, who, as the poem later tells us, was not easy to talk to even when he was alive.

I used to pray to recover you. (line 14)

Prayer is, after all, a way to communicate with God, or with those whom we've lost. Here, the speaker has just started to experiment with ways to communicate with her dead father. We see her struggling with this through the whole poem.

Ach, du.

In the German tongue, in the Polish town
Scraped flat by the roller
Of wars, wars, wars. (lines 15-18)

Now the speaker is giving us a whole new language to work with – German, that she probably picked up from her German father. Throughout the poem, the father is shown as a German – a Nazi, to be specific. So it's appropriate that the speaker gets caught up in the German language. Just like the Polish town gets destroyed by wars, the speaker is destroyed by the German language.

DADDY THEME OF FREEDOM AND CONFINEMENT

Throughout "Daddy," the speaker is trapped by memories of her father. In the first stanza, she says that she feels she's been living like a foot in a shoe, a metaphor for the confinement that she's been placed in by her father and his memory. Even when she tries to marry, she's trapped into marrying someone like her father.

You do not do, you do not do
Any more, black shoe
In which I have lived like a foot
For thirty years, poor and white,
Barely daring to breathe or Achoo. (lines 1-5)

In the very start of the poem, we get an image of how our narrator is trapped – she's calling her father a shoe that she's been stuck inside of. Even more, by starting off with a nursery rhyme, she appeals to 1960s images of her gender, which focused on the role of women as mothers and housewives.