The speaker of Sylvia Plath’s poem “Daddy” is a woman who both passionately loves and fiercely hates her father. The love came from the speaker seeing her father as God when she was a child, and from an obsessive need on the speaker’s part to love and to be loved. The hate came from an intense, deep-rooted fear she felt towards her father, who completely dominated her life. Viewing her unresolved feelings for her father as the root of all her pain and suffering, the adult speaker of this poem is attempting to free herself from her father’s influence.

The speaker’s father dies when she is only ten years old. Most normal children are dominated by a parent but are able to break away from that domination as they grown older. The speaker states, “Daddy, I have had to kill you / You died before I had time” (6-7) because with her father’s death the speaker loses her chance to outgrow him and subsequently becomes trapped in her childhood, unable to “kill” her father’s domination over her. The poem has a noticeable nursery-rhyme quality to it, with the imagery in the first stanza absurdly reminiscent of the old Mother Goose tale, “There Was an Old Woman Who Lived in a Shoe.” The speaker is made to sound purposefully infantile and uses the informal word “Daddy” instead of the more formal “Father.” Those elements combine to show how the speaker’s conflict with her feelings over her father have kept her child-like, even as she grows older.

In the second stanza of the poem, the speaker describes her father as “a bag full of God” (8) and a “Ghastly statue” (9). Her father is the most important person in her life--her own “God”--and is like a statue who rules over her life and demands her complete devotion. The words used to describe her father shift between spiteful and awe-filled, showing the speaker’s confused feelings for him shifting between love and hate. Therefore, his death during her childhood left the speaker with no way to understand her conflicting feelings for him, or his inescapable hold over her. The confusion stemming from his death haunts her in her later years, causing her years of pain and anguish.

When the speaker is older, she begins to see her father in a completely new way: “not God but a swastika” (46). She compares the relationship between she and her father to that of a Jew and a Nazi during World War II; she is the victim and he is her tormentor. Her fear of her father becomes a Jew’s fear of a Nazi during the Holocaust. As the speaker feels more pain about her inability to be free of her father, her hatred for him increases, and the Nazi-Jew scenario becomes even more real to her. As the speaker explains it: "I thought every German was you.... / An engine, an engine / Chuffing me off like a Jew. / A Jew to Dachau, Auchwitz, Belsen. / I began to talk like a Jew. / I think I may well be a Jew" (29-35). The speaker becomes so overwhelmed by her suffering that she comes to equate herself with history’s greatest sufferers, the Jews of the Second World War.

Even through her identification with the Jews’ suffering, the speaker still shows her conflict of loving and hating her father. After several stanzas describing her treatment at the hands of her father using the Nazi-Jew metaphor, the speaker claims, “Every woman adores a Fascist / The boot in the face / The brute heart of a brute like you” (48-50) and shows that even though she feared her father she was still so desperate for his love that she was willing to take it in any form, even in the form of pain and cruelty.

Toward the end of the poem, the speaker tries to find a way to destroy her father’s hold on her. At first, she tries suicide as a way to join her father and end her suffering. She “thought even the bones would do” (60). The speaker needs her father so badly that she is willing to die to be with him. Her suicide attempt is a failure, but following it she devises a way to escape her dead father’s domination.  She tells her father how she frees herself from him: "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" (64-67). The speaker marries a man who resembles her father, and her relationship with this man is the same as the relationship she had with her father. Her husband is described as a “vampire” who “drank [her] blood for... seven years” (72-74). The word “vampire” is important as it not only refers to her husband but to her father as well. A vampire is one of the living dead, and even though her father is dead, his influence is still very much alive in her mind. The speaker allows herself to be dominated by a man who shares many of her father’s characteristics; in a sense, she has married her father. When the speaker leaves her husband after seven years, she is at the same time leaving her father behind, because she had recreated her father in the image of her husband. The speaker tells her dead father, “Daddy, you can lie back now / There’s a stake in your fat black heart” (75-76). Again, she compares her father to the living dead, a vampire who has haunted her even after his death.

When the speaker leaves her husband, she is also resolving her conflicting emotions over the dominating father she never had a chance to outgrow. The love and hate are “through,” as the poem indicates in the lines, “So daddy, I’m finally through” (68) and “Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m through” (80). All the pain and suffering the speaker has experienced from her obsessive love-hate relationship with her father has finally ended. Plath’s poem is a powerful and terrifying description of love and hate and the psychological paralysis that can ruin a person’s life.