Sylvia Plath: The Use of Dramatic Monologue as Confessional Poetry
Sylvia Plath presents an unusual paradox as a writer. On one hand, she is lauded by literary critics, particularly feminist critics, for her use of confessional poetry. Specifically, in poems such as "Daddy" and "Lady Lazarus" Plath is assumed to be 'confessing' certain aspects of her personal life. Like the speaker of "Daddy," she was the daughter of a German father; like the subject of "Lady Lazarus" she attempted suicide several times. On the other hand, both of these poems are still written in the genre of the dramatic monologue, in which a speaker articulates an idea through the assumed persona of another person obviously different from the poet.
In "Daddy," perhaps Plath's most famous poem, the speaker is the child of a former Nazi officer who is desperately trying to exorcise the ghost of her father.
An engine, an engine
Chuffing me off like a Jew.
A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen.
I began to talk like a Jew.
I think I may well be a Jew.
The speaker of the poem "Daddy" identifies not with her father, but with her father's murdered victims, suggesting that the oppression she felt at his hands as a young girl mirrors that of the oppression he wielded against the Jews of Europe. The political oppression of the German man parallels his oppression within the home of his family. "Rather than an elegy or an angry conversation of a girl with her deceased father, 'Daddy' can be seen as a manifestation of the different aspects of a woman's oppression by patriarchy" (Hassanpour & Hashim 123). In other words, this gives the poem an explicitly political dimension that it would lack if simply read as an expression of Plath's feelings about her own father who was of German extraction but not a Nazi. Plath explicitly invokes the Holocaust in every line, effectively ratcheting upon the intensity of the poem and making its subject matter larger than that of a familial relationship.
Plath almost playfully creates connections with her poetry and her own life, even while using a dramatic monologue to hold the speaker at a distance. "Dramatic monologue in poetry, also known as a persona poem, shares many characteristics with a theatrical...
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