My Two Dads: Sylvia Plath and the Electra Complex

Sylvia Plath composed her most famous-and infamous-poem "Daddy" at a time in her life when she must certainly have been contemplating suicide, or at the very least was in the grip of a devastating depression. At this point Plath, abandoned by husband Ted Hughes, was living alone with her two children in an apartment formerly occupied by William Butler Yeats. England was experiencing its most bitterly cold winter since the Year Without a Summer and Sylvia Plath was moving incessantly toward tidying up the profound emotions that served as the driving before behind her greatest artistic expression. The ultimate expression of those conflicting emotions are expressed in "Daddy" in an outburst of vitriol and pained condemnation of male abandonment. Although the poem seems most obvious on its literal level to be directed toward Plath's own father, a close examination reveals that much of the venom is directed not toward her own daddy, but to the daddy of her children, her husband Ted Hughes, whom Plath confused as a reincarnated version of her father in vampire form.