Deconstructing Sylvia Plath's "Daddy"

Daddy by: Sylvia Plath

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. Daddy, I have had to kill you. You died before I had time-- 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 Where it pours bean green over blue In the waters off beautiful Nauset. I used to pray to recover you. Ach, du. In the German tongue, in the Polish town Scraped flat by the roller Of wars, wars, wars. But the name of the town is common. My Polack friend Says there are a dozen or two. So I never could tell where you Put your foot, your root, I never could talk to you. The tongue stuck in my jaw. It stuck in a barb wire snare. Ich, ich, ich, ich, I could hardly speak. I thought every German was you. And the language obscene 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 snows of the Tyrol, the clear beer of Vienna Are not very pure or true. With my gipsy ancestress and my weird luck And my Taroc pack and my Taroc pack I may be a bit of a Jew. I have always been scared of you, With your Luftwaffe, your gobbledygoo. And your neat mustache And your Aryan eye, bright blue. Panzer-man, panzer-man, O You-- Not God but a swastika So black no sky could squeak through. Every woman adores a Fascist, The boot in the face, the brute Brute heart of a brute like you. You stand at the blackboard, daddy, In the picture I have of you, A cleft in your chin instead of your foot But no less a devil for that, no not Any less the black man who Bit my pretty red heart in two. I was ten when they buried you. At twenty I tried to die And get back, back, back to you. I thought even the bones would do. But they pulled me out of the sack, And they stuck me together with glue. And then I knew what to do. 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. So daddy, I'm finally through. The black telephone's off at the root, The voices just can't worm through. If I've killed one man, I've killed two-- The vampire who said he was you And drank my blood for a year, Seven years, if you want to know. Daddy, you can lie back now. There's a stake in your fat black heart And the villagers never liked you. They are dancing and stamping on you. They always knew it was you. Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I'm through.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

From the beginning of this piece you know from the title that the poem has something to do with Plath's father figure, but from the outset it's impossible to tell what that connection is. In the first Stanza references a Black shoe and her being a foot inside that shoe. The weird part is where she talks about not being able to breath within the shoe, melding the comparison between the foot and herself, because obviously feet don't breathe but people don't go in shoes...which one is it Plath?
The first part of the second stanza has violent undertones, claiming Plath wanted to kill her father in some way, but the second part of the Stanza has nothing to do with that, coming back to the foot analogy, she's claiming her father died before she had the chance to kill him, but these lines about a giant statue make it seem as though she's claiming he's immortal, a stone-like presence.
In the next few stanzas we move out of the metaphorical a little bit, because it seems like Plath is literally talking about a trip to Germany and Poland, maybe her father was actually a Nazi or that's just how she felt about him but that's obviously the point she's trying to get across here.
Later she claims that every woman adores a fascist, but that doesn't make sense when it seems that she's been constantly claiming to this point that she hates the man and she wishes she had killed him. She claims that she tried to get back to him, so there's obviously some contradiction here between her hate for her father and her love for him, and she even goes so far as to contradict and rewrite some of the same things she was saying about him being like a Nazi to her, saying that the cleft wasn't actually in his boots, just in his chin.
She goes on once again to compare him to something immortal, a vampire, so that even though she claims for most of the poem that she's dismissing him even at the very end there's the claim that he will always be there.

Appleman Chapter 7

I really enjoyed this chapter about Martha, mainly because instead of taking one subject for many pages and using many quotes from students, we got to hear about a number of important subjects directly from a teacher who's been through it. It's really encouraging to hear about how things can change in the classroom, and I'm particularly struck by the quote at the end of the chapter:

"As Freire (1971) has suggested, [teachers] are "knowing subjects," constantly learning from the process of teaching. Here we take the more radical position that learning from teaching ought to be regarded as the primary task of teacher education across the professional life span. By "learning from teaching" we mean that inquiry ought to be regarded as an integral part of the activity of teaching and as a critical basis for decisions about practice."

I know for a fact that when I start my student teaching that I'm going to be lousy at it, I'll be struggling to move beyond simply doing the kinds of presentations that I've been doing for my classmates for the past 15 years or so, and I know it's going to be a rough trip. But there's proof out there that things improve, that as we teach we learn, and I think that's one of the most important things. I know I've mentioned this before, but I was also really worried about what kind of actual material I would be teaching in my classroom because I've had trouble actually coming up with things to say in my unit plans in the past, and I think this book has helped me with that more than anything else. Not only does it give you things to say, it gives you ways to say it, and I think I feel much more comfortable now about teaching literature in the classroom.

It's an unfortunate thing, but I am skeptical that the majority of teachers actually follow the same path of self-discovery that Martha and Appleman did, I'm sure that there are a great number out there that are still teaching the same things they taught their first year. It's an important point to make because one of the main things that I got from reading about Martha is that she must have been ridiculously busy, she had to work hard for this, and we'll have to work hard too. Change and improvement don't come easy, but I think it's worth it.

Appleman Chapter 6

Deconstructionism! Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh....

That's basically the main thing this chapter presents to us. First of all, I'm almost positive now that these conversations with students aren't real at all, I mean, they seemed so contrived before but some of the ones in this chapter were just ridiculous. My other problem with the chapter is that Appleman basically uses the quotes from other people to try to cobble together a definition of deconstructionism, and even the "clear and lucid definition" is seriously lacking. Basically the best way to get an idea of what deconstructionism "is" is from the name itself. I realize that one of the main aspects of this theory is that it's a little vague, but it was really aggravating reading an entire chapter about a vague theory, and the reactions the students had to it and the warnings made about it didn't really make any sense. Claiming that deconstructionism takes apart everything it means to be a person and destroys the other theories is really darn melodramatic.

English Teacher Censorship Snafu

Just though this would be an interesting read for people considering our recent talks about censorship in the classroom and whatnot. It looks like this teacher let a seriously disturbing book slip by him and now he's in some hot water for it. I guess it's just one more reminder that we should always be reading everything we assign.


Here's the article


Here's an excerpt from the book "Child of God"

Webb Chapter 3

I've had a good amount of experience with Feminist text, and I have some well read Math major roommates (who I consider to be some of the smartest folks on this campus) who I can talk about these texts with as well, and the conclusion I came to is that a LOT of guys just plain hate Feminist literature. I'm not saying that the stances we take on it are decidedly chauvinistic, it's just that so many of us have a problem connecting with the literature on any level and I'm still not really sure how to solve that in the classroom.

Because it has to be solved right? We need to find some way to bridge the gap between the two worlds. Even in our classroom I noticed that almost without exception it was the girls clamoring for books such as "The Bell Jar" and "Tsotsi", while most of the men were interested in reading Catch-22 and Vonnegut. I think we should have a discussion in class based around the different books people have read, and whether they've read anything and really enjoyed it that they would consider a book "meant for the opposite sex". It would be useful to hear what kinds of things get people into novels that they would normally have a hard time connecting with because of gender differences. I might sound here like I'm drawing some unstoppable, infallible line between the tastes of the two sexes, and I'm not. I know that there is plenty of give and take and plenty of books that people just plain read, but from everything I've seen the solidarity of the differences in literary tastes between the two sexes is surprisingly strong.

Anyway, if anyone has something they want to say about it here, or in class, that would be great. What I want is insight from some of the girls who love books like Jane Eyre or Pride and Prejudice on how they feel about books like Fahrenheit 451 or Vonnegut or Catch-22 etc.

Appleman Chapter 5

I'm starting to realize that these books, almost in their entirety, aren't really all that useful for teaching low level English classes(6-9th grade) and actually, I'm ok with that. We take so much time in our teaching courses learning about the basics and how to get students interested that it's really helpful to learn about how we should be teaching some of the more advanced classes. The reason I say this is that practically all the classroom environments that Webb and Appleman are talking about for their Theory teaching are 12th grade or AP or even College classes. I read A Room of One's Own for my 11th grade AP English class and for me that book was just brutal, it took everything I had to actually finish the damn thing, although it probably didn't help that it was summer reading. I find that some of Appleman's classroom examples seem a little bit contrived, the way his students respond so perfectly, but once again I find that I'm really drawn to this concept of teaching different literary theories. Feminist theory is important because there have been so many portrayals of women in literature over the years by both men and women and the comparison is amazing. I think a good focus would actually be to read two relatively similar works by a Male author and a Female author and compare both through a feminist lens.

Also, you could probably combine the whole unit of Feminist examination with a unit on Victorian Literature, heh.

Appleman Chapter 4

Thinking about this chapter is conflicted for me, because some of what Appleman was saying here is brilliant and some of it is terrible. I don't think Hamlet is a great choice for teaching the subject, but there are so many books out there that are. I know from growing up in Grosse Pointe, or as I like to call it "The place where all the white people ran", that there's a lot of guilt and anxiety when it comes to talking about status compared to other people, especially in schools like this, and I definitely think it needs to be talked about.
Some of the books that I think would be great for teaching this are the Distopic books, because the Marxist comments in some of these books are so striking that it's practically impossible to ignore. It might be interesting as well to look at some Russian literature, even pre-Communism, for class struggles(Some of the work by Gogol or Dostoyevsky would be particularly interesting). But I think a smart teacher can take some of this and work really well with it. Some of you would not believe the insane majority of people at a school like GPN who think anybody, no matter who you are, can just as easily make something of themselves as any other person, and those who don't are simply lazy/failures. I guess what I'm saying is I think the Marxist view is important, just make sure you have the right works for it.

Webb Chapter 6

I really enjoyed this chapter, and I think that's mainly because I'm desperate to find different things to incorporate into the teaching of Huckleberry Finn because, let's face it, we're all going to be teaching it at some point. When I read and learned about this book in American Lit, I hated it, and this was mainly because the teacher I had didn't really have any specific way of teaching the book and he didn't even really make logical literary conclusions based on the content of the book as far as I could tell.

He was more interesting in vague symbolism, like Tom and Jim and Huck being three people, LIKE A RELIGIOUS SIGN!!!!!1111, and that frankly just drove me nuts. I like the fact that you can take all of the symbolism and literary theory, mix in into your lessons when you're teaching Huck Finn, and still use the topic of Racism in literature to drive the class. I think it makes the whole experience more interesting and it has the students learning a lot of things they didn't know before. I didn't know anything about Twain and the Blackface acts he enjoyed until reading about it from Webb. It's encouraging to know that there's a handy dandy book printed with all the criticism of HF inside of it, and I definitely plan to get my hands on it.

Definitely the most enticing thing about Cultural Studies approaches is that you can keep doing what you've always been doing with teaching a work, but you can incorporate more to make sure you're reaching the maximum number of students. It's an interesting concept and I see it played out here more practically than in some of Webb's earlier chapters.

Webb Chapter 2

In Webb's second chapter he continues his explanation of cultural studies based learning with a chapter on Homelessness. Now, after our discussion on Monday, I'm very cognizant of the fact that once again Webb is talking about lessons that worked for him in a college setting, but I think that the lessons and the literature he teaches using homelessness are easily adaptable to a high school setting.

The greatest thing about teaching about homelessness, I think, is the great potential it has for promoting activism in the surrounding community, because once the students realize just how many people out there are in fact homeless more of them will likely be drive to help. It was interesting to see how Webb used texts that I normally hate(ugh Dickens) to drive classroom discussion, and I think it's a better use of some specific literary works.

It makes sense to me that an entire British lit course could be taught in this manner because of how big of an issue homelessness and the poor in general were in Britain and Ireland, and a unit could be easily comprised of works by Swift and Dickens and Orwell.

It's good that he mentions that he still puts a lot of focus on some of the literary themes and motifs behind these works because I think even with a unifying theme I wouldn't be able to handle not covering the basics.

Homelessness

Webb didn't mention it but this is one of my favorite pieces on Homelessness:

On Dumpster Diving
(It's a PDF)

Read it, it's fantastic, and for some reason it's stuck with me for about ten years or so since I first read it.

MCTE Conference.

The MCTE Conference was great, and I think it was as beneficial if not more so than when I went the first time, and when I was there I was already looking into what I needed to do to become a member when I become a real teacher.

First off, the Keynote speaker gave a great talk about technology in the classroom, and it was really interesting to hear her talk because I really got the impression that the people she was mainly walking to were people much older than me. The thing is, I've been around computers and other technology my whole life, I'm part of the new generation she was talking about, and most of the computer resources she was referencing were things I've already heard about or used myself. It was still incredibly interesting to see how the general conception of technology in the classroom is evolving and to see how the importance of it is still growing. I've been thinking about it a lot since she reference Pandora and I've really been wondering how easy it would be to make use of a system like Pandora for Literature. I mean, Amazon.com actually sort of already does this, when you purchase or check out a story from them they have the ability to suggest to you many other stories that are similar to the ones you looked at, and I think it would be amazing to refine this process and give people a suggestion engine for books that took an aggregate composite of the different characteristics of books that they enjoyed!

I myself have been looking quite a bit lately at different ways to involve video games in the classroom, or just simply using the structure of video games to help some students connect. I can still remember to this day having Civilization 2 installed on all the computers in my middle school and I know the ancient day wonders of the world, the Colossus, The Hanging Gardens of Babylon, The Oracle of Delphi, Sun Tzu's Art of War, all because of that game. There is so much potential in other forms of media and we as teachers are just beginning to scratch the surface.

One of the other interesting sessions I went to was one that was helpful to new teachers, a session dedicated to offering advice for surviving your first year. Most of it was common sense but it was helpful to hear about the different strategies starting teachers use to find a good mentor and the things they did to survive.

Probably my favorite session was one that was actually meant for teachers who had been teaching for a long while, and it focused on common assessment. The best thing about sitting in on this session was that normally, all I get to hear about are the things they tell new teachers, and the strategies I can use to get students interested, but it was SO HELPFUL to hear for once about the inner working of the school. These teachers were talking about the different things they do to successfully negotiate with their administrators different kinds of common assessment, and how they make use of the State guidelines and the school guidelines to do so. Like I mentioned in an earlier post, one of my biggest fears is getting into a classroom and not having a problem knowing how to teach, but having a big problem knowing what to teach, so it was nice hearing a lot on that subject.

Webb Chapter 5

It's strange that so many students and teachers reference Romeo and Juliet because I never read it at my school, and I don't really know anyone who did. I think what may have happened is it was offered in the basic English class, of which I was a part of for perhaps two weeks. This was the amount of time it took for me to read Of Mice and Men, decide it was a terrible book, and immediately transfer into honors. I think it's important to teach students Shakespeare, but I just don't think the Tempest (or Romeo and Juliet for that matter) is the way to go with it. The problem I see here is that for many students, and it depends on your school, Post-Colonialism is taught over and over and over and over again, it gets boring and it's hard for a teacher to get the sense of that because they're only there for their own class. I think instead of relating literature like Shakespeare to distant historical events it's much more advantageous to relate Shakespeare to current life events and situations. There are so many things that Shakespeare wrote about that can be tied to everyday life, and that's where the main focus should be, and I'm sure Webb talks about this in one of his other chapters. I like the fact that Webb gives so many examples and sources for reading because I know it's the kind of thing that will be really helpful for beginning teachers and I'm trying to keep a good mental list of all the books and suggestions he makes.

Webb Chapter 1

The Webb book from the beginning strikes me as being very similar to the book from Appleman, with the main focus being the challenge of striking a balance between relating class reading to the students (making it relevant) and actually teaching the students meaningful information about the text without boring them to death. I really like Webb's story about the Contemporary World Lit class that he taught because it's always helpful hearing about someone who didn't really know what they were doing and slogged through it successfully. For me, the biggest worry about my first teaching year is that the curriculum will be so open ended/non-existant that I won't have any idea what to teach, and it's encouraging to see that even in extreme situations where you simply don't have a curriculum set up it's still possible to figure things out as you go along.

A lot of what Webb says in the first chapter about cultural studies reminds me of my literacy class I took here at Western. The teacher I had for that was also a big proponent of teaching culturally relevant books and her favorite books were books just like Night, controversial depressing stories that could evoke something from the students emotionally, and in fact for that class the book I was set to read with my group was First They Killed My Father. I think there's something to this, because books that get the kinds involved emotionally also have the best chance of getting them involved intellectually, but the challenge here is finding books that not only involve the students emotionally and culturally by finding ways to take classic literature and have it fulfill the same purpose.

Read this with a Feminist Lense zomg

The Centaur
by May Swenson

The summer that I was ten --
Can it be there was only one
summer that I was ten? It must

have been a long one then --
each day I'd go out to choose
a fresh horse from my stable

which was a willow grove
down by the old canal.
I'd go on my two bare feet.

But when, with my brother's jack-knife,
I had cut me a long limber horse
with a good thick knob for a head,

and peeled him slick and clean
except a few leaves for the tail,
and cinched my brother's belt

around his head for a rein,
I'd straddle and canter him fast
up the grass bank to the path,

trot along in the lovely dust
that talcumed over his hoofs,
hiding my toes, and turning

his feet to swift half-moons.
The willow knob with the strap
jouncing between my thighs

was the pommel and yet the poll
of my nickering pony's head.
My head and my neck were mine,

yet they were shaped like a horse.
My hair flopped to the side
like the mane of a horse in the wind.

My forelock swung in my eyes,
my neck arched and I snorted.
I shied and skittered and reared,

stopped and raised my knees,
pawed at the ground and quivered.
My teeth bared as we wheeled

and swished through the dust again.
I was the horse and the rider,
and the leather I slapped to his rump

spanked my own behind.
Doubled, my two hoofs beat
a gallop along the bank,

the wind twanged in my mane,
my mouth squared to the bit.
And yet I sat on my steed

quiet, negligent riding,
my toes standing the stirrups,
my thighs hugging his ribs.

At a walk we drew up to the porch.
I tethered him to a paling.
Dismounting, I smoothed my skirt

and entered the dusky hall.
My feet on the clean linoleum
left ghostly toes in the hall.

Where have you been? said my mother.
Been riding, I said from the sink,
and filled me a glass of water.

What's that in your pocket? she said.
Just my knife. It weighted my pocket
and stretched my dress awry.

Go tie back your hair, said my mother,
and Why Is your mouth all green?
Rob Roy, he pulled some clover
as we crossed the field, I told her.