Discuss the relationships of the daughters to their fathers in Slyvia Essay

Discuss the relationships of the daughters to their fathers in Slyvia Plath's Daddy and Sharon Olds' The Chute - Essay Example ted by Sylvia Plath as expressed in her poem â€Å"Daddy† and Sharon Olds as seen in her poem â€Å"The Chute† struggle instead to communicate the complicated love/hate emotions they had for their fathers to very different effect. Plath’s â€Å"Daddy† is written in first person as a letter to her father, who has been dead for 20 years. Although it is not clear who the dominating figure of verse 1 has been, his identity and the concept that this is a letter emerges in the second verse, â€Å"Daddy, I have had to kill you, / You died before I had time† (6-7). The story that emerges in the subsequent lines is of a woman who has lived in fear and awe of her father for as long as she can remember. The fear is evident in her metaphor of him as â€Å"Marble-heavy, a bag full of God, / Ghastly statue with one gray toe / Big as a Frisco seal† (8-10). Later, she compares her fear of her father to the fear the Jews felt for the Nazis, seeing herself as being shipped off to the concentration camps and describing her father’s appearance in terms of the perfect Aryan. â€Å"But no less a devil for that, no not / Any less the black man who / Bit my pretty red heart in two† (54-56). Finally, her description of the man she married as the model of her father indicates his deep cruelty because he has a â€Å"love of the rack and the screw† (66). She ends the poem by indicating her father has been an evil vampire, sucking her life dry and finally buried with a stake in his heart to the delight of the villagers. Her beginning and end of the poem, each expressed in terms of anger and fear, leave no doubt that her fear outweighed any other emotions she had of her father. However, Plath also provides plenty of clues that her love for her father was almost as strong as her fear of him. Although she is writing against him, defying her fear of him, she seems almost breathless as she allows the thoughts of the poem to be interrupted by line breaks and allows one thought to blend almost