by Jane Ward

Created on: September 17, 2008

Does an author have to be associated with a certain culture of people in order to write from this group's point of view? Of course not. Acclaimed have done this for centuries and met with extreme success. Harriet Beecher Stowe is the first one that comes to mind. However, now and then a writer will use an allusion too soon after the fact, or in a way that is perceived as inappropriate, and this is when criticism occurs.

Some of Sylvia Plath's poetry draws heavily on imagery and metaphor regarding the Holocaust. It has been said by many critics that it is not her place to use such a terrible experience in her work, since she is not actually of Jewish descent but merely using the genocide as a symbol.

Her poem "Daddy" from the posthumous collection "Ariel" is one in particular that uses several references to Judaism and the Holocaust. The poem is about a woman's unhealthy relationships with both father and husband. Plath's narrator compares herself to a Jew and her father to a Nazi.

The poem "Daddy" is about a girl who sees her father as a sinister, abusive figure, and who feels that her unresolved relationship with him led her to marry a similar man later in life. The fact that, so soon after the Holocaust, the Nazi-Jew relationship is the one Plath decides to use as her metaphor is both controversial and bitingly effective. These two things probably have much to do with one another. The fact that Nazism is and was such a touchy subject is because of the horrible abuses the Nazis inflicted on civilians. Some critics feel Plath's metaphor to be completely appropriate because only something so raw and personal could evoke the heart-wrenching emotion she sought to in her writing. Others feel that she crossed a line.

"An engine, and engine
Chuffing me off like Jew.
A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz Belsen.
I began to talk like a Jew.
I think I may well be a Jew."

reads one stanza from the poem. It is apparent how the frightening images of Nazis and their death camps attempt to recreate the confused child's view of the evil man she barely knew who called himself her father.

Yet what does Plath mean by "I began to talk like a Jew/I think I may well be a Jew"? To what racial stereotype is she referring? Or is she simply saying that she has effectively played the role of the victim to her father's abuser? Critic Richard Nathan sums it up well when he says that

"It's a very touchy subject, and it may well be that we're too close
to the event to turn the Holocaust into a metaphor. But that's exactly
what Sylvia Plath did, audaciously wielding the power of metaphor to
the extreme. This is not to say that the poet is free from all
responsibility in languagebutwho's to say that the personal Hell
in which she found herself at that time was not as soul destroying
as the Hell of any specific victim of the Holocaust."

Not being Jewish myself, but having grown up with an abusive father, and constantly living with the fear that I will repeat my mother's mistake in choice of husband, I find the metaphor to be spot-on. Poetry is about evoking emotion, and Plath has certainly hit the nail on the head with "Daddy". However, were I Jewish, perhaps with family members who had actually been in concentration camps, I might feel very differently about the subject. I believe it is this potential for differing interpretations that makes poetry such a wonderful medium for expression. Whether a reader takes offense at her use of the Holocaust or not, there is no doubt that every reader will experience one form or another of visceral reaction to Plath's words, and in this way, the poem succeeds.

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