Sylvia Plath and Holocaust Analogies

Nazis and patriarchy go together.

“Daddy” is probably Sylvia Plath’s most famous poem. It’s definitely her most controversial thanks to lines like this:

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.

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The poem is a denunciation of Plath’s emotionally distant, possibly emotionally abusive father, and of her emotionally and physically abusive husband Ted Hughes. To make those denunciations, Plath—as is clear from the excerpt—uses repeated Holocaust and Nazi analogies, made even blunter by her sing-song rhymes and rhythms. She calls her father a “swastika,” a “fascist,” and suggests he had a mustached like Hitler. She refers to Hughes as “A man in black with a Meinkampf look/and a love of the rack and the screw.”

When I first read “Daddy” some thirty years ago, I thought the Holocaust analogies seemed hyperbolic and presumptuous—and a lot of critics over the years have agreed with younger me. Heather Clark in Syliva Plath: A Very Short Introduction reproduces some of the most damaging quotes: Helen Vendler said the poem amounted to a “tantrum;” Harold Bloom called it “gratuitous and humanly offensive.” Seamus Heaney believed “Daddy” was “so tangled up in biographical circumstances and rampages so permissively in the history of other people’s sorrows that it simply withdraws its rights to our sympathy.”

Heaney’s response is telling because it is focused specifically on who Plath (supposedly) is and who she (supposedly) is not. His first objection is to the fact that Plath is talking directly about her father and her husband, the latter of whom was a poet and a celebrity Heaney knew personally. His second objection is to the fact that Plath is mucking about in “other people’s sorrows”—which is to say, Plath is appropriating Jewish trauma.

Heaney, like most of these critics, is assuming that Plath isn’t Jewish. But Clark notes that Plath herself believed her mother’s ancestors might have been Jewish, while her father was German Christian. She says as much in the poem.

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.

“I think I may well be a Jew” is in part Plath saying that, as a woman in an abusive household, she is suffering the way that Jewish people suffered under fascism. But she is also saying that she thinks that she might, literally, be Jewish, because she might come from a Jewish family.

Family memories of Jewish heritage were often lost, deliberately or otherwise, because of persecution—conversion and erasure was a way to escape death and violence. If Plath’s mother’s family was Jewish, is she still rooting around in other people’s sorrow? Do we need some sort of genealogy of Plath to determine whether “Daddy” is aesthetically and morally sound?

Plath, Clark says, felt that it was ethically incumbent on poets of her time (the 50s and 60s) to engage with and think about the 20^th centuries history of atrocity and violence. Plath does so in part by turning the Holocaust into an intimate, personal and familial nursery rhyme. The Holocaust becomes, as Vendler says, a child’s tantrum.

To write about the Holocaust in this way, as analogous to Plath’s trauma, feels trivializing. But is that because the trauma of the Holocaust is distinct from the trauma fo women and children? Or is it because women and children’s experiences are seen as unserious because of misogyny?

To put it another way, is the comparison Plath draws between fascism and misogynist patriarchal abuse inaccurate? Hitler and the Nazis were obsessed with enforcing traditional gender roles and with eugenics, which led to horrific cruelty against queer people, Jewish women and children, and against children deemed “inferior” because of illness or what the Nazis saw as genetic defects. And of course our own current fascist regime has explicitly stripped women of abortion rights and has repeatedly elevated and championed violent abusers specifically because they are accused of abuse—as in the GOP’s manic rush to confirm Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh not so much despite as because of credible accusations of rape.

Similarly, when Plath discusses her first suicide attempt, and links her experiences with mental illness to fascism, you could see her as trying to dramatize herself or as borrowing meaningfulness from others’ tragedies.

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 you could also see this as a demand that the reader recognize the way that mental illness can be tied to patriarchal trauma, and the extent to which fascist patriarchy perpetuates abuse by stigmatizing mental illness. Plath’s depression was exacerbated by poorly administered electroshock therapy, and her suicidal ideation was worsened in part because she feared being returned to brutal treatment and isolation. The hierarchical demand for normalcy—to perform gender correctly, to perform health correctly—is entangled with fascist hatred of difference and its cults of strength, masculinity and (per RFK) health.

I don’t think Plath was always in control of her material, or always thoughtful or incisive about fascism. She uses a lot of gothic imagery in “Daddy,” without thinking through very clearly what it means in this context. For example, “the black man who/Bit my pretty red heart in two” are lines that unfortunately channel racist stereotypes about Black men ravishing innocent white girls—stereotypes which the Nazis enthusiastically deployed themselves. Similarly, she uses references to vampires in a way that, to me, doesn’t seem very aware of Dracula’s antisemitic antimus.

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.

The father here is framed as parasitic, evil because he’s a leach-like, etiolated other, rather than because he’s simply performing as an upstanding patriarch. Plath doesn’t analyze or undermine discourses of degeneracy; she simply adopts them and shouts, “you’re another.” June Jordan (as one example) seems much more attuned to the quiet, bloody grinding of normality, and of the violence in silences, rather than in cinematic gouts.

from “War and Memory”

I was quite confused, “But in this picture,
Daddy, I can’t see nobody.”
“Anybody,” he corrected me: “You can’t see
anybody!” “Yes, but what,” I persevered, “what is this a
picture of?”
“That’s the trail of blood left by the Jewish girls
and women on the snow because the Germans
make them march so long.”
“Does the snow make feet bleed, Momma?
Where does the bleeding come from?”

My mother told me I should put away
the papers and not continue to upset myself
about these things I could not understand
and I remember
wondering if my family was a war
going on
and if
there would soon be blood
someplace in the house
and where
the blood of my family would come from

In the poem, Jordan’s mother and father have a heated argument about what is happening in the picture, before Jordan’s mother says that it shows what is not there—the Jewish women who no longer exist. The poem also recounts instances of Jordan’s father physically assaulting her mother and herself. As in Plath’s poem, patriarchy in the home is linked to fascism abroad; gendered violence and racial violence and (with Vietnam and Palestine) imperial violence inflect and build upon one another. Resistance isn’t framed as a stake through the heart of the disgusting outsider, though, but as a memory of a picture of what isn’t there, and as a determination, to “invent the mother of the courage I require not to quit.”

Even if I’m less ambivalent about Jordan’s poem, though, I think it’s worth revisiting, and not dismissing Plath “Daddy” is careless and irresponsible in some ways, but anger isn’t always cautious, and there’s reason to be angry at fascism and abuse. Plath may in some ways be claiming an identity that isn’t really hers. But she’s also demanding that readers think about whose identities are considered valuable and how oppression erases the distinction between public and private spheres.

“Daddy” also seems like an important poem to grapple with at a moment when the worst people in the world are demanding that we restrict Holocaust memory and silence Holocaust analogies. Trump insists that identifying his movement as fascist is a violent assault; Netanyahu insists that analogies between the Nazi genocide and the Palestinian genocide are antisemitic and inappropriate.

When Plath links the Holocaust and her father’s memory, it can feel distasteful or over the top. But if we can’t use the Holocaust to critique abuse, violence, and cruelty, what is the point of remembering it? If we reject eugenics, how can we insist that a poet take a DNA test before they’re allowed to engage with someone’s sorrow? That “bag full of God/Ghastly statue with one gray toe”—it still looms over us. Plath knew the enemy when she saw him. Younger me and other more decorous critics maybe wish she hadn’t identified him quite so loudly or with such vehemence. But right now, a certain amount of bile in the name of antifascism seems more appropriate than not.