Father and Husband as Vampires in Plath's DaddySylvia Plath's poem "Daddy" ends with the symbolic scene of the speaker killing her vampire father. Obviously, this represents Plath's struggle to cope with the haunting influence of her own father, who died when she was young. However, as Mary G. DeJong points out: "Now that Plath's work is better known, 'Daddy' is generally recognized as more than a simple confession of her personal feelings toward her father" (34-35). In the context of the poem, the symbolism of the scene becomes ambiguous because, mixed with the descriptions of the poet's father, there are clear references to her husband, who left her for another woman at the time "Papa" was underway. writing. The problem for the reader is to understand what Plath is saying about the connection between the father and husband figures by linking them together in her poem. A clue lies in the final image she uses, the vampire. In films and books today, vampires are depicted as humans who gained immortality and power in exchange for the need for blood and avoiding sunlight and crosses. However, Plath wrote her poem in 1962, and since then the image of the vampire in our culture has changed dramatically. Historically, people turned into vampires were no longer the same human beings. Instead, they became monsters who only retained their physical appearance. Our interpretation of the poem is affected if we assume that when Plath wrote about a vampire, she had in mind the older conception of a monster taking over the body of a now-dead human. With this image in mind, we will look for how the duality of father and husband in the poem corresponds to the double I of the vampire...... middle of paper ...... the equally painful memory of his father involuntary abandonment. Despite the mixture of father and husband in the antagonist of "Daddy", it is obvious which man Sylvia Plath is addressing with the final line of the poem, written during the breakdown of her marriage and three months before her suicide: “Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m done” (80). Works Cited Cam, Heather. "'Daddy': Sylvia Plath's debt to Anne Sexton." American Literature 59 (1987): 429-32. DeJong, Mary G. "The Imaginary Crimes of Sylvia Plath and Sheila Ballantyne." Studies in American Fiction 16 (1988): 27-38.Ramazani, Jahan. "'Dad, I Had to Kill You': Plath, Rage and the Modern Elegy." Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 108 (1993): 1142-56. Srivastava, K.G. “Plath’s Daddy.” The explainer 50 (1992): 126-28.