Mirela Shendrya

Sylvia Otto Fix It: An Analysis of Repair Imagery

Often times many daughters seek to have a close relationship with their fathers. Very much the same, Sylvia Plath had an extremely close relationship with her father. Sylvia and Otto had a husband-wife routine which suggested an oedipal relationship. In 1940 Otto Plath died, when Sylvia was only eight, as a result of untreated diabetes. She underwent much frustration and discontent at her father’s departure. Sylvia’s poems often times depicted her father as strict, and authoritarian. In both of the following poems the central characters are her father and herself. In the poems “Daddy” and “Colossus” Plath uses repair imagery to show her feeling toward her father and the frustration she went through.
Through using repair imagery in her poems she is able to portray the feelings she had. While in the “Colossus” she writes of putting back together one of the wonders of the world, the Colossus or her father, in “Daddy” Sylvia writes of others piecing her back together. In the “Colossus” she says “I shall never get you put together entirely, / Pieced, glued, and properly jointed”(1-2). Through this statement it is evident that Sylvia wants to bring Otto back, and is expressing a sentiment of longing to be back again with him. In “Daddy”, though she uses the same imagery to bring about a feeling of discontent. As she states that she wished to die and return to her father “but they pulled me out of the sack, and stuck me together with glue”(61-62). Plath uses references to glue in both occasions, and yet once it shows her desire to have someone back, and in the other a despise for the ones who tried to bring her back to life.
Plath further uses the same imagery to show her experience and the frustration she went through. In “Colossus”, the entire poem has a much more technical feel. Plath writes lines such as “dredge the silt from your throat”(9) and, “scaling little ladders with glue pots and pails of Lysol”(11). These tasks are ones that require lots of energy, and the ways they are presented seem immensely large, and eventually unable to be completed. Plath tries but her efforts in restoring the Colossus equal zero. This is where Sylvia’s frustration can be seen, in the fact that she just can’t seem to get her father back together; that it is a task to great for her. In “Daddy” the expression of frustration takes a slightly different path. “And they stuck me together with glue. / And then I knew what to do. / I made a model of you”(62-64). Since people kept rescuing Plath form her attempted suicides, and would not let her join her father, her alternative was to get married. Her husband in turn became the model f her father. In the need to fill the void of her father’s presence, her frustration resulted with a model, a marriage.
The imagery use in both of the poems is very beneficial o the overall understanding of the poems. In “The Colossus” the repair imagery is essential to create the mood of a repair site, which is ultimately hopeless, that the damage done is too great to restore. Besides that it helps the reader visualize what Plath was going through in a more practical manner. The structure itself of the Colossus allows the reader to see at what level Sylvia saw her father. Through this method she is capable of creating an over inflated image of Otto in the eyes if the reader and to accord him more importance than in reality. The overall tone of “Daddy” is much more pessimistic though, and minimizes her father, and degrades him to that of a Nazi, and herself to the position of a Jew. Sylvia views her father as a cruel German, because he deserted her and left her to be glued together by others. In “Daddy” without the repair imagery we would be missing Sylvia’s emotions about life and death, and particularly her father, whom she made a model of. Plath’s use of repair imagery is very successful and essential to these two poems.

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