The Body as Battleground: Patriarchal Inscription and Linguistic Resistance in Sylvia Plath’s Daddy

Abstract

Sylvia Plath’s Daddy (1965) remains among the most contested poems in twentieth-century American literature, generating sustained critical debate over its emotional violence, historical imagery, and ideological implications. While existing scholarship has addressed the poem through autobiographical, psychoanalytic, and broadly feminist lenses, comparatively few studies have examined how the female body and poetic language work together as instruments of both patriarchal subjugation and feminist resistance. This paper addresses that gap by applying the theoretical frameworks of Simone de Beauvoir and Hélène Cixous to a close reading of the poem. Drawing on de Beauvoir’s (2011) formulation of woman as the socially constructed “Other” and Cixous’s (1976) concept of écriture féminine, the study argues that Daddy performs a dramatic and linguistically enacted movement from corporeal imprisonment to embodied revolt. The female speaker begins as a silenced, entrapped subject whose body and voice are controlled by patriarchal authority. Through progressive rhetorical escalation, violent imagery, and rhythmic rupture, the poem transforms that silence into confrontation. The analysis demonstrates that Plath’s poetic language does not merely describe liberation—it enacts it. Daddy thus functions as a feminist literary performance in which the body becomes both the site of inscription and the ground of resistance.