Housekeeping

Throughout Housekeeping, the differing approaches to 'keeping house' gives insights into their characters.

Throughout the course of the book, Lucille grows from a passive character like Ruth, to a self-determined character who begins to distance herself from her more flighty family. Lucille wishes to assimilate into conventional culture, a marked difference from Sylvie and Ruth, who desire to wander free. It is fitting then that Lucille moves into the home of the home economics teacher-- the teacher who's job it is to literally teach her students about good housekeeping.

Sylvie is a free spirited and flighty transient, who dislikes staying in one place. We see many instances of Sylvie's inability to keep house-- she leaves the windows open, she leaves things to dry in the yard and promptly forgets about it, etc. Throughout the book we see the once clean house degrade into a shell of its former self. In the last chapter, Sylvie uses a broom to help light the house on fire, using something meant to 'keep house' to instead destroy it.

When Sylvie tries to convince the court that she is fit to keep custody of Ruth however, she begins to clean up the house, faking her ability to keep house to seem normal. She seems almost like a different person, with Ruth saying "I had never imagined that Sylvie was capable of haste or urgency". Sylvie becomes paranoid that she's being watched, declaring loudly how well she and Ruth are doing.

Nazi Daddies and Jewish Mommies

Upon first reading Sylvia Plath's Daddy, as a person of Jewish heritage, I was mildly put off and irritated about her comparison of her relationships with her father and her ex husband to the treatment of the Jews during the Holocaust. I found it insensitive that a Christian woman without any immediate apparent connections to the Holocaust would go and compare herself to a Jew off to a concentration camp, and her father to Hitler. If this poem came out today, I'm fairly certain she would have received a large amount of criticism from social justice warriors and the like. 

Plath states that the poem is not meant to be autobiographical, instead describing

 "a girl with an Electra complex [whose] father died while she thought he was God. Her case is complicated by the fact that her father was also a Nazi and her mother very possibly part Jewish. In the daughter the two strains marry and paralyze each other – she has to act out the awful little allegory once over before she is free of it"
However, upon researching Plath's life and her parent's background more than in the biographical information in the copy of the Bell Jar we read, I found more direct connections from the poem to her life which better justified her usage of such controversial imagery in her poem.

Plath's father, Otto Plath, was born in Germany, and according to Plath, was a Nazi sympathizer that "heiled Hitler in the privacy of his home". Plath's mother, Aurelia Plath, had suspected (though not confirmed) Jewish heritage. Given this information, it's pretty freaking hard to argue that Daddy was not intended to be autobiographical to some extent.

Plath metaphorically eviscerating both her father and her estranged husband in the poem was a way for her to achieve the closure her subject craved in the poem. During the time she wrote Daddy, Plath was falling farther and farther into her depression, ultimately resulting in her suicide not that long after. With her deteriorating mental state, and her penchant for a sometimes over dramatic writing style, I imagine Plath felt that using the baggage associated with the Holocaust and its atrocities would make both her more sympathetic, and her father and ex husband irredeemably evil in the eyes of the reader. 

 That being said, upon reflecting on the greater context of her Holocaust metaphor, do I think it was justified? No, not really. Although the imagery of the Holocaust is immediately evocative and sure to catch the reader's attention, the fact that it's being used by Plath to compare her struggle to one of the largest atrocities in history on what is effectively a diss track, is just disrespectful to the victims of the Holocaust. I understand that Plath's family had connections to the Nazis, and there was a whole dynamic there. I understand it was her right to express herself as she saw fit. I just don't have to like the product of her expression.