PERTANIKA JOURNAL OF SOCIAL SCIENCES AND HUMANITIES

Sylvia Plath's "Daddy" is one of her most widely studied poems under psychoanalytic theories. This paper, however, argues that the poet offers a meticulous framework of art revealing the strata of an autocratic government from its heyday to the fall of its leader. In this regard, the paper presumes that the poet had already established antagonism between Daddy as the symbol of arbitrary power and herself as the representative of the suppressed in society. This study applies the concepts of race, space and vision to the poem based on Sallie Westwood's power grammar in his Power and the Social (2002) and also gives prominence to political cognition introduced by Teun A. van Dijk. Finally, the paper affirms that although there are traces of autobiographical narrative within the poem, Plath's work surely stands as a great illustration of a totalitarian regime that sanctions programmes of propaganda, surveillance and ethnic purgation.