The German Language

German symbolizes the speaker’s inability to speak in her father’s terms. She struggles to get “through” (80) to her father in order to communicate with him, and also to articulate her own selfhood in his terms. She dramatizes her own inability to talk to her father through the symbol of the “German tongue” (16). When she tries to speak in that tongue it is as though her own is “stuck in [her] jaw” (25). The line “Ich, ich, ich, ich, / I could hardly speak” (27-28) shows her attempt to speak about herself in German but failing to do so, getting stuck on the German word for “I.” Plath figures the German language itself as an instrument of the speaker’s demise. As the poem concludes, the speaker abandons the German tongue and therefore symbolically enacts her own freedom from her father's grasp.

Nazism

Nazism symbolizes...