In 1959, Plath wrote "The Colossus," a painstaking evaluation of her deceased father. After three decades of labor, the speaker's plastic reconstructions fail to re-create the man she knew only from childhood memories. The astonishing controlling image of a fallen giant places the speaker in the seriocomic role of a Lilliputian, who climbs ladders and traverses the oversized brow and pate of a fallen Gulliver. Locked in the hell of ambivalence, she explores fantasies meant to free her from loss, betrayal, and remorse.
Charged allusions to Aeschylus's Oresteia and the Roman Forum dignify the dead father as they tinge a lifelong search with subtle shades of tragedy. The poet-speaker allies herself with the Greek Agamemnon's doomed twins, Orestes and Electra, who destroyed themselves by attempting to avenge the father's murder. A pivotal image — "married to shadow" — tethers the harried speaker to an Electra Complex, the Freudian name for a young girl's abnormal adoration of her father. As though abandoned on a faraway island, she ceases to anticipate rescue from an idealized father.
