Poetry Analysis: Sylvia Plath’s “Lady Lazarus”

Sylvia Plath’s “Lady Lazarus” is a revolt against established social institutions and power politics.”The speaker is a woman who has the great and terrible gift of being reborn.”The only trouble of being reborn is that first you have to die. She is the phoenix, the libertarian spirit, what you will. She is also just a good, plain, resourceful woman”(Sylvia Plath). The poetess in the poem visualizes herself to be the female version of the mythical archetype, Lazarus. Lazarus lay buried for three days in the grave till Jesus raised him from the grave. (John 11:1-44). The poetess inverts gender here, and mythification with reality. Here, she also refers to her own attempts at suicide.

At twenty in 1953, Plath attempted suicide by consuming a huge number of sleeping pills and concealing herself in the cellar beneath the house for three days. She tried it again by driving off the road, and survived the ‘accident’ yet again. In 1963, however, she won/lost to Death/Life. She often identifies herself with victims of persecution in the Nazi concentration camp due to the mental agony and anguish that she experienced. Both of these victims may be emblematic of the male dominated monopoly in society that she dies in and tries to arise from each time. Her domain of persecution pertains to the so-called patriarchal society that is all about chauvinistic control and power-politics.

“Lady Lazarus” according to Sylvia Plath expresses “the agony of being reborn.” It points to her frustrated attempts at suicide. She refers to these in the opening lines:

I have done it again.

One year in every ten

I manage it—–

Eillen M. Aird states,”As in ‘Daddy’, however, the personal element is subordinate to a much more inclusive dramatic structure, and one answer to those critics who have seen her work as merely confessional is that she used her personal and painful material as a way of entering into and illustrating much wider themes and subjects. In ‘Lady Lazarus’ the poet again equates her suffering with the experiences of the tortured Jews, she becomes, as a result of the suicide she inflicts on herself, a Jew.” There were rumours during WW2 that the Nazis made lampshades out of human skins. These gruesome activities were carried out at Buchenwald, apparently at the request of the commander Karl Koch’s wife. The Nazis, as part of their vicious atrocities, made lampshades out of the skins of the murdered Jews. In such a context, her right foot serves as a paperweight to save her paper-skin. Her right step helps her guard her individuality, though her identity was shrouded in a “fine, Jew linen.” The word napkin has a Biblical reference too “He that was dead came forth, bound hand and foot with grave-clothes: and face was bound about with a napkin (John 11:44).

Peel off the napkin

O my enemy.

Do I terrify?——-

The word “enemy’ connotes both Nazi persecution and Male exploitation of the female. As she is resurrected once again, the skin is yet to grow on her. The skin is the largest organ, and is an omnipresent emblem of existence. She appears terrifying; the decrepit features will vanish within a day, as with the sour breath. And the skin that the grave ate shall grow on her. Like the Jews in the Holocaust, she is a victim.

The poem points to the third time she escaped Death. She says like the Cat, she has nine lives. Popular cultures contain assumptions that cats have nine lives. More than its actual death, it figuratively refers to the cat’s tendency to come out of dangerous situations. In spite of all the atrocities, she still has a smile on her face that defies all crime and logic. And more significantly, she is only thirty. She annihilates each decade through her act, she burns the previous decade and rises like the phoenix. Since life is primarily based on previous experiences she says:

What a trash

To annihilate each decade.

She seems to others like a spectacle, which they mob to see. Note the phrase “peanut-crunching crowd.” It points to their nonchalant inquisitiveness into other people’s lives. She sums up here, others’ responses to her attempts at suicide. She terms the “what a million filaments”-the people as fleas or parasites that fed on the tragedy of others.

Them unwrap me hand and foot ——

The big strip tease.

Gentleman , ladies

These are my hands

My knees.

I may be skin and bone,

Regarding the phrase ‘striptease,’ Dennis Walder says: “The personal impulse to death is shown to be an obscure desire to be sensational”. Plath asserts that in spite of her impulses to suicide, she too was human with ‘hands’ and ‘knees’. She was not to be looked upon as a specimen. The line:” Them unwrap me hand and foot ——” refers to the post-mortem done on her actions and intentions. She emphasizes that she is the same identical woman biologically (even after attempted suicides). Note that she does not refer to the change in her frame of mind.

She then goes on to relate a near-death accident at the age of ten. When she was ten, it was unintentional. The second time in her twenties, it was to not come back. She intended to shut herself from Life. When she brings up the image of the sea-shell, it may allude to her crouched posture(when she shut herself in the cellar). And, also to how she sought refuge in death. They come and pick out “the worms” (of death) from her that fell like sticky pearls. They have started to grow on her very existence. Her coherence to the same is echoed in theses lines.

Dying

Is an art, like everything else.

I do it exceptionally well.

The poetess says that she does it (suicide) so that it feels like “real” and it feels like “hell”. So note that she equates reality with hell. One wonders whether she was a victim of Munchausen’s Syndrome, in her tendency to inflict pain on herself. Or whether this ‘pain’ was more pleasing than reality.

She stresses that her individuality has its own value: For everything there is a Charge ranging from the eyeing of her scars. For the hearing of her heart, to a word/touch to a bit of blood. Even a hair fallen apart has its individual value. The doctor that come to treats her is identified with the one at the concentration camp. The Doctor also stands for Death personified.

She asserts:

I am your opus,

I am your valuable,

The pure gold baby

She claims that she is endowed with creative value, logical value and material worth as echoed by the words ‘opus’, ‘valuable’ and ‘gold’ respectively. She possesses the substance to ‘melt’, and sensitivity to ‘shriek’. And most significantly she does not relegate other people’s concerns.

Arthur Oberg asserts:””Lady Lazarus” and “Daddy” are poems which seem written at the edge of sensibility and of imagistic technique. They both utilize an imagery of severe disintegration and dislocation. The public horrors of the Nazi concentration camps and the personal horrors of fragmented identities become interchangeable. Men are reduced to parts of bodies and to piles of things. The movement in each poem is at once historical and private; the confusion in these two spheres suggests the extent to which this century has often made it impossible to separate them.” The final imagery is indeed provocative as though somebody is cooking up a concoction of herself. She affirms that that now there is only ash, there is no flesh and bone. Neither remains the domestic hygiene of a cake of soap, the religious sanctity of a wedding ring, nor the material limpidness of gold. She addresses both the reigning forces over humankind-good and evil-as Herr God and Herr Lucifer. The major forces are reflections of religion that is also at once predominantly patriarchal in nature (Herr). Hence, she revolts against the same, and declares triumphantly and gloriously how she will be reborn:

Out of the ash

I rise with my red hair

And I eat men like air.

WORKS CITED:
Aird, Eileen M. Sylvia Plath’ Her Life and Work .New York: Harper and Row, 1973.

Dobbs, Jeannine. “‘Viciousness in the Kitchen’: Sylvia Plath’s Domestic Poetry.”
Modern Language Studies 7.2 (1977): 11-25. JSTOR. Web. 21 Mar. 2011.

Gray, Richard. American Poetry of the Twentieth Century. UK:Longman Group
UK Limited, 1990.

Molesworth, Charles. “The Fierce Embrace”. A Study of Contemporary
American Poetry. University of Missouri Press, 1979.

Oberg,Arthur.Modern American Lyric: Lowell, Berryman, Creeley,-and Plath. Rutgers University Press, 1978.

Rukhaya M.K

A Literary Companion