Lady Lazarus Flashcards
1
Q
Key points
A
- Draws from the biblical story of Lazarus’ resurrection and Plath’s own personal experiences (her suicide attempts)
- Features Holocaust imagery
- Extensive use of repetition and anaphora- somewhat playful tone
- Like in Daddy, there is a powerful use of rhyme and repetition, and a culminating revenge fantasy: ‘I eat men like air’
- Confessional voice is engagingly colloquial, but with some vividly disturbing detail: ‘pick the worms off me like sticky pearls’- alludes to maggot-infested cheek wound.
2
Q
Theme of death and suicide
A
- For Lazarus, his resurrection was a joyous event, and one might assume that all such resurrections would be happy. But the speaker of the poem subverts that expectation: she wants to die. And so the efforts of those who want to save her—whether loved ones, or doctors, or whoever else—feel to the speaker like selfish, controlling acts committed against her wishes.
- In contrast, the speaker describes death as a kind of calmness. For instance, when the speaker describes her second suicide attempt , the imagery evokes the peacefulness of the sea: the speaker tells the reader she “rocked shut,” alluding to the rhythmic, calming waves of the ocean
3
Q
Theme of gender and oppression
A
- The poem suggests that the men mentioned
are the ones—whether loved ones or doctors—who keep bringing the speaker back to life, suggesting how little autonomy women can ever hope to have in a patriarchal world. - The poem’s metaphors of death and resurrection, then, come to illustrate how society seeks to dominate women’s lives and bodies. The implication is that one of the reasons that the speaker wants to die is because, ironically, it’s the only way to exercise some semblance of control over her own life—which then makes the fact that she can’t die all the more agonizing.
4
Q
Key quotations
A
- ‘My skin bright as a Nazi lampshade’
- ‘My right foot a paperweight’ - parallel with father’s foot
- ‘Like a cat I have nine times to die’
- ‘Dying is an art’- ironically romanticizes death
- ‘Out of ash I rise with my red hair and I eat men like air’
