Lady Lazarus- Sylvia Plath Flashcards
Summary of Lady Lazarus
- “Lady Lazarus” is a poem commonly understood to be about suicide. It is narrated by a woman, and mostly addressed to an unspecified person.
The narrator begins by saying she has “done it again.” Every ten years, she manages to commit this unnamed act. She considers herself a walking miracle with bright skin, her right foot a “paperweight,” and her face as fine and featureless as a “Jew linen”. She address an unspecified enemy, asking him to peel the napkin from her face, and inquiring whether he is terrified by the features he sees there. She assures him that her “sour breath” will vanish in a day.
- She is certain that her flesh will soon be restored to her face after having been sacrificed to the grave, and that she will then be a smiling, 30 year-old woman. She will ultimately be able to die nine times, like a cat, and has just completed her third death. She will die once each decade. After each death, a “peanut-crunching crowd” shoves in to see her body unwrapped. She addresses the crowd directly, showing them she remains skin and bone, unchanged from who she was before.
- The first death occurred when she was ten, accidentally. The second death was intentional - she did not mean to return from it. Instead, she was as “shut as a seashell” until she was called back by people who then picked the worms off her corpse. She does not specifically identify how either death occurred.
- She believes that “Dying / Is an art, like everything else,” and that she does it very well. Each time, “it feels real,” and is easy for her. What is difficult is the dramatic comeback, the return to the same place and body, occurring as it does in broad daylight before a crowd’s cry of “A miracle!” She believes people should pay to view her scars, hear her heart, or receive a word, touch, blood, hair or clothes from her.
- In the final stanzas, she addresses the listener as “Herr Dockter” and “Herr Enemy,” sneering that she is his crowning achievement, a “pure gold baby.” She does not underestimate his concern, but is bothered by how he picks through her ashes. She insists there is nothing there but soap, a wedding ring, and a gold filling. She warns “Herr God, Herr Lucifer” to beware of her because she is going to rise out of the ash and “eat men like air.”
First Analysis
Context
- “Lady Lazarus” is a complicated, dark, and brutal poem originally published in the collection Ariel. Plath composed the poem during her most productive and fecund creative period. It is considered one of Plath’s best poems, and has been subject to a plethora of literary criticism since its publication. It is commonly interpreted as an expression of Plath’s suicidal attempts and impulses. Its tone veers between menacing and scathing, and it has drawn attention for its use of Holocaust imagery, similar to “Daddy.” The title is an allusion to the Biblical character, Lazarus, whom Jesus raised from the dead.
- The standard interpretation of the poem suggests that it is about multiple suicide attempts. The details can certainly be understood in this framework. When the speaker says she “has done it again,” she means she has attempted suicide for the third time, after one accidental attempt and one deliberate attempt in the past. Each attempt occurred in a different decade, and she is now 30 years old. Now that she has been pulled back to life from this most recent attempt, her “sour breath / Will vanish in a day,” and her flesh will return to her bones. However, this recovery is presented as a failure, whereas the suicide attempts are presented as accomplishments - “Dying is an art” that she performs “exceptionally well.” She seems to believe she will reach a perfection through escaping her body.
Second Analysis
Content
- By describing dying as an art, she includes a spectator to both her deaths and resurrections. Because the death is a performance, it necessarily requires others. In large part, she kills herself to punish them for driving her to it. The eager “peanut-crunching crowd” is invited but criticized for its voyeuristic impulse. The crowd could certainly be understood to include the reader himself, since he reads the poem to explore her dark impulses. She assumes that her voyeurs are significantly invested - they would pay the “large charge” to see her scars and heart.
- However, she imbues this impulse with a harsh criticism by comparing the crowd to the complacent Germans who stood aside while the Jews were thrown into concentration camps. Further, the crowd ultimately proves less an encouragement than a burden when they also attend the resurrection. She despises this second part of the process, and resents the presence of others at that time. Whether this creates a vicious circle, in which that resentment is partially responsible for the subsequent attempt, is implied but not explicitly stated. Critic Robert Bagg explores the speaker’s contradictory feelings towards the crowd by writing that Plath “is not bound by any metaphysical belief in the self’s limitations. Instead of resisting the self’s antagonists she derives a tremendous thrill from throwing her imagination into the act of self-obliteration.” She can destroy her body, but her imaginative self remains a performer, always aware of the effect she has on others.
Third Analysis
Content
- The poem can also be understood through a feminist lens, as a demonstration of the female artist’s struggle for autonomy in a patriarchal society. Lynda K. Bundtzen writes that “the female creation of a male-artist god is asserting independent creative powers.” From this perspective, “Lady Lazarus” is not merely a confessional poem detailing depressive feelings, but is also a statement on how the powerful male figure usurps Plath’s creative powers but is defeated by her rebirth. Though Lady Lazarus knows that “Herr Doktor” will claim possession of her body and remains after forcing her suicide, she equally believes she will rise and “eat men like air.” Her creative powers can be stifled momentarily, but will always return stronger.
- The poem can also be understood in a larger context, as a comment on the relationship between poet and audience in a society that, as Pamela Annas claims, has separated creativity and consumption. The crowd views Lady Lazarus/the poet/Plath as an object, and therefore does not recognize her as a human being. Plath reflects this through her multiple references to body parts separated from the whole. From this interpretation, Lady Lazarus’s suicide then becomes “an assertion of wholeness, an act of self-definition, and a last desperate act of contempt toward the peanut-crunching crowd.” The only way she can keep herself intact is to destroy herself, and she does this rather than be turned into commodities. Though “Herr Docktor” will peruse her remains for commodities, she will not have been defeated because of her final act.
Final Analysis
Conclusion
- As has often been the case in Plath’s poems, the Holocaust imagery has drawn much attention from critics and readers. It is quite profuse in this poem. Lady Lazarus addresses a man as “Herr Dokter,” “Herr Enemy,” “Herr God,” and “Herr Lucifer.” She describes her face as a “Nazi lampshade” and as a”Jew linen.” As previously described, one effect of these allusions is to implicate the reader, make him or her complicit in passive voyeurism by comparing him or her to the Germans who ignored the Holocaust. However, they also serve to establish the horrific atmosphere than be understood as patriarchy, as a society of consumers, or as simply cruel humans. No matter how one interprets the crowd in the poem, they complicate the poem’s meaning so that it is a sophisticated exploration of the responsibility we have for each other’s unhappiness, rather than simply a dire, depressive suicide note.
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I have done it again.
One year in every ten
I manage it–
- Plath attempted suicide multiple times throughout her short life. It wasn’t exactly once every decade, but it wasn’t far off either. One attempt is thinly fictionalized in her only novel, The Bell Jar.
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A sort of walking miracle, my skin
Bright as a Nazi lampshade,
- It’s a miracle that after multiple attempts at suicide she is still alive
Again this is ironic. We think of a miracle as something positive; a wonderful achievement facilitated by God. Here, her mere survival is the cause for wonder.
- The speaker is comparing herself to a “walking miracle”; a lampshade made out of murdered humans.
For her body to be used as everyday objects is insulting (lampshades and paperweights); as though she was torn off her own environment to serve for the purpose of others.
- Nazis are supposed to have made lampshades out of human skin. The veracity of this story has come into question since it first spread in the wake of WWII, but rumors and alleged artifacts periodically resurface. According to The New York Times:
The consensus among historians is that these Nazi lampshades may well be a myth, as are the bars of soap Nazis allegedly rendered from Jewish corpses. But soldiers, journalists and survivors reported seeing such lampshades at Buchenwald after its liberation, even if no one can locate one today.
Plath goes into great detail with parts of her body every stanza (skin, foot, face, nose, eyes, etc) as though she really was dismantled and sown together again.
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My right foot
- This echoes Plath’s poem, ‘’Daddy’’ in which she writes:
“… you do not do
Any more, black shoe
In which I have lived like a foot
For thirty years …
The implication in both poems is of plodding ‘deadness’, like a lump that impedes her. Her foot is powerless. Ironically, in this case it is her ‘right’ foot that is an inanimate and heavy, when it should be the one that leads and propels her forward.
Reference to feet again, as with ‘Daddy’, is possibly a reference to her father, who lost a foot due to untreated gangrene. This also links in with ‘Nazi lampshade’ and ‘Jew linen’. Plath’s father was a Nazi, and Plath sympathised and identified with the Jewish people, hence she’s confused about her identity and lacks a sense of belonging.
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A paperweight,
My face a featureless, fine
Jew linen.
Peel off the napkin
O my enemy.
Do I terrify?–
- Here, Plath annuls her existence, an earmark of her underlying depression. She describes her face as a nondescript fabric. The only trace we have of her identity is in her calling it Jewish, which also plays off the last stanza, wherein she writes, “Nazi lampshade.” Given the Nazi reference, this also makes us think of the holocaust, and perhaps implies that she suffers a mental agony reminiscent of the Jews in the Holocaust – although Plath would undoubtedly have agreed her suffering was not of that magnitude.
Next she tells her enemy, presumably a Nazi, to “peel off the napkin” (her face), asking does her Jewish identity terrify him? However, maybe she is asking if what lies beneath the face, her identity, is what terrifies, which would relate back to her mental illness and sense of self-loathing. The “napkin” could represent a mask that is covering her true self; perhaps she is desperate for someone to see what is underneath it. To an extent she’s searching for an identity she knows little of herself.
- While many critics find fault with Plath comparing her suffering to the suffering of the Jews, a different reading of these lines offers another perspective. When she describes herself as “featureless,” perhaps she does not describe how she views herself, but instead how she is viewed by others. With this in mind, the comparison between her and the Jews is spot on. Often someone suffering from deep depression is not seen as a person but as an object, strange and intriguing, watched and criticized in a surreptitious, pitying fashion.
The line could be referring to John 20:7, where it states that when Jesus was buried his head was wrapped with a napkin, possibly a custom of the Jews during that time.
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The nose, the eye pits, the full set of teeth?
The sour breath
Will vanish in a day.
- An allusion to the stereotyping of the Jews by the Nazi war machine and its attempt at a “final solution.”
Potentially also a remark on how Plath’s existence is bound to end. Here, she describes herself almost as if she doesn’t exist, reducing her identity to a nose, eye sockets, a skeletal set of teeth, and a fetid whiff of air. She likely despised herself, and this description shows it, as well as her tenuous hold on life. It could also serve as a harbinger of her suicide.
Note that she uses ‘eye pits’ instead of ‘eye sockets’. In terms of semantics, the word ‘pits’ is more negative and disparaging than the more clinical description ‘socket’.
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Soon, soon the flesh
The grave cave ate will be
At home on me
- Soon—sooner than maybe I would like!—I will die
- The ‘grave cave’ links with the idea of Lazarus. At the time dead bodies were wrapped in cloth and left in caves to decompose, usually with a rock to mark its presence. This was because ground was too hard and dry to dig. Plath is saying that this cave too will be her ‘home’.
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And I a smiling woman.
- It is often assumed that the speaker of the poem contemplates suicide. It can also be read more as a dark fantasy. Perhaps the “smiling woman” refers to the smiling visage of the speaker’s skull after the flesh has rotted away. The undead speaker, freshly buried and awaiting her own decomposition, could be symbolic for something beyond thoughts of suicide.
One possibility is that the buried body is symbolic of someone suffering from depression. More specifically, “a smiling woman” is not only the macabre visage of a decomposing skull, but it also alludes to the speaker’s state of mind. As the poem progresses, she glorifies her ability to endure her own despair and isolation. She also reprimands and condemns those who watch and judge her deepening depression. She seems to have a cathartic hope that she will overcome her depression. In the end, she will have her revenge, which, in light of the poem’s condemnation of others, is the poem itself.
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I am only thirty.
And like the cat I have nine times to die.
- Plath’s use of the word “only” implies perhaps she feels older than her years; depression frequently induces exhaustion and so her “thirty years” could have be perceived by her as much longer.
“Only” could also indicate her young state; again, Plath is ironically taking the point of view of the people around her, who view her as too young to die. She takes an opposing opinion, supported by the former analysis of this word.
- Plath wrote this poem during the month of her 30th birthday, same as “Daddy,” “Ariel,” and many of the other poems that would become famous through her posthumously published collection, Ariel.
Of this month of extraordinary productivity, literary critic (and Plath’s friend) A. Alvarez has remarked:
The poems had become unstoppable. She had kind of hit that mother lode, you know, like Brent oil or something. She’d gone through and found the reservoir. She was writing poems of an order that seemed to me quite extraordinary for this century….She was writing two or three a day, as though she’d tapped the mother lode to end all mother lodes of her creativity.
- Sylvia’s depressed worldview transforms even the uplifting concept of having nine lives into the awful fact that a cat must suffer death nine times.
The juxtaposition of folklore about cats with suicidal musings on Nazi war atrocities is also chilling.
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This is Number Three.
What a trash
To annihilate each decade.
- i.e., her third death, or brush with death. Plath killed herself in 1963; but there were numerous failed attempts beforehand.
- Plath suggests that her once-a-decade suicide attempts are actually a waste, showing her extreme level of despair, and noting that she views suicide as a mechanism to completely erase whatever progress life had made.
Line
What a million filaments.
The peanut-crunching crowd
Shoves in to see
- Filaments from the cameras. Refers to the mass media who came to see her after her suicide attempt
- The speaker feels like an exhibit, something from a carnival or freakshow.
To say that Plath suspects some of the well-wishers and concerned people don’t have her best interests at heart would be an understatement.
This stanza suggests extreme negativity. Plath was greatly admired during her lifetime and after her death. She was highly intelligent and talented. She was also extremely attractive; tall and slender, blond, pretty. Some people no doubt viewed her suicide attempt with gruesome voyeurism, but many were distressed and sad for her. Plath’s depression distorts her perceptions. It is a fact that depressive people misjudge those around them and are difficult to help.
- ‘Shoves’ is colloquial and disparaging. It suggests brutal, heartless curiosity.
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Them unwrap me hand and foot–
The big strip tease.
Gentlemen, ladies,
- Again this is brutally negative. Plath’s view of herself is detached and contemptuous; she sees herself being ‘unwrapped’ like a non-human parcel.
The ‘big strip tease’ is also ironic. She was an attractive young woman, respected for her talent and intellect. She sees herself reduced to an impersonal, cheaply sexy strip tease.
- Jonathan Rosenblatt writes that at this point in the poem Plath “becomes a barker at a striptease show” (from Sylvia Plath: The Poetry of Initiation. 1979)
Arthur Oberg notes the same thing, suggesting that the adoption of a “barkerlike tone…is not accidental. As in “Daddy,” the persona strips herself before the reader … all the time utilizing a cool or slang idiom in order to disguise feeling. Sylvia Plath borrowed from a sideshow or vaudeville world the respect for virtuosity which the performer must acquire, for which the audience pays and never stops paying. Elsewhere in her work, she admired the virtuosity of the magician’s unflinching girl or of the unshaking tattoo artist. Here, in “Lady Lazarus,” it is the barker and the striptease artist who consume her attention.“ (From Modern American Lyric: Lowell, Berryman, Creeley,-and Plath. 1978)
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These are my hands
My knees.
I may be skin and bone
- She focuses on ‘hands and knees’, but why? Maybe because these are the parts of the body that are most commonly wounded, say by a fall off a bicycle? It is also a pattern in her poetry to refer to parts of her body to illustrate what she wishes to say, for example, ‘Ariel’ refers to ‘pivot of heels and knees …’
- During her illness she lost weight. Again, Sylvia Plath deliberately strips herself of humanity and reduces herself to ‘skin and bone’.
Form and Meter
Holocaust Analysis
Line by Line Holocaust Analysis
Death Imagery Analysis
Line by Line Death Imagery Analysis
Part 1
Line by Line Death Imagery Analysis
Part 2
The Circus Analysis
Speaker Analysis
Setting Analysis
Sound Check Analysis
Title Analysis
Brutal Metaphor Analysis
Tree line Analysis
Additional Info for Context
Are there any allusions or references in this poem?
