Overview
"Lady Lazarus" by Sylvia Plath is a confessional poem exploring themes of death, resurrection, gender oppression, suffering as art, and societal voyeurism, using stark Holocaust and mythological imagery to convey the speaker's inner torment and critique patriarchal control.
Poem Summary
- The speaker claims she kills herself and is resurrected every ten years, likening each revival to a public spectacle.
- Resurrection is depicted as traumatic, with Holocaust references underscoring the horror of being forced to live.
- She feels objectified and commodified, her suffering displayed for others as entertainment.
- The speaker repeatedly attempts suicide, seeking escape from suffering caused by male figures of authority.
- The poem ends with the speaker vowing to rise like a phoenix and consume her oppressors.
Major Themes
Death and Suicide
- Uses metaphors of death and rebirth to express unbearable suffering and a longing for peace in death.
- Resurrection is portrayed as torture, with life itself experienced as a kind of death.
- Death is depicted as calm and redemptive, contrasting with the agony of living.
Gender and Oppression
- The speaker is a woman oppressed by male authority figures (doctors, God, Lucifer).
- Objectification and lack of autonomy fuel her desire to die as an act of control.
- Her suffering is commodified and her pain is treated as public property.
Suffering, Objectification, and Art
- The poem critiques society’s fascination with pain and the spectacle of suffering.
- The speaker ironically charges for access to her wounds, embracing and subverting her own objectification.
- Suffering is equated with artistic performance, blurring boundaries between empowerment and exploitation.
Symbols
- Skin: Symbolizes both exposure of suffering and a prison hiding the true extent of pain.
- Phoenix: Represents cycles of death/rebirth and a wish for female empowerment, but also endless suffering.
- Holocaust imagery: Used to express extreme victimhood and objectification under systemic oppression.
Poetic Devices & Form
- Heavy use of allusion (Lazarus, Holocaust), irony, repetition, and extended metaphor.
- Written in free verse tercets, suggesting ongoing cycles and referencing Dante’s terza rima.
- Meter is mostly irregular but often shifts to intensify emotional impact.
- No consistent rhyme scheme, but uses internal and end rhymes to reinforce cyclical suffering.
Speaker & Setting
- The speaker is a 30-year-old woman who parallels Plath herself.
- She is metaphorically dead, repeatedly revived against her will by men.
- Setting is abstract—possibly the speaker’s body or a liminal state between life and death.
Context
- "Lady Lazarus" appears in Plath’s 1966 collection Ariel, reflecting post-WWII trauma and feminist critique of mid-century gender roles.
- Written against the background of the Holocaust, postwar womanhood, and Plath’s personal struggles with mental illness.
Key Devices and Vocabulary
- Uses vocabulary and imagery referencing the Holocaust, objectification, and artistic creation as metaphors for suffering and resurrection.
- Key terms: Nazi lampshade, Jew linen, annihilate, filaments, peanut-crunching crowd, brute, Herr, Doktor, opus, cake of soap.
Resources
- External links to Plath’s biography, interviews, audio readings, and analysis for deeper exploration of the poem.