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Isabella Brown-Quigley
English 102
19 September 2017
In 1962, Sylvia Plath wrote a poem that is still a topic of controversy. Suicide has been a
taboo topic throughout human history, especially with the Church and Plath bombarded the
world with her caliginous perceptions of it in Lady Lazarus. Whereas Bruce Bawer from The
New Criterion opined that Sylvia Plath glorified suicide, she actually confided to her audience
how devastating and depressing suicide is by relating the anguish of suicidal tendencies to the
Holocaust with her title, dark figurative language, imagery and autobiographical elements.
Plaths title of the poem includes a biblical reference with femininity. In the Bible,
Lazarus died and then was revived by Jesus. Plath compares herself to Lazarus because when
she made the suicide attempts she knew that she would come back to life like him. She wrote,
Dying / is an art, like everything else to indicate how familiar and talented she was with death
(42-43). The author feminizes Lazarus to make it clear that she is the speaker of the poem. The
Lady Lazarus is filled with dismal figurative language such as metaphors, similes, and
repetition. For example in the metaphor is My right foot / A paperweight, Plath compares
what perhaps is her best foot forward--an idiom about effort, to something with no more value
than an object having sufficient mass to hold paper in a light breeze (6-7). She views herself as
being meaningless even when she is trying her absolute best. In the simile, Bright as a Nazi
lampshade, she refers to a lampshade made of human skin (5). The lampshade is made of
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recycled dead bodies like many other items in this poem, which show how valueless Plath feels
about herself. Her simile And I eat men like air suggests her hatred for men and how she
wants revenge on them (84). According to Bawer, Plath had poor experiences with men and
wanted to express how she still holds a power over them. She emphasized her pain and suffering
with repetition. Plath repeats the word, charge several times towards the end of the poem to
acknowledge that her only value was a dark spectacle at which others could marvel. The
audience has to pay to see her scars and dead body when she succeeds in her last attempt, which
is evident in For the eyeing of my scars, there is a charge (57). The figurative language shows
that the world sees her as a source of entertainment without compassion and perhaps without
knowledge of her suffering. Some atrocities are committed on a grand scale, like the holocaust,
while other terrible events happen in our lives and are hidden behind fake smiles.
Plaths gory and depressing diction magnifies the vividness of her imagery. An example
of her imagery is A cake of soap, / A wedding ring, / A gold filling (76-78). Plath describes
these three objects concisely so the reader can picture them and think about their
significance. The wedding ring and gold filling were commonly taken by Nazis from their
victims. The imagery, cake of soap refers to soap that was made from the fat of dead
Holocaust victims. Throughout the poem, references to body parts being taken for their material
value without regard for human life are pronounced. Plath feels indeterminately miserable in her
world that she wants to sacrifice her body to be recycled and used for other purposes like how
knowing of Plaths personal life, one could presume that she was a Holocaust
survivor. Although she had Holocaust references throughout the poem, shockingly, she was not
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a victim. Plaths father died when she was eight years old and him not being present led her to
have unrewarding relationships with men. Bawer from The New Criterion wrote, ...it represents
a miraculous triumph over them because he believes that Plath is glorifying her suicide attempts
in order to get back at men (Bawer 18-27). Plath was not suicidal all because of men and did not
intend to glorify it. Traditionally the most important man in a young womans life is her
father. He died when she was eight and she may not have ever recovered from the painful loss,
which could have possibly made her suicidal. Many of her poems were about or referenced
death. Plath states, The first time it happened I was ten (35). When Plath was ten, she
attempted suicide for the first time--only two years after her father passed away. Her father
dying had a significant impact on how she perceived death. Plath talks about dying and
resurrecting every decade--when she was ten, twenty, and thirty. She writes, This is Number
Three (22). She capitalizes the number three to emphasize how serious she was about making it
her last attempt. Three signifies her third decade, which is when she finally died and didnt
come back. Plath confiding to her audience openly about her suicide attempts depicts her
purpose, which is to educate about the atrocities of depression and suicidal thoughts.
Lady Lazarus is an iconic poem for its gruesome truths about suicidal peoples
worlds. This great literary work sheds light upon the darkness that many people around the
world experience. Recently, a similarly controversial work came out called 13 Reasons Why
and received extremely mixed reviews. Many regard it as highly inappropriate because of its
goriness and that it was glorifying suicide like Plaths poem. The popular Netflix show and
Plaths poem both convey a suicidal persons thoughts, and even though it may seem extreme to
us, that is how their worlds feel to them. Although Bawer believes that Plath was glorifying
suicide, she wanted to confide about her suicidal thoughts to depict the calamitous truths of
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depression through figurative language, imagery, and autobiographical information because she
Works Cited
Bawer, Bruce. Sylvia Plath and the Poetry of Confession. Poetry Criticism, edited by
Elisabeth Gellert, vol. 37, Gale, 2002. Literature Resource Center. Originally published
Curley, Maureen. Plaths LADY LAZARUS. The Explicator, vol. 59. no. 4, p. 213, Summer
Narbeshuber, Lisa. The Poetics of Torture: The Spectacle of Sylvia Plaths Poetry. Canadian
Review of American Studies, vol. 34, no. 2, Mar. 2004, p. 185. Accessed 18 September
2017.
https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poet/sylvia-plath
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/49000/lady-lazarus