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A paperweight,
My face a featureless, fine
Jew linen.
As a seashell.
They had to call and call
And pick the worms off me like sticky pearls.
Dying
Is an art, like everything else,
I do it exceptionally well.
'A miracle!'
That knocks me out.
There is a charge
I am your opus,
I am your valuable,
The pure gold baby
A cake of soap,
A wedding ring,
A gold filling.
I hope to demonstrate how the themes and motifs explored by Sylvia Plath in ‘Lady
Lazarus’ (Ariel, 1962) enhance its unique nature and to consider how the poem fits
into the wider context of Plath’s collection Ariel, the Confessional mode and
child for the duality of manic depression as an influence on the Confessional mode.
The poetic technique that informs the way in which Plath arduously forges a persona
is what translates into a spell bindingly theatrical piece. Plath achieves this by
the critical situation of choosing death over life, explains her motives and effectively
reveals her life pattern: ‘I have done it again. / One year in every ten/ I manage it’ In a
traditional monologue such as Robert Browning’s ‘My Last Duchess’ the speaker
addresses the emissary of his cruelty. Alternatively Plath uses the monologue to
address the spectators of her self-harm as well as the agent of her destruction which
1
Sylvia Plath, ‘Lady Lazarus’, Ariel: The Restored Edition (Great Britain: Faber and Faber Limited,
2004), p. 16.
33114823 4
as ‘Lady Lazarus’ one must use the wealth of poetic characteristics provided that
sever it from the “I” presented to us. In fact, I would argue that the pronoun “I” is
used to reconcile the dual aspects of the speaker and the craft of poetry itself. Plath
explores the notion of “ I” internally but reflects the complexity of the external world
at the same time. She clearly uses the Confessional mode as a means by which to
“make it new” in the words of Ezra Pound and to construct a form that has profound
In this poem we see the cyclical rhythm of death and revival reflecting Plath’s
pervasive philosophical concerns with the Jungian concept of the individual’s dual
nature. The poem uses the doomed Electra figure that reoccurs throughout the Ariel
collection to convey the ferocious duality that emerges from loving and hating the
patriarchal figure. The figure is contradictorily described as both ‘Herr Doktor’ and
‘Herr Enemy’ 2 (64-66) in a manner that threatens both her father and her husband as
she leaves her wedding ring behind. ‘Lady Lazarus’ was unsurprisingly written
shortly after the poem ‘Daddy’ during Plath’s most profusive literary period and so it
can be interpreted as what Judith Kroll called a ‘companion piece’3 as both poems
portray the husband, father and male patriarchal figure as ‘Herr God’ and ‘Herr
Lucifer’. 4 (79) Theses epithets express how man is a dual force that is at one with
both the underworld and salvation. ‘Lady Lazarus’ furthers this ritualised approach
conveying "a girl with an Electra complex whose father died while she thought he
2
Sylvia Plath, ‘Lady Lazarus’, Ariel: The Restored Edition (Great Britain: Faber and Faber Limited,
2004), p. 16.
3
Judith Kroll, Chapters in Mythology: The Poetry of Sylvia Plath (Sutton Publishing Limited, 2007),
p. 122.
4
Ibid., p. 17.
33114823 5
was God"5 and in response becomes the female incarnation of the dead Lazarus. In
doing so the speaker liberates herself from the irreconcilable influence of the male
figure and realizes her full potential as a self sufficient goddess who ‘rises out of the
ash/ to eat men like air’6 (82-84) and is energized by what Plath herself described as
“the terrible gift of being reborn”.7 The image of the phoenix is utilized by Plath to
channel the speaker’s personal rebirth into the realms of poetry. Crucially the pronoun
specifically personal relation to the father figure to the world of men and finally into a
looming reincarnation of the self. In the guise of Lady Lazarus the girl with the
[…]’8 (11-12) She grows increasingly powerful throughout the stanzas and
increasingly akin to the phoenix image alluded to at the end of the poem that will
‘rise’ and ‘eat men like air.’ The ancient signifier of power, lust and terror associated
with the phoenix is evident in the poem’s portrayal of Lady Lazarus, who is literally
fraught with energy, as she makes a ‘Comeback’9 (52) from suicide to defiantly face
‘the same place, the same face, the same brute’. In the first tercet Lady Lazarus
announces ‘I have done it again’ and the operative word here is “I” which signifies
her self-generative power. Similarly in the next stanza she calls her skin ‘A sort of
walking miracle’10 (4) suggesting that the skin is a metaphor for her humanity as
luminous as a ‘Nazi lampshade’11 (5) and electrified by persecution. Once again Plath
reflects the power Lazarus generates from pain. Likewise the speaker’s appraisal of
5
Kroll, p. 123.
6
Ibid.
7
Sylvia Plath, ‘Lady Lazarus’, in Ariel: The Restored Edition (Great Britain: Faber and Faber Limited,
2004), p. 16.
8
Ibid.
9
Ibid.
10
Ibid., p. 14.
11
Ibid.
33114823 6
her face as ‘a featureless fine Jew linen’12 (8-9) intimates the terror that Plath intends
to be associated with her amalgamation of the phoenix and Lazarus in the female
humanity from the speaker so that she can transcend it: communicating the manner in
which she has found life-in-death by disrupting the traditional boundaries between
them. It also implies that the speaker has been obliterated by suffering and effaced
through the process of repeatedly attempting to die. The freakish quality implied by
this description is mitigated and reinforced by the troubling veneer of beauty that is
implied through Plath’s depiction of a face that is like ‘fine […] linen’. In this
and smoothness as if it were the face of a person always reborn. The full capacity for
whiteness to signify emptiness and purity is explored by Plath here and it is reiterated
in her description of the speaker’s skin as a ‘napkin’ (10, p. 14.) and her foot as a
‘paperweight’ (7, p. 14.). Whilst these objects may not necessarily be white paper,
linen and napkins are associated most readily with this color. Plath utilizes these color
associations to bolster her radical images illustrating her considerable skill as a poet
as she animates her vision of Robert Grave’s white goddess who is clearly ‘sister’ to
‘Plath’s phoenix’ according to Judith Kroll. Furthermore, when the speaker declares
‘what a trash/ To annihilate every decade’ (23-24) she imparts how her actions may
make a trash or mockery of life but she can and does manage this annihilation
‘exceptionally well’ (45).13 The result of this statement is once again mingled with
dual associations, it is almost wryly humorous and yet there is nothing humorous
about Lady Lazarus’ ability to die and be reborn. The dual persona implicit within
Plath’s portrayal of a woman who is both Lazarus and phoenix is palpable in the
12
Ibid.
13
Ibid., p. 15.
33114823 7
fourth tercet:
It is the arbitrariness of these signs of life that is alarming to the reader as the speaker
relishes the signs of decay and she is resplendent in the process of dying: ‘soon, soon
the flesh/ The grave cate ate will be/ At home on me’15 (16-18) Plath suggests that the
speaker is so familiar with death that makes a home of her psyche and her body. This
seductive to those who are incredulous at the spectacle of her mission to achieve life-
in-death. However the lure of the speaker derives from her Other-ness and
accordingly Plath builds upon the image of the speaker as a freak show, from whom
the crowd clamor to see ‘The big strip tease’16 (29) The image of the phoenix as a
symbol of power as well as one of lust corresponds with the Plath’s portrayal of not
only a woman capable of giving life and taking it away but an enigmatic deity,
straddling the two worlds of life and death and forging them into one.
The image of the Nazi and their treatment of the Jews is repeatedly used throughout
the poem. Plath uses the word “Jew” to signify torment and this personalized
enactment of historical events is so loaded with impact for the post-Holocaust reader
that it haunts the remainder of the poem. Furthermore it corresponds profoundly with
the strength and suffering Plath builds up to fever pitch in the persona of the lady
objectifying a Jewish person into mere parts by using phrases such as "A cake of
soap, /A wedding ring, /A gold filling"17 (76-78) to represent what remains of the
14
Ibid., p. 14.
15
Ibid.
16
Ibid.
17
Ibid., p. 16.
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speaker’s humanity amongst the ash the doctor-Nazi-patriarch tries to “poke and
stir”.18 (74) This alludes to the medical experimentation that was practiced by the
Nazi doctors and the speaker’s response to investigative probing is “Flesh, bone, there
is nothing there”.19 (75) The starkness of these images combine to create a vision of
Plath essentially connects the speaker’s agony and objectification at the hands of men
to the superiority of the doctor who is the master of diagnosis and definition in the
out of the sensuous and emotional experiences I have, I must say that I
cannot sympathize with these cries from the heart that are informed by
nothing except a needle and a knife, or whatever it is. I believe that one
The journey of “I” in ‘Lady Lazarus’ that straddles the underworld and the material
one simultaneously, suggests a wider importance in relation to the journey of the first
Petrarchan sonnets but notes how there was typically a mask that provided a barrier
between the poet and the speaker. In ‘Lady Lazarus’ the Confessional form seems to
take on a far more personal nature more akin to Walt Whitman’s self revelatory “I”
18
Ibid.
19
Ibid.
20
Cate Marvin, ‘Tell All the Truth but Tell it Slant: First Person Usage in Poetry’, Poets.Org
<http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/5888> [accessed 20/08/2009]
33114823 9
than William Shakespeare’s. The transition of Plath’s utilization of “I” from the
personal to the wider world demonstrates a shift from the doctrine of impersonality
that defined the poetic orthodoxy of modernism in the early 20th century. I would
argue that to Plath, the aim of the Confessional mode was to widen its net outwards
and by equating the psychological torment of Lady Lazarus with the ritualized
victimization of the Jews she achieves this. The speaker, however, ironically reverses
the passivity inherent in this comparison to the Jews in her transmutation into the
rising phoenix at the close of the poem. As Leonard Sanazaro points out in Linda
Wagner’s Critical Essays on Sylvia Plath: "This willfulness to arise and devour
intimating the intensifying torment of the modern age by resourcefully using the
the patriarchal indignities Lady Lazarus must transgress in order to fulfill her mission
in liberating herself.
this poem. Brooks defines poetry as the ‘language of paradox’ that is ‘hard, bright,
witty’ and shows awareness of the poetic language’s capacity to balance ‘denotations
with connotations’.22 It is vital in close reading the poem to apply this formalist
outlook to the voice Plath herself described as Virginia ‘Woolfish’ but ‘tough’.23 It is
through Plath’s acute attention to the details in language that she creates an
21
Wagner, Linda. Critical Essays on Sylvia Plath. (Boston: G.K. Hall & Company, 1984) p. 71.
22
Cleanth Brooks, “The Language of Paradox” in Literary Theory: An Anthology (London: Blackwell
Publishing, 1998), p. 54.
23
Christina Britzolakis Sylvia Plath and the Theatre of Mourning (London: Clarendon Press, 1999) p.
72.
33114823 10
astounding landscape that reflects the contradictory nature of human experience. This
effect is what Brooks lucidly called the ‘continual tilting of planes’ in poetic metaphor
that creates universal insight. In my view Brooks description coincides well with the
primary awareness Plath used to remodel her experiences tactically into poetry rather
allusions and radical imagery, always with contrast in mind, to create an ultimately
poetic vision rather than merely a confessional tract. Theme, language and form
combine within the poem to create the continuation of Plath’s Ariel voice. Al Alvarez
describes it as ‘grief stricken but pared down’ he astutely observes how it veers
between the ‘minor-key’24 and finely tuned violence: The ‘smiling woman’25 (19)
becomes ‘The pure gold baby/ That melts to a shriek.’26 (69-70) in a manner that
mimics the progression of the poem into an increasingly rapturous tone.The dramatic
monolgue is a form that best showcases the speaker’s physical and psychological
response to a cycle of metaphorical deaths and rebirths. For instance, we are provided
insight into how her body is objectified and her reaction to this:
As Frank Bidart astutely observes Plath is “using something from the tradition…using
24
Al Alvarez, ‘How Black Magic Killed Sylvia Plath’, The Guardian, Wednesday 15 September 1999
<http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguardian/1999/sep/15/features11.g2> accessed [20/09/2009]
25
Sylvia Plath, ‘Lady Lazarus’, in Ariel: The Restored Edition (Great Britain: Faber and Faber Limited,
2004), p. 14.
26
Ibid., p. 16.
27
Ibid., p. 15.
33114823 11
that this is how I must speak, that it feels fresh and original”.28 The Tradition Bidart
refers derives from Eliot’s hugely influential essay “Tradition and The Individual
Talent”: an essay that defines poetic originality by an ability to embody the whole of
literature’s past and make it new. In my view, Plath achieves this by manipulating the
the more common male speaker central to poems such as T. S. Eliot’s ‘The Love
Song of Alfred Prufrock’ in lines such as: ‘I may be skin and bone. / Nevertheless I
am the same, identical woman’29 (34) she also illustrates knowledge of the Tradition
by using an open verse structure that does not abandon symmetry in its tercets and
does not abandon rhyme. In this sense she is making it new lyrically and contextually.
The tercet metre scheme in Lady Lazarus does not follow a constant rhyming pattern
however it contains near rhymes that often spill onto the next line or create internal
rhymes such as ‘hair’ and ‘air’ ‘shell’ and call’. Alternatively she uses perfect rhyme
for more obvious emphasis such as: ‘I turn and burn’.30 (72) Plath also employs
anaphora in a way that recalls Whitman’s fondness for the rhythm accentuated by this
technique: ‘It's easy enough to do it in a cell. / It's easy enough to do it and stay put.’31
(49-50) Repetition such as: ‘Ash. ash --- ’32 (73) and ‘Beware, / Beware.’33 (80-81)
It really goes.
The charge, in this visceral image, does not merely represent the literal payment of
the peanut crunching crowd to watch her resurrection. Plath’s repetition of the word
charge establishes this female figure’s monstrous power and the unyielding dominion
she has over her entire body. Plath effectively houses a dark monologue on death and
rebirth within a rhythmic structure that is unpredictable but always present and
provocative. She subsequently infuses the poem with a sense of pulsing urgency that
In ‘Lady Lazarus’ the struggle to regain a unified sense of self is transformed into a
universal concern. The subject of “I and its personal agonies and grievances with the
conflict of the internal and external world are transported into wider artistic and
independent from its inspiration. Secondly it provides a gateway into the nature of
man as whole. The poem is much larger than one individual’s personal experiences
and demonstrates how one can make signs and signifiers out of them, imparting a
form of knowledge that may derive from “I” but radiates outwards to capture the
observes in “How Black Magic Killed Sylvia Plath” that poets “experiment with new
forms not in order to cause a sensation but because the old forms are no longer
adequate for what they want to express”. Alvarez describes Plath making it new as an
‘astonishing’ product of ‘the bravery and curious artistic detachment with which she
34
Ibid., p. 16.
33114823 13
went about her task’35 Indeed, Plath shapes experience as if she were a blacksmith
manipulating iron into steel. Her style is both crushing in its blows and characterized
35
Al Alvarez, ‘How Black Magic Killed Sylvia Plath’, The Guardian, Wednesday 15 September 1999
<http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguardian/1999/sep/15/features11.g2> accessed [20/09/2009]