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Isabella Brown-Quigley

Professor Holly Batty

English 102

19 September 2017

Is Lady Lazarus Glorifying or Confiding?

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

title reveals that Plath resurrected from her suicide attempts.

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

the Nazis used humans to make essentials.

Plaths autobiographical information changed the meaning of the poem. Without

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

feels it is as wretched as being a Holocaust victim.

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

in The New Criterion, vol. 9, no. 6, Feb. 1991, p. 18-27.

Accessed 22 September 2017.

Curley, Maureen. Plaths LADY LAZARUS. The Explicator, vol. 59. no. 4, p. 213, Summer

2001. Accessed 19 September 2017.

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.

Poet- Sylvia Plath. Poets.

https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poet/sylvia-plath

Accessed 23 September 2017.

Plath, Sylvia. Lady Lazarus. Poetry Foundation,

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/49000/lady-lazarus

Accessed 17 September 2017.