On Suicide and Resurrection

Sylvia Plaths‘s “Lady Lazarus” is a vivid look into the mind of the author mere months before the end of her life. She is known, in the vaguest of terms, as a member of the literary group entitled the “Confessional Poets.” In these writers’ poems, the speaker is, in fact, usually the poet herself. These poets express their own lives, thoughts, and feelings through their poems and in this way (as our book has pointed out) the poems are sometimes more useful to the authors than they may be to the readers.

In “Lady Lazarus,” Sylvia Plath recounts not only a suicide attempt (and her plans for another one) but also her successful rebirths. She begins her poem with a simple fact. She has done “it” again. She manages “it” every decade. At this point, the reader has no idea what she might be referring to. What follows is a simile and two metaphors which compare her inner sufferings to those of the Jews during World War II. The literary device of stanzas two and three is a favourite of Miss Plath: the Holocaust analogy (which is also evident in another of her poems, “Daddy”) Plath seems to favour these comparisons because of the strong emotions they evoke. Also, her German father is usually alluded to through such Nazi terms. Many have called her allusions to the suffering of the Jews unfounded. They believe she is trivializing the atrocities of the Holocaust. For, of course, what could a blonde little American girl born to a middle-class family possibly know about suffering? That’s the thing about Miss Plath; she likes to shock. To disgust. To evoke such terrible emotions from her readers. This is how she shares her feelings with her audience.

Stanzas two and three are also the first instance of Sylvia Plath’s objectification of herself. She is not a person. She is a paperweight. She is linen. She submits herself to the world around her. And yet, in stanza four, she has taken control. Ordering the peeling off of her napkin, she seems to rise above the others gathered there. She is fully aware of the effect she has over the crowd. Aware that she is terrifying.

Stanza four is also a direct reference to the title of her poem, her allusion to the biblical character of Lazarus, whom Jesus raised from the dead. He left his tomb still wrapped in his grave cloths which were removed by Jesus’s followers (here placed with men at a side-show).

Stanzas five and six expose the reader to horrific descriptions of the body that will outlive her apparent death. Then, suddenly, the poem’s image changes from a description of her corpse, to her smiling face. Her age. The juxtaposition between stanzas 6 and 7 is shocking. She seems renewed, if you will. And then, something else surprising: her proclamation of her superiority over death. She has nine times to die. Again, she is above mere mortals. She is immune to death. She is immortal. Miss Plath seems filled with such a confidence in her own ability to return from death, the question has been raised whether she truly meant to die in her next suicide attempt.

This is what’s referred to in stanza 8. “This is Number Three.” Capitalized. Titled. One year in every ten. She is thirty years old. Now the “it” is becoming clear. The author is planning to kill herself. Again. The fact that this poem was written not two months before she succeeded makes the line even more ominous and terrible. Her next line is filled with understatement. Her deaths are a trash? Her diction makes the action feel more like a chore she performs every decade. One merely to please “the peanut-crunching crowd.”

And then she becomes an object again. Her body is a freak show at a traveling carnival. She’s like nothing found in nature. She has risen from death. This fact alienates her from the surrounding crowd, makes her special, while also giving her a certain power over them. The speaker’s relationship with the “crowd” jumps from being submissive to being god-like again and again throughout the poem. In this way, the reader comes to learn of Sylvia Plath’s own self-view. In many ways she was arrogant, yes. (That’s evident throughout her poems and her published journals.) And yet, she is also very meek. (Be this because of her own inclination or because of society’s demands of women.)

“The crowd” is also a frightening creation. A group of faceless individuals who show almost too much interest in the revived suicide. They revel in morbid spectacle. They seem more monster than the zombie.

The poem then jumps, in stanza 12, to more autobiographical information. She refers the to the “first time it happened.” When Sylvia Plath was 10, (the same year she lost her father, by the way) she almost drowned in a swimming accident. “It was an accident.” Those words finally close the mystery of the “it.” “It” does not refer to suicide. How can it if the first time “it” happened was an accident? No, the “it” of the poem is her resurrection. Her inevitable resurrection that follows her every brush with death. Looking solely at the resurrection aspect of the poem, it seems that Miss Plath is certain she will always be able to come back. At least, the first eight times anyway. Did she truly mean to die not a few months later?

The “second time” Sylvia Plath mentions in “Lady Lazarus” refers to her first suicide attempt at the age of 21. She took a large overdose of sleeping pills, then crawled into a hole in the basement of her family’s house to die. She “rocked shut / As a seashell.” She was revived, of course, and in that way, cheated death a second time and as a result, as will be later referenced, became a prize of the doctors who made it possible.

“Dying / Is an art, like everything else. I do it exceptionally well.” Here, Sylvia Plath makes her wittier, even egotistical, side show. Some are natural-born athletes. Some; natural-born artists. Sylvia Plath is a natural-born die-r. (All right, so, that might not actually be a word. Humour me.) She places herself, once again, above others in regard to the skill with which she dies. In the skill with which she comes back from the dead. For, of course, only she is capable of such a feat. To Miss Plath, her resurrection is a show. A spectacle meant to shock others. In this way, her resurrection slightly mirrors her poetry: personal and tortured and yet public and shocking.

And she likes it. She loves the reactions her crowd gives her. “[T]he same brute / amused shout. / That knocks me out.” That line should be given special attention due to her masterful use of the enjambed line. “The same place, the same face, the same brute” If one is to pause at the end of the line, “brute” takes on a whole new connotation. She comes back to a brute. Her husband, the poet Ted Hughes, perhaps? Society? Only when combined with the next two words does the effect become less blunt. More vulgar.

Though, of course, there is a charge. Again, she resorts to prostituting herself to the surrounding crowd.

She then refers to her doctor, the man who brought her back from death. And yet, she calls him her enemy. Her doctor has not only brought her back to a life she never wanted, but also, in the process, has taken away her identity. She is no longer her own woman. Her life belongs to the man who returned her to the living. She is his magnum opus and, as such, she is no better than an object.

It is here, in her last few stanzas of “Lady Lazarus,” that her feminist side shines through. Her semi-autobiographical fiction novel, The Bell Jar, makes clear her feminist views and these can be seen in the warnings of stanzas 27 and 28. “Herr God, Herr Lucifer. / Beware. / Beware.” The German equivalent of “Mr.” is three-in-one: another reference to the suffering of the Holocaust (the suffering that’s happening within the author’s own mind); a reference to her German father, the prominent male figure in her young life who left her prematurely; and a reference to the male sex as a whole. Each syllable seems to be filled with hate. Each “Herr” rhymes with “ware,” giving a forceful bite to the words.

The final stanza recounts another resurrection. This time, the normally light-haired Sylvia Plath depicts herself with fiery hair, rising from her ashes, an obvious comparison between herself and the mythical Phoenix. Her last line is filled with an ominous warning toward the men in her life. She “eat[s] men like air.” An obvious desire to fight against the domineering power of every man she has known. The Sylvia Plath depicted at the end of her poem is one who has burst through society’s chains. In life, she never actualized her liberation. Perhaps she was planning to after her third resurrection.

Some have called “Lady Lazarus” depressing and morbid, and yet, while it might be both on some levels, the main point of the poem is not to depress but to explore. In these last few months before her death, when Sylvia Plath was churning out poems at the furious rate of two or three a day, she not only expresses the state of her own troubled mind, but also looks over her life, her deaths, and seeks closure within herself. Lady Lazarus is a culmination of all of her dying feelings: her objectification, her inferiority, her belief in her own ability to conquer death, her “Daddy” issues, her life, her egotism, her flippant, playful side, her feminism, her wit, and her own warped psyche. Unable to express her inner dialogues with the outside world, with society, she vents her insanity using only pen and paper and sculpts masterpieces.

1672 words.