Lady Lazarus: A Jarring Facade of Empowerment
In “Lady Lazarus,” Plath tackles her repeated suicide attempts by taking on a bold, defiant persona ("Out of the ash/ I rise with my red hair/ And I eat men like air")—even as a "peanut-crunching crowd" watches her self-destruction. Plath's metaphorical depiction of herself as a Jew in Nazi Germany tells us a lot about her thoughts.
One of the most striking images in the poem is when she compares her skin to a “Nazi lampshade,” a reference to the rumor about lamps made from the skin of Holocaust victims. This image of her skin being forcefully stripped away mirrors the feeling of being exposed against her will, much like an animal inside the bell jar. Yet, she asks, “Do I terrify?”. The lampshade metaphor is fitting for Plath in a way, since it has the same grotesque and test-subject image as an animal trapped inside a bell jar. Instead of being peered in from the outside, the lampshade has her skin forcefully removed, alluding to her sense of being unwantedly exposed.
Plath then shifts focus to her looming relapse—a relapse that would ultimately prove fatal—and paints a picture of a society that eagerly dissects and ignores her pain, much like the clinical onlookers at her mental hospital (179). She describes this invasion as a “big striptease,” but then reclaims her power by declaring, “These are my hands and knees.” Here, instead of acting like an animal in the bell jar, analogous to Plath's view of a woman in society during her age, she acts like the powerful red-haired, man-eating phoenix at the end of the poem and expresses how she is unfazed by the crowd, even showing her hands and knees first.
She drives this metaphor of a phoenix home with lines below, even suggesting that she derives a cathartic pleasure from her own pain.
"Dying / is an art, like everything else. / I do it exceptionally well.
I do it so it feels like hell. / I do it so it feels real."
Towards the end, she returns to the Holocaust imagery, suggesting that she’s risen from the ashes. However, this rebirth is as much a facade as it is a coping mechanism. It is evident that Plath creates this false pretense to fight back against her Enemy: the Dr. Gordons of society who disregard and observe her. At the end of the book, the class discussion ended by questioning how a post-coming-of-age Esther can keep living in a world that drove her to the edge. Plath's "Lady Lazarus" tells us that despite a brief period of improvement, her condition ultimately worsened with her relapse, forcing her to adapt a pretense of strength and empowerment that ultimately wasn't enough to save her from her third attempt.
Hi Jay, the connections you make between Lady Lazarus, The Bell Jar, and Sylvia Plath's life are quite interesting. You've taken a deep dive into the underlying references in Plath's work, and I completely understand what you mean by "the looming relapse," and how despite her initial recovery (as represented by the phoenix) she is unable to fully escape the Bell Jar and that's what pushed her over the edge.
ReplyDeleteHi, great post! I appreciate how you connected your analysis to The Bell Jar, showing how Plath continued to suffer even after her recovery in the book. Framing the poem as a façade of empowerment is really interesting, and I definitely see where you're coming from. She's talking about all the expectations that society and the "Dr. Gordons" have for her, and she wants to fight against it with this poem. But underneath it all she is still suffering deeply.
ReplyDeleteHey Jay, Lady Lazarus feels to me a sad retaliation against the struggles Esther and Plath has. Even after the treatments and apparent confidence in the poem lines, it is evident they are a facade to the inner pain they go through. She flaughts off her professional task in dying as if it a trophy to show, knowing deep down the confidence is merely temporary in the giant lapse of time that is life.
ReplyDeleteHey Jay, I really liked how you tackled the somewhat grotesque Holocaust imagery she uses in her poem. The lampshade metaphor really does make it seem like she is exposed, similar to how she is being unraveled like a mummy. The phoenix metaphor also fits with the title of the poem. Lazarus was a person who was resurrected from the dead, as we see her do in her poem. However, to her, this resurrection isn't a miracle, it seems to be a curse, but as you mention, she may get a sense of pleasure from it. Great post!
ReplyDelete"Do I terrify?" gives the impression that Plath has decided to control how she views her appearance and nature in the Bell Jar in order to feel more performative in front of the "peanut-crunching crowd." You make an interesting point about the possibility of Plath putting up a persona which I hadn't previously thought about. The Holocaust imagery also brings up a sad idea in which Plath is trying to run away from the people who have mistreated her in the world, although she comes up short each time.
ReplyDeleteThe notorious line "bright as a Nazi lampshade" is a particularly stark and jarring example of how this poem works--merely the fact that the phrase "Nazi lampshade" (which sounds so unnervingly domestic) can allude to a whole range of dizzying horrors is noteworthy. It's the kind of thing where "if you know, you know," and most readers in 1963 (and indeed today) would KNOW. It manages to be grotesquely graphic while also sounding simple and familiar. The mere fact that we are able to make this quick link between human skin and a lampshade is utterly horrific, once you think about it for a second or two. So on one level Plath is equating the medical/psychiatric world as a bunch of Nazis who torture and experiment on their "patients," turning her own recovery into a Frankensteinian kind of reconstruction. Because her "skin" in this image *is still on her body*. She has been "repatched" and healed, as she is at the end of the novel, but here she equates the work of those doctors with Nazi pseudo-science. In this imagery, there is something *unnatural* about the speaker being "raised from the dead" like Lazarus--it's an opportunity for these sick doctors to show off their handiwork, and it implies that the speaker is complicit in the show, taunting the "peanut-crunching crowd" and enjoying the spectacle ("do I terrify?"), as Citlali notes. The man-eating Phoenix at the poem's end is itself a pretty terrifying vision of what "mental health" looks like.
ReplyDeletewsg JP! I found it very interesting how you highlight the idea of self destruction and unwanted exposure in Lady Lazarus. This could reference to relationships with society as someone who is in a severe psychological state. The underlying references you highlight throughout the poem are definitely valuable insights into this powerful poem. I enjoyed this blog post, as it allowed me to reflect and relate it to my own ideas of this poem. Thank you JP!
ReplyDeleteThe overall grotesqueness of Lady Lazarus mixed with Plath's bold words delivers her terrifying confidence that she will make it out of the mental health crisis alive again. I really liked your analyses of the crude metaphors to the Jews and Nazi Germany but also how these descriptions are a way for her to describing fighting against the society that's inadvertently bringing her down. However, I think your best point is that this is a coping mechanism for her failing psychological state and that it was unable to stop her from killing herself.
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