Lady Lazarus By Sylvia Plath Analysis

Sylvia Plath, who is highly regarded as an acclaimed American poet and story writer, was born to Otto and Aurelia Plath on October 1932 in Boston, Massachusetts. Sylvia Plath experienced a great deal of sorrow during her childhood because of her father’s death. Sylvia Plath expresses her ambivalent feelings and complex ideas about her father in her poems. Therefore, the poems reflected Sylvia Plath’s life. Lady Lazarus is Sylvia Plath’s one of her autobiography poems which stems from the author’s mind. The poem is written before her last attempting suicide, which she actually succeeded. The reader can use one’s imagination by reading her images and feelings in her confessional poem. In the poem, she reflected her hardship that she inevitably
She uses the word, “a Nazi” (“Plath” 5) to imply the authoritative and coercive manner like her another poem, Daddy. In contrast, she uses “Jews Linen” (“Plath” 9) to portray her powerlessness in front of the environment she faced. In a broad perspective of meaning, the reader also can associate the relationship between the male dominated society and oppressed, frustrated women, from the relationship between the Nazi and the Jews. For oppressed, frustrated women like Sylvia Plath, outside of the world is probably safer and freer place. The world is a cruel and infernal hell where filled with “the same place, the same face, the same brute” (“Plath” 53). From dead tired state of her, the readers can feel the weight and pain of her life. That is why she kept trying to throw away her false ego, which came from traditional feminine roles that society asks for, and the ego that she truly pursued, creative female poet. In this point, attempt of committing suicide is actually reborn or a fresh start to Sylvia Plath. She believes that she can have a resurrection, just like Lazarus did. In another perspective of view, she wanted to show that she can control her own life and death as a strong independent woman by practicing suicide in an oppressed
Her passion and expectations about composing poetry was stand out conspicuously when the reader looked her biography. The experiences she had in the poetry are something hard to do for commonplace people. Detailed pictures about her suicide situation shows her sense of poignancy. Her lifelong extraordinary experience definitely did not make her look vulnerable and passive women. She can be an aggressive like a roughneck. She showed her strong will that she can go to extremes to vocalize her torment.
Sylvia Plath establishes a link between her suicide and the Holocaust. It is made of private and a public matter which widen the reader’s narrow point of view. Her attempted suicide and the Holocaust are kept overlapping with her a gentle voice throughout the poem. “A sort of walking miracle, my skin/ Bright as a Nazi Lampshade” (“Plath” 4-5) is one of the good examples. She could maximized the wavelength of her death because of the