Lady Lazarus (1962). Content and Description

Written soon after Ted Hughes had moved out, “Lady Lazarus,” the seventh in the collection Plath called Ariel, captures the emotional intensity of an embittered woman who, despite her agony and desire for revenge, is determined to restore herself to life again, taking her own life and regenerating herself from the smoldering ashes containing only remnants of what she has been, relics that include a cake of soap, a wedding ring, and a gold filling. Suicide is the “art of dying” the speaker does so well, a subversive act that thwarts all attempts that others have made to contain her.

The title of the poem alludes to a biblical story found in John 11:2 in which Jesus raises a good friend, Lazarus, from the dead. In the Plath poem, the speaker describes how she, as a cat with nine lives, has resurrected herself repeatedly, restoring her flesh eaten by the grave to life. The poem also concludes with another resurrection motif: the phoenix bird rising out of the ashes, a malevolent being with “red hair” ready to seek retributive justice, ready to “eat men like air.” Introducing the poem in a reading for BBC radio, Plath said:

The speaker is a woman who had the great and terrible gift of being reborn. The only trouble is, she has to die first. She is the Phoenix, the libertarian spirit, what you will. She is also just a good, plain, very resourceful woman. (Plath, Collected Poems 294)

“Lady Lazarus” is a confessional poem, a self- revelatory work that records the speaker’s state of mind, in this case, a powerful self-examination of repressed desires, anger, aggression, powerlessness, and the need for vengeance delivered in a vitriolic voice that is not only defensive but also bitterly ironic, filled with a dark humor that captures pain and selfloathing, each unearthed in the process of learning to understand the self. These thoughts flow as if the speaker is speaking to an analyst, a patient unveiling herself to her doctor.

In 28 irregularly rhyming tercets (stanzas of three lines linked by a rhyme scheme), the speaker identifies herself as a Holocaust victim. The allusion “Nazi lampshade” refers to a widely publicized image emblematic of Nazi atrocities: a lampshade made out of stretched, tattooed human skin, captured by Billy Wilder in his 1945 documentary of Buchenwald, a German concentration camp. In the third to the last stanza, what remain are only remnants, objects that would not burn, an allusion to Auschwitz, where blankets were made of human hair and soap of human fat, rings were looted from the ashes, horrific medical experiments were conducted on inmates by Josef Mengele, the chief medical officer, and gold fillings were removed by death-camp dentists.

Thus, “Herr Doktor,” “Herr Enemy,” “Herr God,” and “Herr Lucifer” evoke a monstrous, horrific image, one that haunts the poem’s speaker, refers to historical personages, and describes the experience of psychoanalysis, during which the speaker becomes the doctor’s “opus,” his work of art made from the dissected pieces of his subject.

In the poem this process of revealing the self is also compared to a strip tease, an event during which the speaker becomes a thing to be consumed by others’ eyes, an erotic spectacle over which much is made. Also, this image can be seen, as can the image of the doctor laboring over his artifice, with the nature of poetry: the way that the poet reveals herself in her works. In that sense, “Lady Lazarus” is one of Plath’s most self-reflexive poems, a poem that comments upon her own works with an ironic eye, not only envisioning how she will be interpreted— how her own life poured into language will become a spectacle—but also comically reflecting on mortality, the subject of so many of her poems, the subject of “Dying . . . an art like everything else,” that the speaker does “exceptionally well.”

It is one of Plath’s most famous poems, a work containing Plath’s dark form of parody, in which, by incorporating news, history, psychoanalytic terminology, sexual and racial stereotypes; commenting on her own artistic process as an artist; and revealing her deep-seated fears and anger, she creates a lyric poem capable of generating many, many meanings. To hear Plath reading a version of the poem for a BBC broadcast, visit: http://www.bbc.co.uk/arts/poetry/outloud/plath.shtml.

For Discussion or Writing:
1. What can be made of the numerous Nazi images in the poem? How do they affect the poem’s tone and enrich its possible meanings? Are they justified? What is their purpose?

2. Read the story of Lazarus in the Bible (John 11:41-44) and then think about why the speaker of the poem calls herself “Lady Lazarus.” What is the significance of the biblical allusion? Why is it significant that this Lazarus is a woman?

3. In John Knowles’s A Separate Peace (1959) the character of Phineas is compared with Lazarus, the biblical character. With Knowles’s characterization of Phineas in mind, write an essay that compares Plath’s use of the Lazarus story in “Lady Lazarus” with Phineas in the Knowles novel.

4. On one level, “Lady Lazarus” implicates its readers, who witness a ritualistic death performance. What position does the reader occupy in relationship to the speaker? How can this relationship be characterized? To extend this topic, explore several Plath poems that address specific individuals: the mother figure in “Medusa,” another woman in “Lesbos,” an uncle in “Stopped Dead,” a lover in “Fever 103°,” the speaker’s child in “By Candlelight,” and the maiden aunt in “The Tour.” How do the speakers of these poems portray, characterize, or position the audience to whom the poems are addressed? What role does the audience play in these poems? What statement can Plath be said to be making about the relationship between text and reader, art and spectator, actor and audience?