Sylvia Plath's Perception of Life in Lady Lazarus

Lady Lazarus by Sylvia Plath is a well written autobiography of her life. She cleverly uses words to describe her innermost thoughts and revelations of how she perceives her life.

In Protean Poetic, Broe states that Plath spoke of her later poems, I speak them to my self.and what ever lucidity they may have come from, the fact that I say them to myself, I say them out loud.(160) Writing to herself was a type of therapy, as was her suicide attempts. Sylvia Plath was an intelligent women who thinks that the root of all evil are men and gives a well rounded description of this in her writing and throughout her life.

Sylvia Plath was born to Otto Plath and Aurelia Schober in 1932, in Boston. Her parents were both of German descent and teachers at Boston University. In Literary Lives: Sylvia Plath, Linda Wagner-Martin says in her toddler life she already became angry with the male gender, as her parents favoured her brother Warren over her.(4) Her inability to love the opposite sex started at a very early age. She grew up in an well disciplined home, where her father was the centre of her mothers attention. It is possible that Plath became envious of the power that men had over women which taunted her throughout her life.

Plath was clinically depressed from a young age and struggled with every year to make it to the next, to the time she successfully committed suicide. In Lady Lazarus, Plath depicts her life and suicidal obsessions. She became so angry at men after her father died and left her, as she writes in Daddy. Plath feels her father stopped loving her by dying and in the poem she writes Daddy, I have had to kill you./You died before I had time.(2.6-7), and that was the reason why, she was who and what she became. Plath blames her father for her hatred towards the male gender and her unwillingness to accept things the way they are.

Lady Lazarus is a poem reflecting Plath's suicide attempts. Lazarus is an allusion in the Bible and was resurrected from the dead. Plath believed that through death, she was reborn. She uses an audacious mixture of incongruities: the Lazarus story from the Bible and the Nazi extermination, states Broe.(176) Plath uses her religious side and combines it with her knowledge and obsession with the Holocaust. Her father, being from Germany, had encouraged her knowledge of the Nazi concentration camps. In the New Testament of the Bible and the story of Lazarus Jesus called for him to come out of the tomb or grave cave(6.18), as Plath writes in the poem. There were a crowd of people watching the miracle of the resurrection of Lazarus. (John 11:38). Plath makes reference to this resurrection in many lines of the poem such as The peanut-crunching crowd/Shoves into see.(9.26-27) and Amused shout:/ A miracle!(18.54-55), making reference to the miracle that everyone had witnessed.

Each of the stanzas in the poem makes suggestions to men including the title, where Lazarus is a man, and brings us to believe she may be feministic. Broe says to Plath, dying is the defeatest ritual of feminity(176) and she wants the male audience to see how they cannot destroy her. She wants the male to see that they can bring her close to death, but she is more powerful and is able to rise again, for the third time. In Bright as a Nazi lampshade(2.5), Plath brings us to the horrible treatment that was carried out by the Nazis (men). She refers to herself as an opus or valuable, That melts to a shriek.(24.70), in the arms of the doctors and tormenting them when she writes Do not think I underestimate your great concern.(24.72). In this line she thinks the doctors are not concerned for her well being, they are just illustrating the power they have to revive her.

In her last stanza, she is warning God and Lucifer to beware of her presence, and that she does have a call, maybe not now, not at the present time of her third attempt at suicide, but another time. Plath seems to get a laugh out of the taunting the male gender in her poems, and for some ill fated reason she enjoys the attention. The warning in Lady Lazarus applies to one of Plaths posthumous reputation.(179) She writes of her life as being ordinary and wants it to be exciting. Plath finds routine in her life hard to deal with, which does not help her inner depression.

Sylvia Plath is a prisoner within herself and she uses images of the Nazi concentration camps and the Jews who suffered to express it. Her expressions of her inner depression was written in her later poems, which was therapeutic for her. Plath struggled everyday just to do what comes natural for people. The weakness she illustrated was blamed on the opposite sex, and ironically, at the same time, this is why she committed suicide.