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Lady Lazarus Analysis

The poem "Lady Lazarus" contrasts the speaker, Lady Lazarus, with the biblical figure of Lazarus. While Lazarus was resurrected by Jesus and was grateful, Lady Lazarus resurrects herself after suicide attempts "one year in every ten" and feels anger rather than gratitude. She uses vivid and disturbing imagery to describe her suicide attempts and resurrections, portraying them as public spectacles. Through these depictions and allusions to the Holocaust, she expresses feeling oppressed by her Jewish identity and gender roles. The poem ultimately ends with Lady Lazarus declaring that she will continue resurrecting herself and gaining strength despite life's difficulties.

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Tenzing Cassie Michelle
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456 views1 page

Lady Lazarus Analysis

The poem "Lady Lazarus" contrasts the speaker, Lady Lazarus, with the biblical figure of Lazarus. While Lazarus was resurrected by Jesus and was grateful, Lady Lazarus resurrects herself after suicide attempts "one year in every ten" and feels anger rather than gratitude. She uses vivid and disturbing imagery to describe her suicide attempts and resurrections, portraying them as public spectacles. Through these depictions and allusions to the Holocaust, she expresses feeling oppressed by her Jewish identity and gender roles. The poem ultimately ends with Lady Lazarus declaring that she will continue resurrecting herself and gaining strength despite life's difficulties.

Uploaded by

Tenzing Cassie Michelle
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Lady Lazarus, the speaker of the poem, is the suicidal yet angry, non-conforming,

female counterpart to Lazarus in the Bible. While Lazarus is a grateful man Jesus resurrected
from the dead, Lady Lazarus resurrects herself “one year in every ten,” and therefore forms a
contrast between the biblical figure and herself.

The second stanza is filled with allusions; she begins by stating that she is a sort of
walking miracle, which again conjures the image of the biblical Lazarus. However, she sounds
rather angry or terrifying than grateful. She alludes to the Holocaust by describing her skin as
“bright as a Nazi lampshade,” which, knowing that she is Jewish, shows how oppressed she
feels and how her roots have caused her misfortunes. It is further illuminated by her referring to
her face as “a featureless, fine/ Jew linen.” She mentions an “enemy” in the fourth stanza,
asking if she terrifies them. Although it is not specified who this enemy is, it portrays a sense of
aggression and fury at someone. The enemy can be interpreted as being the patriarchal society
which has forced her to become unhappy through its gender roles, or herself, as she may
believe that she has caused her own misery, as hell is oneself, not other people. The latter
explanation is supported by the fact that Sylvia Plath often felt unstable and therefore miserable,
always swinging between two opposite things, and she sounds bitter as she tells her enemy to
peel off the napkin; one can almost hear her dark laughter in the stanza.

The next few stanzas are terrifying and ugly, yet vividly attention-grabbing. She
implements the most unnerving diction in order to present herself as a corpse rather than a
woman of thirty, and then describes the situation as ridiculous. She states, “soon the flesh/ the
grave cave ate will be at home on me,” which mocks the situation by showing how absurd it is to
go back to play the loving mother and wife when she has just attempted suicide, and has been
feeling miserable for a long time, with her skin not feeling like her own plastered onto her body,
as if she were wearing another’s skin, or face. This suggests that she feels not her true self in
her own home.

She then shows the suicide attempt and its aftermath in a public-showing eventlike way,
with “the peanut-crunching crowd” that “shoves in to see them unwrap me hand and foot.” After
laying out her suicide attempts over the decades as an almost freakish, repeated occurrence,
she says, “there is a charge/ for the eyeing of my scars, there is a charge/ for the hearing of my
heart.” After the circus or freak show-like description, she returns to a much more aggressive
version of the Nazi allusion. She uses words like “Herr Doktor” and “Herr Enemy,” along with
comparisons of herself to objects that were taken by the Nazis in concentration camps, such as
a wedding ring and a gold filling. She proceeds to warn that she will rise out of the ashes where
she has died, and states, “I rise with my red hair/ And I eat men like air,” which is a powerful
image of a strong but broken woman resurrecting herself every decade following the harsh
reality of her suicide attempts. Thus, the poem ends as a reaffirmation of herself, and that she
will have strength, even if she feels that life is hard to manage sometimes.

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