Essay Example on Lady Lazarus: Death, Pain, and Reality

The main theme in Lady Lazarus is the obsession with death and suicide, but it also deals with psychological disorders, pain, grief, and inner suffering, condition, and female identity in society, eroticism, alienation, desperate search for the reality of the world, loss, and attempt to assert identity, among others. Sylvia Plath's poetic self turns inward to reflect on the outer and inner world, as its interior is oppressed by the outer world, a fact that, sometimes, most

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People are unaware of. As the poetic self speaks, it seems to impose and intensify its energy, and the staccato repetitions of the phrases build an intensity of thought.

The poet had tried to kill herself three times, once at the age of ten, once at the age of twenty, and just before the fatal time. It is evident that she suffered a mental condition where she underwent involuntary confinement and therapy in a psychiatric hospital, which worsened her clinical condition and contributed to her suicide. Thus, the poem is a violent criticism which ends in the threat of the final lines. The spectators cannot understand the victim's pain, only after her death do they realize what she felt, but in any case it is too late to postpone the suffering and to ease the guilt of the spectators.

The poem arouses a great participation from the reader, as the poet's life and death jump from almost every line and poetry as a whole creates an intense world, based on the psychological state of the poet, and an emotional landscape of deep crisis, while the existence of other people, nature or external reality are sometimes entirely modified by the poet's awareness of her own fragile identity (Tyson 21).

The general tone of the poem is highly ironic, which already denounces its postmodern character; the theme refers to death, the poetic self reports events after his failed suicide attempt, in this case the third: "This is Number Three" (eighth stanza). Even if it is really real facts in his life, the poet turns them into poetic fiction and gives himself the right to change them, to adapt them to the effect and meaning he seeks, which confirms the quality of his poetry.

Suicide is spectacularized, the frustrated suicidal self-poetic, who cannot kill herself, vulnerable, becomes an attraction for doctors, for other people, who look at her with curiosity and astonishment, which she calls the audience: "The peanut-crunching crowd / Shoves in to see "" The audience eating peanuts / Crowds to see "(ninth stanza), and maybe even to herself, in a sarcastic, ironic, self-ironic tone and with a black humor," plays " with a serious matter.

Death is seen as a psychological rebirth for the better, something positive, the attraction to death, is not in an ideal sense, platonic as it was for romantics, nor metaphysical, nor as an end, negative (Tyson 22). For that, the Christian myth of Lazarus is used, in the character of intertextuality in the title, which was resurrected by Jesus, who made him walk out of the tomb after being buried, being one of Jesus' miracles.

The classic myth of Phoenix is also suggested in the last stanza: a magical bird from classical mythology, which lives for hundreds of years before it burns and rises from its own ashes, aided by no one, but by its own strength. This image is quite adequate for the sense that the poetic self seems to want to convey from itself, reduced to ash, to nothing, but strong and self-sufficient, reborn from these ashes. This death and this rebirth from the ashes into life again, reveals a desire to live, to recover from the problem (s) or solve it (s), not to die, but in a dignified way, not oppressed, in this case by masculine forces as suggested. The poet was oppressed as a female subject, reduced to ashes, to nothing, which makes her want to take her own life three times throughout the poem, but which reappears strong, threatening and self-sufficient, reborn at the end of the poem.

The poetic self of "Lady Lazarus" adopts an ironic, debauching stance, but respects the Christian and classical figures and myths that are used to construct metaphorical comparisons and metaphors, this is an evident postmodern stance. Even changing Lazarus's gender to a woman, the tone of respect remains, almost an elegance suggested by the word "Lady", whose meaning refers to an elegant woman. The debauchery is not in relation to death, but in relation to other people who see the suicide and her death as an attraction, a diversion, without understanding, nor trying to understand the real reasons for such an extreme act. This symbolic death is not the end, but the restart of something, a recharge of forces for a more complete existence.

The allusion to facts related to World War II, to the atrocities of the Nazi concentration camps against the Jews, with whom the poetic self identifies, demonstrates a critical sense. From a political fact in the real world, it metaphorizes its own inner state, functioning as a powerful sense effect and helping the poetic self to express its inner feelings and states to the reader. Part of the particular for the universal, concentration camps were ignored by many people who knew about their existence and what was happening but did not act.

The poetic self assimilates the political and social and also ethical problem of war, which shook humanity too late. Its personal condition, and thus universalized, generalized its pain and particular states, feeling like a Jew in a concentration camp, giving more intensity and veracity to the way she exposes the autobiographical facts. From the confessional and personal to the universal, she shows herself not alienated: "A sort of walking miracle, my skin/Bright as a Nazi lampshade" second stanza); allusions that also appear in the twenty-sixth stanza, exploring legends or not about the Nazis, who would make lampshade with skin and soap with the fat of the bodies of the Jews, keeping the gold and valuable objects.

The poetic self is not sorry about the suicide attempts. There is a slight suggestion of the futility of the act: "What a trash/To annihilate each decade." (Eighth stanza), the poem changes through different tones, but none shows regret, such as the unpleasant descriptions of the physical effects after the suicide attempt: "They had to call and call/And pick the worms off me like sticky pearls." (Fourteenth stanza). With each attempt, the poetic self comes very close to death, challenges it, but does not die, and this strengthens it more and more. The attraction and cult of death refer to the romantic theme, which idealized death, as an ideal and platonic sublimation. But the meaning and the way of dealing with these themes are different, they have no ideal, platonic, metaphysical, transcendent or nihilistic meaning, but a psychologically positive meaning, an individual and real psychological revival. In this way, dying and being reborn psychologically becomes as laborious and vigorous as creating an art, an artistic object; actions intensified by one of the poems most emotive verses: "Dying/is an art" (fifteenth stanza). The meaning of this metaphor refers to the general context of the poem, because the poetic self is a frustrated suicide, who has tried to kill himself several times, such attempts were laborious and creative, as creating an artistic object is also a creative and laborious process in which she was very successful, she did not reach physical death, but a psychological resurrection, a rebirth of autonomy of a female subject in life, as well as revenge and retaliation against her oppressors, who led her to desire her own death through oppression. But for the poetic self it is possible to be reborn, because she is oppressed and killed psychologically, but not physically, she is able to rebel, recover, be reborn from the ashes and fight back.

Conclusion

Lady Lazarus deals with suicidal tendencies and unsuccessful suicide attempts, real biographical facts transformed into poetic fiction, since the poet gives herself the right to change them, to adapt them to the effect of the meaning she seeks, since she would have tried to kill herself twice in real life and not three, as exposed in the poem. The poetic self reports and reflects on events before and after these attempts, and the reasons that led her to commit such acts, as well as the results they brought about.

Lady Lazarus has an undoubted strength, a shocking power like dramatizing the mental state of a suicide bomber. The underlying hysteria is presented and controlled by rapid changes in tone. These serve to take the reader out of their position as an indifferent observer of the beginning of the poem, to sympathize - not to accuse - with the victim's intense suffering in her sense of loss of identity due to oppression.

Works Cited

Plath, Sylvia. Lady Lazarus. Edition, 1965.

Tyson, Lois. Critical theory today: A user-friendly guide. Routledge, 2014.