Literary Analysis Of Lady Lazarus, By Sylvia Plath

First, the poem’s interfering similes and metaphors undermine its formal coherence and consistency. Whereas the foregoing paragraph explains the uniformity of tone, syntax, diction, and purpose that emanates from the poem’s form, its conflicting comparisons make the poem’s subject protean at best and amorphous at worst. I will argue that Lady Lazarus is the latter. Plath employs several similes and metaphors to describe Lady Lazarus, but these comparisons serve only to destructively interfere with one another and thereby create confusion. Lady Lazarus is first described as a “walking miracle,” [7] then a “Jew” in Nazi Germany, [8] a “cat,”[9], “trash,” [10], a performer/artist, [11] a decidedly human “woman,” [12] and, finally, a mythical

In any event, I cannot imagine I am alone in finding very little commonality between miracles and trash. More concretely though, both of these classifications confuse Lady Lazarus’ role as a “performer.” If Lady Lazarus is trash, why would she attract a crowd, especially when the crowd is “charge[d]”[14] for merely “eyeing”[15] her? Yet, if Lady Lazarus is a walking miracle, why is there an air of derision with which Plath tracks the “peanut-crunching”[16] crowd, the audience for Lady Lazarus’ forced “strip tease”?[17] Surely it is understandable that people would gather to see a walking miracle, and would willingly pay a “charge” to do so. Indeed, if the aforementioned confidence with which Lady Lazarus infuses the poem is justified by anything but a dramatically inflated ego, then it is to be expected that she has some admirers. In short, the descriptions of Lady Lazarus as both a walking miracle and trash do not comport with each other, and neither of them comport with Lady Lazarus’ classification as a performer. This triangle of confusion is just the beginning of Lady Lazarus’ amorphous being.

Lady Lazarus’ comparison to a Jewish person experiencing the Holocaust is as troubling as it is confusing. From describing herself as “turn[ing] and burn[ing],” [18] “A cake of soap,/A wedding ring,/A gold

As this paper has previously mentioned, the poem’s fixation — made clear from the title, the very last stanza, and the content in between — is on Lady Lazarus’ extraordinary resurrections. Lady Lazarus considers herself a sort of master of death, claiming she dies “exceptionally well,”[28] but nevertheless that she does so only insofar as it “feels real.”[29] Notwithstanding the irony that the same person who claims to die “exceptionally well” has only one “accident[al]”[30] brush with death and one failed suicide attempt, in which she “rocked shut/As a seashell,”[31] “mean[ing]/To...not come back at all,”[32] the very attribute for which she praises herself — that attribute being her ability to evade death — is actually attributable to the very people she considers her enemies. In the case of her attempted suicide, Lady Lazarus survives only because “They had to call and call/And pick the worms off [her] like sticky pearls.”[33] Boiled down to its essentials, then, Lady Lazarus’ second brush with death is nothing more than an attempted suicide that failed because others intervened and revived her. It should now be quite clear that Lady Lazarus’ comparison to a phoenix is nothing more than deluded grandeur; it is no different than a woman claiming that she is an expert swimmer — a Lady Michael Phelps, if you will — after attempting to swim in dangerous waters and only surviving because she was saved from