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Sylvia Plath's "Lady Lazarus:" the carnival barker of personal tragedy

The 20th century feminist poet Sylvia Plath is almost as famous for her biography as she is for the greatness of her poetry, despite the fact that her confessional style has proven to be so influential upon subsequent generations of poets. Plath's suicide attempts while still an undergraduate at Smith College, coupled with her untimely demise as a young mother at her own hands has caused many critics to interpret her work solely through the lens of her personal life ("Sylvia Plath," The Academy of American Poets, 2011). Plath, however, in all of her poems often takes on different 'voices' or personas. Even her autobiographical novel, The Bell Jar was originally published under a pseudonym ("Sylvia Plath," The Academy of American Poets, 2011). "Lady Lazarus," a poem about a woman who has attempted and failed to commit suicide likewise is a dramatic monologue using the voice of a carnival barker and a genuinely tormented woman. The woman alternatively 'sells' herself as a suicide victim and gazes at herself from without, at a distance, as medical curiosity, in addition to voicing her own needs and feelings. The degree to which the poem is about Plath remains ambiguous, even though the poem is often interpreted as straight autobiography. By using the cool and playful tone of a persona, Plath's style suggests that the ultimate meaning of the poem is less a primal scream about the torment of the poet's life than it is an examination of how madness in women is considered to be a kind of freak show in the eyes of the world. The concerns of apparent well-wishes and doctors are self-interested rather than selfless and Plath self-consciously creates Lady Lazarus as a persona, rather than treats the poem as autobiography.

In the Bible, Lazarus was a man who died and was resurrected by Jesus, a kind of prefiguration to Christ's own resurrection from the dead and his salvation of all humanity to eternal life. However, according to the speaker of the poem, who has also "done it again./One year in every ten/I manage it --, " her resurrection is a medical triumph, not a religious one even though onlookers regard her as a kind of traveling religious sideshow (Plath 1-3). She continues to try to die over and over again, manifesting the almost-humorous failure of incompetent doctors and therapists to truly resurrect the depressed woman, given her determination to return to the grave. They boast that she is their triumph, but she actually manifests their tragic blindness. On the surface the speaker appears happy and smiling, but within she remains disturbed. "Like the cat I have nine times to die," she writes (21). This is despite the fact that the physical evidence of her suicide will evaporate. "The sour breath/Will vanish in a day" (14-15). She may appear 'whole' again, but this is of little value, since she is still broken within. But despite this sense of sorrow, the tone of the poem is playful, even mundane, deflating both the Biblical resonance of the title as well as the seriousness of the act. Critics of the poem, even literary scholars, often note that Plath's supposed nine lives eventually ran out, and "she died by her own hand, gassing herself in a London apartment in 1963 in the grips of a bitter depression" (Beam 2003). The poet does not speak of why she wants to die, but rather focuses on the attitude of supposed caregivers to her attempts at dying. They do not ask why she is trying to die; they merely resurrect her, to satisfy their own attempts of seeming godlike, in a typical, male fashion, and only focus on the fact that her female trappings of beauty, like smooth skin, have been restored.

According to the poem, the speaker 'Lady Lazarus' says she has attempted to die three times, each unsuccessfully. The pubic looks at her death-driven actions as a show rather than trying to understand why she wants to die. In her personal correspondence, Plath often expressed an inner conflict between the role of a wife and mother and her status as a poet. Through her poetry she mocks a world that cannot appreciate the contradiction she saw inherent not only in her life but the lives of all women. She takes on the tone of the carnival barker, implying that rather than being sympathetic, people are curious about her suicide as if she is a freak, and her actions are seen as a conjuring trick without larger, metaphorical significance. "The peanut-crunching crowd/Shoves in to see / Them unwrap me hand and foot/The big strip tease. / Gentlemen, ladies" (26-30). The pornographic strip tease suggests that Plath is laying herself emotionally bare, but also that there is a sexual undercurrent of interest in the gawker's delight at seeing her, as if a female suicide is automatically more interesting than that of a male's, yet not regarded as a tragedy, merely an inevitability of Lady Lazarus' nature. It is the suicide's body, not her art or her verbal expression and her feeling that is significant to the spectators. "In this poem a disturbing tension is established between the seriousness of the experience described and the misleadingly light form of the poem. The vocabulary and rhythms which approximate to the colloquial simplicity of conversational speech, the frequently end-stopped lines, the repetitions which have the effect of mockingly counteracting the violence of the meaning, all establish the deliberately flippant note which this poem strives to achieve" (Aird 1973). The flippancy of the verse mimics the flippancy with which female suicide and female aspirations are often regarded in the world, and also the coldness with which modern medicine has treated feminine functions.

In the voice of Lady Lazarus, Plath does not explicitly call herself a poet. Rather, she says her act of suicide is her art. "Dying/Is an art, like everything else,/I do it exceptionally well. / I do it so it feels like hell. / I do it so it feels real./I guess you could say I've a call" (41-47). These lines are eerily prescient of Plath's reputation, given that she became as famous as a repeated suicide as she was as a poet. The line that suicide feels like 'hell,' is deflated with her mocking assertion that killing herself and coming back is her 'calling' in life, proving the doctors' apparent success. "Plath's late poems are full of speakers whose rigid identities and violent methods not only parody their torment but also permit them to control it… She is above all a performer, chiefly remarkable for her manipulation of herself as well as of the effects she wishes to have on those who surround her" (Dickie 1975). Lady Lazarus is also full of showmanship, showcasing her own 'tricks' and abilities to die and come back again, trying to assert that it is she who possesses the power of resurrection, not the doctors, although they may lay claim to that ability.

Even while the recovery of the woman from death supposedly is a testimony to the doctor's ability to restore life, there are signs that their attitudes are evil and life-destroying, such as the metaphors of Plath's body that recall the Holocaust, rather than anything holy or life-giving. She calls those who save her 'Herr Doktor' and refers to the 'Jew linen' that covers her face like a shroud. The world's fascination with material objects at a place of death, like a concentration camp is manifested in her reference to "A cake of soap, / A wedding ring, / A gold filling" (77-79). Their obsession with her is an act of scavenging, more than real concern for her needs. They see her as a series of body parts and exploit her, like the Nazis exploited the Jews. The crowd and the doctors both view her in an objectified fashion, and when the speaker states: "Do not think I underestimate your great concern," she clearly speaks ironically as they prod and poke at her: "Ash, ash -- /You poke and stir. / Flesh, bone, there is nothing there -- " (73-76). The references to history are less to specific incidents or to suggest a perfect analogy between Plath and Jewish victims than they are to produce an emotional effect. "The Lady is a legendary figure, a sufferer, who has endured almost every variety of torture. Plath can thus include among Lady Lazarus's characteristics the greatest contemporary examples of brutality and persecution: the sadistic medical experiments on the Jew's by Nazi doctors and the Nazis' use of their victims' bodies in the production of lampshades and other objects. These allusions, however, are no more meant to establish a realistic historic norm in the poem than the allusions to the striptease are intended to establish a realistic social context" (Rosenblatt 1977). Plath creates an enclosed world that partially mirrors some of the concerns of her own, but also is far more extreme, and one in which the poetry and arts of Lady Lazarus are physical, rather than verbal.