Disclaimer: This is a machine generated PDF of selected content from our databases.

This functionality is provided solely for your

convenience and is in no way intended to replace original scanned PDF. Neither Cengage Learning nor its licensors make any
representations or warranties with respect to the machine generated PDF. The PDF is automatically generated "AS IS" and "AS
AVAILABLE" and are not retained in our systems. CENGAGE LEARNING AND ITS LICENSORS SPECIFICALLY DISCLAIM ANY
AND ALL EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES, INCLUDING WITHOUT LIMITATION, ANY WARRANTIES FOR AVAILABILITY,
ACCURACY, TIMELINESS, COMPLETENESS, NON-INFRINGEMENT, MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR
PURPOSE. Your use of the machine generated PDF is subject to all use restrictions contained in The Cengage Learning
Subscription and License Agreement and/or the Gale Literature Resource Center Terms and Conditions and by using the machine
generated PDF functionality you agree to forgo any and all claims against Cengage Learning or its licensors for your use of the
machine generated PDF functionality and any output derived therefrom.

Plath's "Lady Lazarus"

Author: Jeffrey Meyers
Date: May 2012
From: Notes on Contemporary Literature(Vol. 42, Issue 3)
Publisher: Notes on Contemporary Literature
Document Type: Essay
Length: 1,212 words

Full Text:
Plath's title obviously refers to the passage in John 11:43-44: Jesus "cried with a loud voice, Lazarus, come forth. And he that was
dead came forth, bound hand and foot with grave clothes: and his face was bound about with a napkin. Jesus said unto them, loose
him, and let him go." The "loud voice" was not meant for Lazarus, who could have been summoned by a mere whisper, but to attract
the attention of the gathering audience. In the next chapter of John's Gospel, Lazarus sups with Jesus, Jews come to look at him, the
chief priests plan to kill him and he remains corporal evidence of the miracle. And that is the last we hear of Lazarus. (The Lazarus in
Luke 16: 19-37 is a different man.) His function is to show Jesus' miraculous powers and help convert the skeptical Jews. But the
Gospel misses a great dramatic opportunity to describe how Lazarus felt when he came back from the dead --bound up with
cerements like a mummy and with a piece of cloth to keep his mouth clamped shut. And it does not tell us what sort of life Lazarus
led before and especially after he was resurrected: prefiguring Jesus' own personal comeback.

Many great writers have obliquely treated this morbid theme. In Homer, Virgil and the Inferno, Odysseus, Aeneas and Dante visit the
Underworld, interview the dead about their posthumous existence and return to the terrestrial world. But the inquisitors remain alive
and the dead remain dead. In Edgar Poe's stories "Berenice" (1835) and "Ligeia" (1838) the living are nearly dead and the dead, with
a remnant of consciousness, still living. In Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897) the vampire returns from the dead to sustain himself on the
blood of his victims, but offers no account of how he feels when emerging from the grave. T. S. Eliot's Prufrock boldly announces, "I
am Lazarus, come from the dead, / Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all." But, relapsing into his customary paralysis, he fails to
fulfill his promise and tells us nothing.

D. H. Lawrence provides the most detailed (not to say, vivid) description of the return of Christ Himself, and gives a slangy and
blasphemous account of his novella: "I wrote a story of the Resurrection where Jesus gets up and feels very sick about everything,
and can't stand the old crowd anymore--so cuts out" (Collected Letters, ed. Harry Moore, NY: Viking, 1962, p. 975). Lawrence's
description of physical pain in The Man Who Died (1929), written only a year before his death, was based on his own fatal
tuberculosis. Unlike Lazarus, who's miraculously summoned and suddenly returns, Lawrence's Jesus, still suffering from crucifixion
wounds and far from triumphant, is most unwilling to struggle back to life: "Through all the long sleep his body had been full of hurt,
and it was still full of hurt. He did not open his eyes. Yet he knew that he was awake, and numb, and cold, and rigid, and full of hurt,
and tied up.... He could not move if he wanted: he knew that. But he had no want. Who would want to come back from the dead? A
deep, deep nausea stirred in him, at the premonition of movement" (NY: Vintage, 1960, p. 165).

The autobiographical heroine of Plath's "Lady Lazarus" doesn't actually return from the dead: the analogy is inexact. But--unlike the
characters in Poe, Stoker and Eliot--Plath describes her suicide attempts and does tell what it was like to come back from her close
calls. The paradox of the poem is that for Plath life itself is a kind of death, and she returns from near death in order to get dead once
again. She defines suicide as an art, a calling, a religious vocation; she does it exceptionally well yet keeps failing. But these failures
give her another chance to demonstrate her powers of self-destruction and self-revival. She's thrilled by approaching the edge of
extinction and then, somehow, by drawing back just in time to avoid death.

The first of Plath's three suicide attempts, one for each decade of her life, was a half-hearted effort at the age of ten to drown herself.
This episode took place two years after her father's death, which she interpreted as a self-willed and treacherous abandonment of his
family. In her second attempt-after a nervous breakdown following her junior year at Smith--she took an overdose of sleeping pills
and crawled into the cellar of her home in Wellesley, Massachusetts, in August 1953. Conflating her own near-drowning with the
death of the father in The Tempest--"These are the pearls that were his eyes"--she writes, in the poem that appeared posthumously
in Ariel (1965): "These are my hands.... They had to call and call / And pick the worms off me like sticky pearls" (NY: Harper, 1966,
pp. 6-9). In her third suicide attempt, after the break-up of her marriage to Ted Hughes, she tried to crash her car in Devon in August
1962. The horrible irony is that we know--as Plath did not--that her fourth try at suicide--by gas, as in the Nazi extermination camps--
would succeed. She finally killed herself, only three months after she wrote this poem in her last rush of inspiration, in February 1963.

In the notorious, contentious and yet convincing "Lady Lazarus," the Gentile Plath identifies with the Jewish victims of the Nazis and
equates her suffering with theirs. Her psychological justification is that her beloved-and-hated dead father was born in Germany, and
that Hughes' Jewish lover, Assia Wevill, was also born in Germany and became a refugee in British Palestine before moving to
England. In a grotesque imitation of Plath, Assia also gassed herself and her daughter by Hughes in 1969.

Plath composed "Lady Lazarus" in subtly rhymed triplets and in an eerily matter-of-fact tone. She repeats the key images of
dismembered body parts: skin, foot, nose, eye, teeth, flesh, bone, face, heart, blood and hair, and the multivalent "charge," meaning
the fee from the crowd that watches her perform (like Franz Kafka's "Hunger Artist") her suicide act, the vicarious thrill they get from
observing her self-destruction and the current that shot through her body during her electro-convulsive shock treatments (gruesomely
described in her novel The Bell Jar.)

Alluding to Freud and her years of psychoanalysis, Plath links Herr Doktor, who conducted ghastly medical experiments in the
extermination camps, with Herr Enemy, who saved her life when she wanted to die. Similarly, the apparent opposites of Herr God
and Herr Lucifer, beyond good and evil, become one entity. Echoing Coleridge's "Kubla Khan"--"And all should cry, Beware! Beware!
/ His flashing eyes, his floating hair!"--she threatens her adversaries and assumes devilish red hair. From the ashes of the
crematorium she rises, like both Lazarus of the Old Testament and the Phoenix of Classical mythology, to cannibalize men as
naturally as she breathes: "Herr God, Herr Lucifer / Beware / Beware. / Out of the ash / I rise with my red hair / And I eat men like air."
"Lady Lazarus" brilliantly expresses Plath's implacable hatred of all her enemies, including everyone close to her: her oppressive
parents, doctors, husband, rival in love and, most of all, herself.

Jeffrey Meyers, FRSL, Berkeley, California

Meyers, Jeffrey

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2012 Notes on Contemporary Literature

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Meyers, Jeffrey. "Plath's 'Lady Lazarus'." Notes on Contemporary Literature, vol. 42, no. 3, 2012. Gale Literature Resource Center,
https://link-gale-com.aclibproxy.idm.oclc.org/apps/doc/A293545314/LitRC?u=txshracd2904&sid=LitRC&xid=2c926712. Accessed
6 May 2020.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A293545314