Sylvia Plath
Jamie Daugherty

            The early 1960’s were not a very friendly time for well-educated female writers in America. Thus, Sylvia Plath’s poems reflect her frustration and discomfort with her identity as a writer, not as a June Cleaver-type homemaker. The poems “Daddy” and “Lady Lazarus” in particular convey her anger caused by the limited role her society provides for women.

To understand the source of the pain and anger in Plath’s poems, one must consider the social environment in which they were written. Throughout the few decades of Plath’s life, a woman’s “rightful” place was in the home. Most women were not encouraged to attend college or find jobs, but instead to become housewives. Women did not define themselves by their own achievements, but by those of the men in their lives – their fathers and husbands.

Therefore, in “Daddy,” Plath finds her identity in terms of her father’s. Yet since he died when she was very young and she does not have him to complete her, she does not see herself as a whole person. Throughout the poem, she describes herself as small or fragmented. In referring to her attempted suicide, she compares herself to something like a glass or ceramic figurine that has been broken, then glued back together. Of course, even with the repairs, such things are never the same as they were before the damage. Clearly, the poem’s speaker feels that her father’s death shattered her life. She is angry at him for leaving her, and at the people who stopped her from reuniting with him in death.

The Nazi/Jew imagery shows Plath’s bitterness at being subordinated to male authority. It also suggests a masochistic, sadistic relationship: “every woman adores a Fascist, the boot in the face, the brute brute heart of a brute like you.” In comparing herself to one of the Jewish victims of the Holocaust, the speaker reveals her helplessness and suffering at the hands of patriarchal power. And she is still a tiny, fragmented person: “I may be a bit of a Jew.”

Another interesting image is the speaker’s childlike difficulty with her father’s native tongue, German. There are two metaphors comparing language to something imprisoning her: a barbwire fence and a train hauling her off to a concentration camp. As a writer, language is Plath’s only tool. The unwillingness of her father, or metaphorically, male-dominated society, to accept or understand her words renders her powerless.

“Lady Lazarus” further reveals her dismay at society’s treatment of her writing. It seems to the speaker that as a woman writer, she is regarded as a bizarre abnormality, like part of a circus freak show. The lines “there is a charge, a very large charge for a word or a touch or a bit of blood or a piece of my hair or my clothes” signify a feeling that publishing her poems for income is like pawning off her emotions to people who do not understand or appreciate them, but who are simply amused by them.

The Nazi imagery appears again, with even more force than in “Daddy.” “Herr Doctor… Herr Enemy… Herr God, Herr Lucifer” – it seems the whole world is working to overpower and destroy her. This evil force breaks her down and picks from her whatever bits it deems useful: “a cake of soap, a wedding ring, a gold filling.”

Plath probably did feel like the whole world was against her, as she found little support as a woman in her profession. Yet the last two stanzas of “Lady Lazarus” reveal her hope for revenge. The careful plotting and precise timing of her suicide attempts, one every ten years, described in the poem call to mind a powerful Chinese legend. The legend states that if a woman kills herself on the precise night of the lunar new year, she will be able to return to the Earth as a ghost to avenge herself against those who wronged her.

It seems that Plath had just such a goal in mind. Her seething anger and the lines “out of the ash I rise with my red hair and I eat men like air” suggest that she planned to use her death and her words as weapons. Indeed, her dramatic death and her excellent poems have enabled her to defy her society’s attempts to stifle her, to become one of the most influential poets of the 20th century. In short, she has gained immortality.

Nevertheless, the timing of Plath’s death was ironically tragic. Had she survived just a few years longer, she could have played a major role in the women’s movement and might still be writing remarkable poems today. The fact that her poems are still studied and admired today, forty years after her death, shows what a powerful force she was in American literature.

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