Sylvia Plath remains an icon, especially among women today for her brutally honest portrayals of debilitating mental illness in her works. Her novel, The Bell Jar, is an autobiographical work based on her experiences with depression and suicide after she found herself at a crossroads in life at New York, where feelings of inadequacy crept into her and rendered her incapable of moving forward with life.
Her foremost work on suicide has to be the confessional poem, 'Lady Lazarus', which she wrote during her famous creative burst in 1962, when she separated from her husband - the poet Ted Hughes, who moved to live with his paramour. It was during this phase that Plath would have sporadic episodes of elation and confidence in her work interrupted by despair and hopelessness. ‘Lady Lazarus’ remains the most unconventional poem ever written on mental illness, where suicide is almost projected as an achievement -
“Dying is an art,
And like everything else
I do it exceptionally well
I do it so it feels like hell –
I do it so it feels real.”
The theatrics of Lady Lazarus have been widely criticized for its use of provocative imagery to reel in the reader. Plath evokes popular images from the Holocaust and compares it to the torture of being alive. “A cake of soap, a wedding ring, a gold filling” were objects left in the gas chambers after the murder of Jews.
The title ‘Lady Lazarus’ refers to the New Testament account of Jesus’s resurrection of Lazarus from the dead. Plath’s inspiration for this may have been the lines in T S Eliot’s ‘The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock’ in which the dithering hero imagines himself as ‘Lazarus, come from the dead, / Come back to tell you all’. In 1953, Plath had tried to kill herself in her mother’s home in Wellesley, Massachusetts by overdosing on sleeping pills and crawling into the cellar in the downstairs bedroom. She describes this experience in detail in The Bell Jar, where she is discovered days later by her mother Aurelia and her brother. It is mainly this suicide attempt, as well as a swimming accident that nearly killed her, that she refers to in ‘Lady Lazarus’.
"The first time it happened I was ten.
It was an accident.
The second time I meant
To last it out and not come back at all.
I rocked shut
As a seashell.
They had to call and call
And pick the worms off me like sticky pearls."
Plath is, through this poem, asserting her right to compare her psychological Belsen to the Nazi concentration camps. The range of imagery used by her to heighten the emotional intensity of taking one’s own life is what makes ‘Lady Lazarus’stand out.
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‘Herr Enemy’
“The speaker is a woman who has the great and terrible gift of being reborn. The only trouble is, she has to die first. She is the phoenix, the libertarian spirit, what you will. She is also just a good, plain, very resourceful woman.” These words were spoken by Sylvia Plath in her introduction to a recording of the poem she made in December 1962, thus implying that Lady Lazarus is supposed to depict a very conscious, performative anger. She refers to the male antagonist in the poem as ‘Herr Doktor’ or ‘Herr Enemy’, comparing his brutality to that of an evil doctor in a Nazi concentration camp.
“Out of the ash
I rise with my red hair
And I eat men like air”
These lines have rendered the entire spectacle of committing suicide a powerful gesture of setting oneself free. Like a phoenix, the woman is resurrected and she fights back the enemy that is her tormentors. Ending on this note, the poem also tells the oppressed woman that in the process of fighting back, she has to become a new person.
It’s easy enough to do it in a cell
It’s easy enough to do it and stay put
It’s the theatrics –
‘Lady Lazarus’ particularly appeals to women struggling with mental illness. When Plath started writing, the United States was still selling the idea of blissful domesticity to its college-educated white women. Women were expected to get married, stay at home and care for the husband and the children, and by the 1960's, it was clear that housewives across the country were suffering from depression, anxiety, a loss of purpose - all of which summed up to what Betty Friedan famously called 'the problem without a name' in her bestselling revolutionary novel, 'The Feminine Mystique'. Plath's poems, collected in the anthology 'Ariel', are an attempt to encourage the woman with mental health issues to draw attention to herself, something the women of that day and age were trained and conditioned not to do. Women were supposed to be all-smiling, content creatures; adornments to the household, shelved away by the human race. By representing an oppressed, distressed woman in a state of vindictive self-destruction, Plath powerfully depicts the female outrage and a female life that fizzles out- only to be reborn like a phoenix.
(cover picture courtesy: Medium.com)
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