"Lady Lazarus" as a Display of Power

>>Lady Lazarus by Sylvia Plath

Fair warning, I’m going to be discussing the topic of suicide pretty heavily and the darker elements that go with it. Keep that in mind while you read.

Lady Lazarus is a show of power. Not necessarily just of the feminine persuasion, but as a whole. Maybe it’s made better by the fact a woman is putting these words to paper, who’s to say. But the fact remains that Lady Lazarus is a terrifying narrative. When you focus on the idea of Plath flexing some kind of proverbial power, you don’t need to look any further than  lines 79-81.

                Herr God, Herr Lucifer

                Beware

                Beware

                                (Norton Anthology, 1420)

What could be a bigger display of power than challenging God or the Devil himself? In the poem, Plath evokes this idea of an almost otherworldly being, someone that has died three times and still comes back for more each and every time she’s resurrected. It’s put even more into perspective when you think about Plath’s first suicide attempt. Whether by choice or by complete accident, she managed to survive. She rose up from that which would have claimed her the first time. It definitely adds this sense of morose power to her writing; She may not have liked that she survived, but she did, and continued to thrive afterwards. Like she had temporarily beaten down her own demons. Granted she did ultimately take her own life, but the time in between seems like a good time for her. At least in the terms of his poem.

Or, alternately, she feels powerful in the fact that she can control her own well being and her own fate. She could choose to take her life at any time, and yet she doesn’t. She rises from the proverbial ashes every time, renewed with her decision for another few moments of respite. No one can make the decision for her, she is ultimately in control of the fact of  whether she lives or dies. That in and of itself gives her the feeling of power she lives; she can reinvent herself however she sees fit. In this case, she is both the Lady Lazarus and the “Jesus” that revives her. She is her own maker, and the one to undo herself. It brings a little extra weight to the passage I mentioned above; she fears neither God nor the Devil, because they are not the masters of her fate when she ultimately holds the killswitch in her hands.

This one was a little personal for me from my own experiences. The idea that Plath is exercising the power of her own fate drives home the reality of people who have considered something like suicide before. They hold everything in the palm of their hands, whether they choose to go through with it or not The choice will always be theirs, and there’s nothing anyone can do to stop them. In a way, I think this was Plath’s way to try and help herself feel better about it all. Her marriage wasn’t exactly the best, and her life hadn’t always been peaches. I think this is how she held her own power; she looked at what she could do with her own hands, reminded herself that she still held power somewhere, when everything else seemed to be outside of her control. Maybe that’s what ultimately lead her to try and succeed on her second try. It was about power and control, the two things she never had before.

Moving on, I think it’s time to go back to the original passage. Like I said before, this is Plath showing her own power where she feels none. The image of this Lady Lazarus, rising up out of one of humanity’s biggest atrocities, is practically overflowing with the idea of untamable power. The power to defy death and those around you. The biggest pat to remember, though, is that she doesn’t change. Look at lines 31-34 and you’ll see what I mean:

                These are my hands

                My knees.

                I may be skin and bone,

                Nevertheless, I am the same, identical woman.

                                (Norton Anthology, 1419)

Plath doesn’t come back as a different woman. She doesn’t try to change some aspect in some kind of bid to make herself survive longer this time. Maybe to fare better in the world around her. No, she stays herself. She shows the longevity she has, the unwillingness to change in the face of adversity. She still has control over everything this way, and she doesn’t even want to change herself. She views herself as just right for this powerful narrative. Lady Lazarus is exactly as she should be. More importantly, she doesn’t present herself as a man. She shows her power as a woman, unwilling to bend to what is expected of her. She projects the idea of a strong woman, something to be reckoned with, that not even a man could do better than her. She is rising from the ashes of her relatively shattered life at the hands of her cheating husband, and emerging as this new, powerful being. She is unstoppable in her own mind. He will never have the power over her life that she herself does.

Bringing it all together is the idea that, on a broad spectrum, this is Plath’s statement of her power. She is this Lazarus figure, the only thing that truly holds sway over her life. Her marriage was in shambles at the hands of her cheating husband. She had no power over what was going on around her, she couldn’t change anything that was happening. So this idea of Lady Lazarus, of this all-powerful figure that bowed to no man, to no great threat or even death itself, was like a comfort for her. She even enforced the idea that she was the master of her won fate, ultimately taking her own life in her hands.

When you read the poem with this context in mind, it brings to light a different kind of understanding It brings up feelings of unbridled power, but also something almost melancholy. It’s sad to think that she may have written this as an outlet for the one this she couldn’t deal with: her own life. She had to take solace in the fact that she could end it at any point. She clung to the idea that that was the only control she had over anything. And to think, she ultimately ended up taking her life in the end. In short, Lady Lazarus was a brief explosion of power, of good feelings, for an otherwise downward spiraling woman.

Works Cited

Plath, Sylvia. "Lady Lazarus." 1961. The Norton Anthology: American Literature. Shorter 8th Edition ed. Vol. 2. New York City: Norton, 2013. 1418-1420. Print. 1865 to the Present.