#Lady lazarus analysis skin#
#Lady lazarus analysis series#

The entire symbolic procedure of death and rebirth in 'Lady Lazarus' has been deliberately chosen by the speaker. Each of her deaths, she says, is done 'exceptionally well. And when she turns to her audience in the middle of the poem to describe her career in suicide, she becomes a self-conscious performer. For the Nazi Doktor, she is a Jew, whose body must be burned for the 'peanut-crunching crowd,' she is a stripteaser for the medical audience, she is a wonder, whose scars and heartbeat are astonishing for the religious audience, she is a miraculous figure, whose hair and clothes are as valuable as saints' relics. Lady Lazarus is a different person for each of her audiences, and yet none of her identities is bearable for her. ')-all these linguistic elements reveal a character who has been grotesquely split into warring selves. The sexual pun on 'charge' in the first line above the bastardization of German ('Herr Enemy') the combination of Latinate diction ('opus,' 'valuable') and colloquial phrasing ('charge,' 'So, so. The inventiveness of the language demonstrates Plath's ability to create, as she could not in 'The Stones,' an appropriate oral medium for the distorted mental states of the speaker.

#Lady lazarus analysis series#

For example, a passage toward the end of the poem incorporates the transition from a sequence of body images (scars-heart-hair) to a series of physical images' (opus-valuable-gold baby) as it shifts its address from the voyeuristic crowd to the Nazi Doktor: The address to these 'audiences' allows Plath to characterize Lady Lazarus's fragmented identities with great precision. Each of these states is dramatically connected to an observer or observers through direct address: first, to her unnamed 'enemy' then, to the 'gentlemen and ladies' next, to the Herr Doktor and, finally, to Herr God and Herr Lucifer.

#Lady lazarus analysis skin#

At the beginning of the poem, she is cloth or material: lampshade, linen, napkin in the middle, she is only body: knees, skin and bone, hair toward the end, she becomes a physical object: gold, ash, a cake of soap finally, she is resurrected as a red-haired demon. Four basic sequences of images define the Lady's identity. In 'Lady Lazarus,' however, the transformations are more violent and more various than in 'The Stones,' and the degree of self-dramatization on the part of the speaker is much greater. The result is the total alteration of the physical body. As in 'The Stones,' the speaker undergoes a series of transformations that are registered through image sequences. The Lady of the poem is a quasi-mythological figure, a parodic version of the biblical Lazarus whom Christ raised from the dead. The magical and demonic aspects of the world appear in 'Lady Lazarus' with an intensity that is absent from 'The Stones.' The poem reflects Plath's recognition at the end of her life that the struggle between self and others and between death and birth must govern every aspect of the poetic structure.