Lady Lazarus

3 Pages 874 Words

“Lady Lazarus” by Sylvia Plath is a well written autobiography of her life. She cleverly uses words to describe her innermost thoughts and revelations of how she perceives her life.
In Protean Poetic, Broe states that Plath spoke of her later poems, “ I speak them to my self….and what ever lucidity they may have come from, the fact that I say them to myself, I say them out loud.”(160) Writing to herself was a type of therapy, as was her suicide attempts. Sylvia Plath was an intelligent women who thinks that the root of all evil are men and gives a well rounded description of this in her writing and throughout her life.

Sylvia Plath was born to Otto Plath and Aurelia Schober in 1932, in Boston. Her parents were both of German descent and teachers at Boston University. In Literary Lives: Sylvia Plath, Linda Wagner-Martin says in her toddler life she already became angry with the male gender, as her parents favoured her brother Warren over her.(4) Her inability to love the opposite sex started at a very early age. She grew up in an well disciplined home, where her father was the centre of her mothers attention. It is possible that Plath became envious of the power that men had over women which taunted her throughout her life.

Plath was clinically depressed from a young age and struggled with every year to make it to the next, to the time she successfully committed suicide. In “Lady Lazarus”, Plath
depicts her life and suicidal obsessions. She became so angry at men after her father died and left her, as she writes in “Daddy.“ Plath feels her father stopped loving her by dying and in the poem she writes “Daddy, I have had to kill you./You died before I had time….”(2.6-7), and that was the reason why, she was who and what she became. Plath blames her father for her hatred towards the male gender and her unwillingness to accept things the way they are.
“Lady Lazarus” is a poem reflec...