Question

C) What are the major metaphors in “Lady Lazarus” and what do they say about Plath? What do we learn about the narrator and her father in “Daddy”?

Answer 1

• Plath's poetry is known for its brutal metaphors. Her Lady Lazarus is depressed, disturbed, and suicidal. The most direct way for Plath to impart to us the horror of Lady L's scenario is to make references to the genocide, the most horrific event of the twentieth century. Again and again, Lady Lazarus compares herself to Jewish victims of the Nazis. It takes a brave poet to elevate her speaker's suffering to the level of genocide victim, but Plath doesn't hold back.
• She compares her skin to a Nazi lampshade. This is significant because of the idea that the Nazi people used the skin of the Jews to make lampshades. Plath uses this horrifying metaphor to compare her own suffering to those in Nazi concentration camps.
• She conveys the heaviness of her pain by comparing her right foot to a paperweight. This imagery helps the reader to understand that Plath’s pain was so real that it felt like a physical weight.
• The paperweight conveys the nature of her emotional pain. The imagery of a featureless face reveals that she doesn’t feel any identity. She doesn’t feel set apart for any specific or important purpose. She feels like a face lost in the crowd, one that noone would remember.
• When she asks the reader to “peel off the napkin” she is challenging to reader to look at her for who she really is. She doesn’t believe that anyone would want to really know her, to peer into her soul and really know her. She believes that if people were to do that, they would be terrified. The reason she thinks this way, is because she is afraid that people will become aware that although she is alive in flesh, her soul is dead.
• Plath then transitions from speaking of herself as an already dead woman, to revealing that she is actually alive. However, the tone of the poem reveals that she is disappointed at being alive. It becomes obvious that she identifies with death far more than with life.
• She thinks of herself as a rotting corpse, no the “smiling woman” of only thirty that she sees when she looks in the mirror. She reveals an obvious disappointment that she has not been able to die when she compares herself to a cat, concluding that it will probably take many more attempts to reach death.
• Plath then takes the focus off of herself and her own misery and begins to criticize the people around her.She calls them the “peanut crunching crowd” suggesting that they are only in her life to scoff at her and make a spectacle of her. This same view of people is conveyed when she compares herself, yet again, to Lazarus. But this time, she doesn’t compare herself to the Lazarus who is dead in the tomb.
• She compares herself to the Lazarus that has risen and is coming out of the tomb still wrapped in burial cloth. Only Plath’s tone is not triumphant, but rather skeptical. She calls her exit from the tomb, “a big strip tease” revealing that when she came close to death, but was brought back to life, the people around her were there not to rejoice with her or comfort her, but to be entertained by her. Her sarcastic tone reveals her frustration with the spectators and her disappointment that she was unable to stay dead.
• It is difficult to tell whether Plath is referring to herself when she “rises from the ashes” as a physically alive woman who has failed yet again at trying to end her life, or as one who has died and will return as an immortal. She may plan to stop attempting suicide and take her revenge on men instead of herself.
• Or she plans to come back as an immortal after she has died to take her revenge on men. The red hair suggests that could symbolize the mythical creature, phoenix, who can burst into flames and then be reborn from it’s ashes. Either way, Plath warns men everywhere, that she is no longer a powerless victim under them, but that she is ready to take her revenge.
• Due to time limit,remaining question can be asked as another question,it will be answered,thankyou for your cooperation