Sylvia Plath’s “Lady Lazarus”: Finding Resistance in Death
Trigger Warning: Mentions of suicide, death, and mental illness.
If you have watched any early 2000s movie that has a punk girl character that is a hardcore Riot Grrrl feminist, you probably would have seen a mention of Sylvia Plath. There would usually be a scene where those girls are reading one of her books, or mention the poem I’m going to be talking about: Lady Lazarus. Plath has always been a staple in a teenage girl’s exploration process to literature and the inherent sadness of girlhood and being young. She is one of the most influential writers and poets of the midcentury and has been credited for advancing the genre of confessional poetry. Plath’s impact is undoubtedly massive and universal for young women who have experienced some form of sexism and struggle with mental illnesses.
“Lady Lazarus” talks about her suicide attempts and how she “rises” from them. Ironically, she died approximately a year after the poem was originally written in 1962, at the age of 30. In Lady Lazarus, Plath uses dark imagery and a morbid tone to show the complexities of suffering from a mental illness. She had somehow made a poem about waking up from numerous suicide attempts sound less like she failed to die but more like she managed to live on for another day. The climactic power of this poem lies in the three last lines;
“Out of the ash
I rise with my red hair
And I eat men like air.”
She makes it clear that death is an art, but it is also everything that it is; gritty, grim, full of worms that people had to pick off her skin, and not all that glorious. But art is also anything you want it to be. This depiction of death is refreshing to read, in an absurd way, because it is not described in grief. She might be glorifying it in some parts, saying that she tries to die to “feel like hell”, to feel the real kind of hurt, but it is done in an eloquent way that does not romanticize it. And inherently, it is not death she loathes, but the:
“theatrical/Comeback in a broad day/To the same place/The same face/The same brute/Amused shout”
She hates coming back after a suicide attempt to a startled, dramatic surrounding. Unlike people’s fear of death, she craves it, she constantly tries to achieve death and finds beauty in dying and then staying alive. And in it, she finds her power and resistance.
Lady Lazarus might sound depressing for the general reader, and as I mentioned, it can even seem like it’s glorifying suicide. After all, she also mentioned in the poem that you can say that she does “dying” exceptionally well and that it is her call. Who can blame her? Dying is a concept hard to grasp by some, and is craved by the rest. Some are too familiar with it, living in a global pandemic; I think we’re all becoming a bit too familiar with it as well. For the rest of us with niche interests and a total lack of joy for life, it is comforting to find a depiction of our feelings that lets us find that power within ourselves, instead of feeling powerless to feel something that we cannot control. Dying isn’t a solution; it never will be. But the fact that a lot of us are still here, reading this piece of writing, despite maybe the sub-plot our fate could have brought us to, that is your own little personal power.
I won’t sugarcoat that Plath is notorious for being the depressing-poem-lady, but Lady Lazarus is a testament to the fact that finding resistance doesn’t always have to be grand. The act of staying alive itself while you are simultaneously wishing for the opposite is resistance within yourself. I think, as bleak as it can be, at the end of Lady Lazarus, I always manage to retrace my way back to the journey I’m in for the long run that is staying alive, despite.
You can read Lady Lazarus in full here, and find your own resistance: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/49000/lady-lazarus
Editor: Clara Nathania & Handiko Wijaya
References:
- Plath, S. (1965). Lady Lazarus. Poetry Foundation. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/49000/lady-lazarus
