Sylvia Plath's Attitude towards Life As Reflected in Her Poem 'Lady Lazarus' and 'Daddy'

 

Sylvia Plath conveys her pessimistic outlook on life, reflecting on its inherent sufferings through her poetry. Her poems present a vision of life that seems conflicted, while forcefully questioning and challenging life’s very essence.

Plath seems intrigued by the connection between life and death. Her work reflects an ongoing concern for duality, and almost every poem she wrote between 1956 and early 1963 is filled with the tension between two opposing forces. Jon Rosenblatt notes, “Plath found the twentieth century to be an era of dehumanization and violence that requires of the poet an extraordinary openness to suffering. . . [Her life] becomes [the] representative of the personal crisis in modern life” (143). Plath, for her poetic material, draws on the events of her own life. She also transforms her personal experiences into something universal by making the connection to Biblical myth and the suffering of the people in the concentration camps in her poems “Daddy” and “Lady Lazarus.” She extends her creative sphere by describing the battle between life and death. She describes life as full of suffering and her pessimistic view of life is evident in most of her poems

Sylvia Plath, being a confessional poet, talks about personal issues in her poems “Daddy” and “Lady Lazarus.” While the poem “Daddy” talks about her father, Otto Plath, and her husband, Ted Hughes, “Lady Lazarus,” on the other hand, describes her failed suicidal attempts in her life. The poems are exceptional in the sense that she relates her problem to global problems. Plath not only thinks about her own personal pain but also talks about the pain of human beings as a whole. She imagines herself [sharing] the sufferings of the Jews. A. Alvarez, after saying that suffering is an important element in her work, notes two things which relate to her sufferings:
First, because anyone whose subject is suffering has a ready-made modern example of hell on earth in the concentration camps. And what matters in them is not so much the physical torture—since sadism is general and perennial—but the way modern, as it were industrial, techniques can be used to destroy utterly the human identity. . . Second, she seemed convinced, in these last poems, that the root of her suffering was the death of her father, whom she loved, who abandoned her and who dragged her after him into death. And her father was pure German, pure Aryan, pure antisemite (qtd. in Bloom 45).

It is an exaggerated view of Plath towards her father that he is a Nazi because her father moved from Germany in 1901, 19 years away from the birth of the Nazi Party in 1920. As Plath describes it in her note:
The poem is spoken by a girl with an Electra complex. Her father died while she thought he was God. Her case is complicated by the fact that her father was also a Nazi and her mother very possibly part Jewish. In the daughter the two strains marry and paralyze each other—she has to act out the awful little allegory before she is free of it. (qtd. in Bloom 46)

Plath’s father is not the only victim of the allegorical reference of the Nazis in her poems; there is also the reference to her husband Ted Hughes. After the death of her father at the age of eight, she was prepared for her life to unite with a fatherly figure, Hughes, but he acted exactly like her father by leaving her. The comparison she makes between her father and husband with the Nazis refers to her hatred towards the masculine figures and the sufferings they caused in her life. According to Plath, her father was strict and had an authoritarian attitude towards her when she was little. But above all, it was the death of her father and the adverse luck of her life that made her angry. She tells her father that she “made a model of [him] / A man in black with a Meinkampf look” (Plath 64-65) because her husband left her for another woman. Plath’s hatred towards her husband is evident in the poem when she says “the black man who / Bit my pretty heart in two” (55-56). Plath, after acknowledging the affair of her husband, went to her friend Elizabeth and describes the situation she was in: “Ted lies to me, he lies all the time, he has become a little man. . . When you give someone your whole heart and he doesn’t want it, you cannot take it back. It’s gone forever” (qtd. in Alexander 284).

In the poem, “Lady Lazarus,” Plath describes her suffering with the mythical reference to Lazarus. Here Lazarus is not a man but a woman who is frustrated at her rebirth. Being alive is a burden for her as she tells us, “The peanut-crunching crowd / Shoves in to see” (26-27) as if she is a stripteaser or a caged animal in a zoo. They “poke and stir” (73) to see if she is alive or not. From these lines it is clear that the narrator is irritated at the resurrection. Their utterance, “A miracle!” (55), knocks her out [every time] she resurrects from the dead. The dystheist narrator is so frustrated at her bitter life that she even accuses and threatens God: “Herr God, Herr Lucifer / Beware / Beware” (78-80). The narrator here is dissatisfied with all the male figures, including God, as she is in bad luck. However, Lynda K. Bundtzen notes that, “Herr God may be a representation of her father or her husband” (qtd. in Bloom 86). The reference to the two figures who are treated as gods by Plath in the poem “Daddy,” are destroyed at the end of the poem when she says, “[d]addy, daddy, you bastard, I’m through” (80). Both of the poems are written after Ted’s departure, and they foreshadow Plath’s suicide. On describing the suicide, Jon Rosenblatt says that, “On the one hand, Plath seeks her own death because life appears unbearable, guilt-ridden, and worthless; on the other hand, she seeks death because it can give her new life by releasing the reservoir of love that will refresh the self” (29).

A woman’s life centers around [her father] from birth and her husband throughout her life till death. If the woman is deprived of love from both sides, she is definitely a victim of the cruelty of men. Plath, being a chronic schizophrenia patient, and dealing with the blows from the death of her father and her husband’s departure, made her life a living hell like the concentration camps of Germany. Despite being a patient of schizophrenia, her allegorical reference to the brutal Nazi camps and the horrific suicidal attempts that she made is accurate in the strictest sense. Leaving a Lady Lazarus who is struggling with her depressed life with two children for another woman is a serious crime. A woman needs a companion to share her inner self. When that life is broken down into pieces, the attitude towards life becomes pessimistic and life becomes meaningless. The life she passed after the death of her father, the failed attempt at suicide, and the betrayal is not her real self but a false self which she felt in her depressed life, and it can be eliminated only by destroying it. As Judith Kroll, referencing Robert Lowell, notes: “‘that life, even when disciplined, is simply not worth it’. . . but that life lived in the wrong terms, a life lived by the false self, is not life but an intolerable death-in-life which can be overcome only by dying to that life” (12).