Plath associates death in many of her poems. The poem “Lady Lazarus” generally describes how she attempted suicides. At the beginning Plath wrote about two desktop settings: “A sort of walking miracle, my skin/Bright as a Nazi lampshade,/My right foot//A paperweight,/My face a featureless, fine/Jew linen.” These small things stand out for its autobiographical relevance. They hint at the poetess’s manipulation of her horrific experience to set the stage for her art. The whole process of dying and being brought back to life intensifies, and improves, her art. After that she writes about her first two attempts to suicide: “Nevertheless, I am the same, identical woman./The first time it happened I was ten./It was an accident.//The second time I meant/To last it out and not come back at all./I rocked shut”—It is presumed that the first time she tried to take her life away from too much pressure studying in Smith. The second time she tried to take her life when she learned that she had not been accepted to a fiction-writing course in Harvard. She was 21 then. The most famous lines in this poem should be “Dying/Is an art, like everything else./I do it exceptionally well.” After that Plath explained why she tried to kill herself through Lady Lazarus’ account, “I do it so it feels like hell./I do it so it feels real./I guess you could say I’ve a call.” It shows that Plath was hopelessly addicted to committing suicides, like drugs, she could not withstand the urge to kill herself; like a irresistible “call”, suicide had become part of her life that it feels so “real” to do so. Years after her death, British critic and poet A. Alvarez would say that Plath’s self-destructiveness was “the very source of her creative energy, …it was, precisely, a source of living energy, of her imaginative, creative power.” There is another hint on the second attempt to suicide in the next two stanzas, “It’s easy enough to do it in a cell./It’s easy enough to do it and stay put./It’s the theatrical//Comeback in broad day/To the same place, the same face, the same brute/amused shout://‘A miracle!’/That knocks me out.” On August 24th, 1953, Sylvia crawled in her house’s cellar and swallowed an enormous dose of sleeping pills after leaving a note saying that she had gone for a walk. Three days later, she was discovered and rushed to hospital. After treatments with intense psychotherapy and electroshock therapy, she returned to Smith for the second semester. She hated those who saved her life, and she did not like the pitying faces around her: “So, so, Herr Doktor./So, Herr Enemy.//I am your opus,/I am your valuable,/The pure gold baby//That melts to a shriek.” Herr Doktor is the Nazi doctor who raises Lady Lazarus’ from dead twice, yet the name “Doktor” also stands for “doctor”—the “doctor” who saved Plath was her “enemy”: he did so not out of love, but because he wanted to advertise his skill by saving her, by all those surgeries and therapies. The poem “Lady Lazarus”, with all of its autobiographical features, is a confession. The poetess’ distinguished exhibitionist style is the force that has us stirred through her dead body’s ash (her works). Like an ascetic monk would grow closer to God through his self-discipline, Plath becomes closer to being her own artistic god through her literary performance. The revenge and immortality promised in the last two stanzas (“Herr God, Herr Lucifer,/Beware/Beware.//Out of the ash/I rise with my red hair/And I eat men like ait.”)are attained by Lady Lazarus, or Sylvia Plath herself.
Plath expressed a feminist point of view in her poems. She was not a very radical feminist, but she did show her rage against men in her works. In “Daddy”, Plath expresses her feelings about death, and the prominent men in her life: Sylvia Plath’s father, Otto Emil Plath, emigrated from Germany to the United States and became a biology professor at Boston University, specializing in the study of bees. Sylvia Plath had a comfortable childhood until her father died from complications due to undiagnosed diabetes, when she was eight years old. It then became a loss Sylvia Plath would always feel. When she was studying in Cambridge, Sylvia Plath met Hughes at a party on February 26th, 1956. They married on June 16th, 1956. After she concluded her studies in the spring of 1957, Sylvia Plath was offered a post at Smith College, which she accepted, returning to the States with Hughes. Prior to her starting work at Smith, Aurelia Plath granted the newly weds with a holiday in Cape Cod, where they could spend the summer writing. In December 1959, the couple returned to England, and Sylvia Plath gave birth to her two children, Frieda and Nicholas Hughes. In July 1962, Sylvia Plath discovered that Hughes was having an affair with Assia Wevill. The couple separated that September then. On February 11th, 1963, Sylvia Plath committed suicide, dying by carbon monoxide poisoning from her gas oven.
Plath’s inner conflicts made her feel inferior toward men, primarily her husband. “Daddy” is Plath’s most controversial and renowned poem. The images of Otto Plath and Ted Hughes appear randomly throughout the poem. The first half of “Daddy” chiefly talks about Otto Plath, Sylvia’s father; she writes, “Daddy, I have had to kill you./You died before I had time—/Marble-heavy, a bag full of God,/Ghastly statue with one grey toe/Big as a Frisco seal//And a head in the freakish Atlantic/Where it pours bean green over blue”. Here, she compares the one gray toe, which was injured, to the amputation of his father’s leg in 1940—his toe turned black from gangrene, a complication of diabetes. The words “God”, “ghastly”, and “Atlantic” identify the daddy in the poem as a colossus who stretches across America from the Atlantic to the Pacific. From this we can conclude that Plath was really scared of her father. After this Plath recounted her childhood spent in Winthrop, a Massachusetts seaside town near Boston: “In the waters off beautiful Nauset./I used to pray to recover you./Ach, du.” Nauset is Massachusetts beach, where Plath would later recall as “defined by the sea.” “Ach, du” is a German phrase, which means “Ah, you.” This is the first reference to her father’s German origin in the poem. The poem goes on, “In the German tongue, in the Polish town…”: Though Plath’s father was of German descent, he was born in Grabow, Poland. “So I never could tell where you/Put your foot, your root,/I never could talk to you./The tongue stuck in my jaw.”—after her father’s death, Sylvia Plath gradually forgot how to speak German, and she mourned for not being able to communicate to her father. The poem continues, “It stuck like a barb wire snare./Ich, ich, ich, ich,/I could hardly speak./I thought every German was you./And the language obscene”. “Ich” means “I” in German. Here, Sylvia Plath keeps on lamenting the loss of her German language. “An engine, an engine/Chuffing me off like a Jew./A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen./I began to talk like a Jew./I think I may well be a Jew.” A Jew has no homeland. Plath compares herself to a Jew hints at her eradication of root after her father’s death. Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen were German concentration camps, where millions of Jews were executed during World War II. Besides Jews, Plath also likens herself to gypsies: “The snows of the Tyrol, the clear beer of Vienna/Are not very pure or true./With my gypsy ancestress and my weird luck/And my Taroc pack and my Taroc pack/I may be a bit of Jew.” Tyrol is an Austrian Alpine region. Taroc is a variation for Tarot, a type of ancient fortune-telling cards. Gypsies, like the Jews, were objects of Nazi genocidal ambition, and many of them died in the concentration camps. On the other hand, Sylvia Plath’s use of Austrian references may refer to her mother Aurelia Plath, who was of Austrian descent. The “snows” and “beer” are not “very pure or true”, which depicts an attractive façade that actually masks an ugly reality. Plath may have felt that her mother embodied this image: outwardly sweet and affectionate but inside perhaps harboring negative and destructive feelings. Plath speaks more about her mother in the poem “Medusa”, which I will not discuss here. Below is the critical stanza where the “daddy” turns from Otto Plath to Ted Hughes: “I have always been scared of you,/With your Luftwaffe, your gobbledygook./And your neat moustache/And your Aryan eye, bright blue./Panzer-man, panzer-man, O You—”. Luftwaffe and Panzer are German air force and Nazi tank corps respectively. From the first nine stanzas of “Daddy” we see that Sylvia Plath was still haunted by her father’s death long ago, and she felt distanced from him, primarily due to the loss of language. The “you” at the end of this stanza, however, is not referred to Otto Plath anymore. It refers to Hughes, Plath’s husband. In the next stanza she writes, “Not God but a swastika/So black no sky could squeak through./Every woman adores a Fascist,/The boot in the face, the brute/Brute heart of a brute like you.” I should also mention that in one of her journal entries, Plath wrote, “I met the strongest man in the world…with a voice like the thunder of God.” From that we can tell that Plath was really in love with Hughes, who thrilled her like a “thunder of God.” However, when she found out that Hughes was being unfaithful to her, he became a brute to her. Yet she still loved him very much, that she still “adores a Fascist”, “the boot in the face”, and the “brute heart of a brute.” Plath’s father reappears in the next stanza: “You stand at the blackboard, daddy,/In the picture I have of you,/A cleft in your chin instead of your foot/But no less a devil for that, no not/Any less the black man who//Bit my pretty red heart in two.” The first line describes Otto Plath’s pose in the picture Sylvia Plath had of him. It is easy to understand. The black man, obviously, is Hughes, who broke her heart by being disloyal. Then Plath turns to talk about her second attempt to suicide, “At twenty I tried to die/And get back, back, back to you./I thought even the bones would do.//But they pulled me out of the sack,/And they stuck me together with glue./And then I knew what to do./I made a model of you,/A man in black with a Meinkampf look”. “Mein Kampf”, or “My Struggles”, was Adolf Hitler’s political autobiographical book written before he rose to power. The first five lines were about how she killed herself and was saved. The last two lines may imply that Sylvia Plath tried to look for a man who was just like his father, in order to compensate for her lack of father in her childhood. Plath’s hatred of her father and her husband combined with her own self-loathing created a chimerical, impersonal frustration in the poem—“If I’ve killed one man, I’ve killed two—/The vampire who said he was you/And drank my blood for a year,/Seven years, if you want to know./Daddy, you can lie back now.” The vampire, in fact, is a biographical reference to her father’s research and publication. The blood-sucking image of the vampire probably suggests Otto Plath’s study of parasites, “Muscid Larvae of the San Francisco Bay Region Which Sucks Blood of Nesting Birds”, a study that documents the endurance, tenacity, and enormous destructiveness of these larvae. This may also explain why Sylvia Plath uses “Frisco Seal” in the first place: not only because there are seals in San Francisco, but also because this is the place where her father conducted his research on muscid larvae. The vampire here also refers to Hughes, whose marriage with Plath had lasted for seven years. At last, Plath decides to slay the two images which have always haunted her peace of mind: “There’s a stake in your fat black heart/And the villagers never liked you./They are dancing and stamping on you./They always knew it was you./Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m through.”