Scribd
Upload
41 views2 pages

American Literature - Class Assignment - Anwesha Saha

Uploaded by

anweshasaha2002
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
41 views2 pages

American Literature - Class Assignment - Anwesha Saha

Uploaded by

anweshasaha2002
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
You are on page 1/ 2

NAME - Anwesha Saha

ENROLLMENT ID - 2112213001010
REGISTRATION NO: - 210010105884
SUBJECT - American Literature
UG-SEM-VI, English Department

JUSTIFY SYLVIA PLATH'S USE OF METAPHORS RELATED TO HOLOCAUST IN HER


POEMS “LADY LAZARUS” AND “DADDY”.

In "Daddy" and "Lady Lazarus" by Sylvia Plath, a persona is widened to a collective


metaphor of herself as a Jewish victim of the Holocaust. This is to illustrate her struggle in
defining her identity against the consuming male oppression with which she is faced. The
use of allusions to the Holocaust of "two of the most celebrated, controversial, and critiqued
of [Sylvia Plath's] poems," "Daddy" and "Lady Lazarus," is enlarged to a metaphor which
embodies her fight against the presence of repressive male dominance that she finds within
her life. Plath sets herself apart from referring to herself as a singular being to a
multiple-person population or "collective" embodiment to form a metaphor for her suffering at
the hands of the two primary oppressive male figures in her life, her late father, and her
husband, Ted Hughes. The idea of the two poems is supported by the audacious,
over-exaggerated, accusations of feeling as persecuted Jewish people terrorised by the
Nazis, but many have argued that this comparison is overstepping the boundary between
what is appropriate and justifiable for acceptable.

A prevalent theme of both "Lady Lazarus" and "Daddy" is the dissolving of what is usually
considered private feelings to shed light on inner conflicts. The two poems uncover an ugly
private life and make Plath's hidden unhappiness of her internal struggle of self-identity and
individual mentality to public light. In "Lady Lazarus," Plath exposes herself in front of a
"peanut-crunching crowd, [shoving] in to see" the spectacle she is making in "[unwrapping]
me hand and foot". In "Daddy," Plath openly purges her father; "There's a stake in your fat,
black heart…the villagers never liked you" revealing a community setting rather than a
private confrontation regarding the relationship between herself and her father. The villagers
then go about "dancing and stamping" upon him, as a collective response to a community
problem showing public disapproval, evidence of Plath's displacement. Plath's personal
opinion is a reflection of the two poems' openness in her struggle for identity in taking
personal experience and enlarging it to a relevant situation, giving purpose and meaning to
her use of applying a collective meaning: the persecuted Jewish people. She looks at the
situation she is embroiled in through a historical lens to make her pain more tangible to
others, which could be taken as an audacious claim of equalising her suffering to the likes of
those six million dead. But in the two poems studied, Plath feels that a Jew's pain in the
hands of the Nazis is an effective comparison for the general public to understand her own
internal conflict, believing that a universal event of anguish that can be comprehended by all.
This gives justification for her collective metaphor in defining her identity against the male
oppression that she feels.

In the lines "Herr God, Herr Lucifer" in "Lady Lazarus," similarly making the Germans more
powerful than the God and Devil in heaven and hell as a determination of Plath's fate. Not
only does the pain she feels from the oppression she faces penetrate her emotionally and
spiritually, but physically, altering the language she uses to convey her thoughts.As Plath is
under the control and jurisdiction of her father throughout "Daddy," represented as a Nazi for
a figurehead of male dominance, the German language and its presence is directly linked to
what extent Plath is free from this source of control. "I could never talk to you/The tongue
stuck in a barb wire snare", stanzas 24 through 26 state in the poem "Daddy," a resentful
relationship without understanding in reality.By using German language, not her native
tongue, Plath begins to lose her identity; "I think I may be a Jew" and at the end of the next
stanza "I may be a bit of a Jew". This repetition of words or stuttering is found throughout the
poem to show Plath's rancour towards the oppression thrust upon her, seen in the stanzas
"You do not do, you do not do" in the beginning of the poem, and "wars, wars, wars".

In conclusion, she wins over the dominion in "Daddy" as well with the stomping villagers, as
she proclaimed: "Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I'm through" in the final line of the last stanza.
His memory is killed "with a stake in [his] fat black heart" and can rest and "lie back now"
with her reassurance and personal victory "Lady Lazarus" defines a particularly brutal and
dehumanising relationship between the individual and her society, within her use of a
collective metaphor, but "in spite of this, the poem has the vocal quality of a manifesto, a
statement of purpose and intent, self-assertion" for the development of defining her identity
through her struggles, which she finds resolution in death.

You might also like