Speaker

Lady Lazarus is the character-speaker of “Lady Lazarus” by Sylvia Plath, and she can be seen as a persona of Sylvia Plath. As you may know, Plath had various suicide attempts during her life, and she succeeded committing suicide in 1963 by placing her head in the oven with the gas turned on. Keep in mind that the poem was written in 1962, just one year before Plath’s death, so the contents of the poem become even more important and relevant for her life.

Lady Lazarus is a fictional character invented by Plath, a character whose name is given after the Biblical Lazarus, who has died and was resurrected by Jesus Christ four days after his death. This is why the name “Lady Lazarus” becomes very symbolic of life after death.

The poem begins with Lady Lazarus confessing that she has “done it again” (l. 1), that she has tried to commit suicide for the third time in her thirty years. The first time she attempted to die, she was only a child of ten, and it happened as an accident:

Nevertheless, I am the same, identical woman.
The first time it happened I was ten.
It was an accident. (ll. 34-36)

The second time she wanted to kill herself, the woman “rocked shut” (l. 39) and refused to come back to life, until she was rescued. Now, after the third time, she depicts herself through horrifying imagery and powerful metaphors.

The most striking comparison made by Lady Lazarus concerns Nazi elements. First, she compares her skin to a “Nazi lampshade” (l. 5). Note that it was believed that Nazis used to make lampshades out of the skin of the Jews they killed in concentration camps. What is more, the woman also compares her face with “Jew linen” (l. 9), which reinforces this metaphor related to Holocaust. Although these metaphors are very dramatic, they simply convey...