“Lady Lazarus” is an extraordinarily bitter dramatic monologue in twenty-eight tercets. The title ironically identifies a sort of human oxymoron, a female Lazarus—not the biblical male. Moreover, she does not conform to society’s traditional idea of ladylike behavior: She is angry, and she wants revenge. She is egocentric, using “I” twenty-two times, “my” nine. Her resurrection is owing only to herself. This is someone much different from the grateful man of John 11:2 who owes his life to Jesus.

Given Sylvia Plath’s suicide, one might equate this Lazarus with Plath. Self-destruction pervades the poem as it did her life, but she has inventively appropriated Lazarus in constructing a mythical female counterpart who is not simply equatable with herself. This common tactic of distancing autobiography tempers one’s proclivity to see the poem as confessional. As confession mutates to myth, subjectivity inclines to generalized feeling.

Lady Lazarus resurrects herself habitually. Like the cat, she allows herself nine lives, including equally their creation and cancellation. The first line may stress her power over her fate, but “manage” (line 3) suggests an uneasy control. It also connotes managerial enterprise, an implication clarified when the speaker’s language takes on the flavor of the carnival.

The first eight stanzas largely vivify this ugly but compelling experience. The reader sees the worm-eaten epidermis and inhales the sour breath. More cadaver than person, Lady Lazarus intends terror, however problematic her bravado. Nevertheless, she will soon smile, when time restores flesh eaten by the grave. (The smile will not prove attractive.) For the moment, however, she is only a “walking miracle” of defective parts: a shell of glowing skin, a face blank as linen, a paralyzed foot. Almost spectral, she remains finely, grotesquely palpable.

Stanzas 9 to 19 present Lady Lazarus as sideshow freak, stripper, and barker. Her emergence from the winding-sheet (perhaps a straitjacket) is a “striptease.” The “peanut-crunching crowd” thrills, pruriently. She alters the introductory “Ladies and gentlemen,” but her phrasing retains the master of ceremonies’ idiom. Reference to her “theatrical/ comeback in broad day” plays poetically with the jargon of show business and magic.

In presenting the history of her efforts to die, Lady Lazarus assures the reader of her honor. This integrity gives continuity, making her the same woman at thirty that she was at ten. It is nothing against her that her first attempt at annihilation was accidental; it was premonitory. Eventually, intention ruled—both descent and resurrection. In the eighteenth stanza, she says that each “comeback” is, however, to the “same place” and the “same brute/ Amused shout.” The prosody allows “brute” to be a noun (hence, person) in the line, an adjective in the sentence. As it is the “same brute” each time, beginning with her tenth year, and as she finally intends the destruction of “men,” this brute is always the father or his replica. This explains why Plath renders the customary “Ladies and Gentlemen” as “Gentleman, ladies.”

Stanzas 19 through 26 clarify Lady Lazarus’s victimization at the hands of “Herr Enemy” and “Herr Doktor,” who are one and the same and merely the latest incarnation of the “brute” father. The German spelling of doctor and the choice of Herr create the stereotype of Germanic male authority. Lady Lazarus is this creature’s “baby,” more particularly his “opus.” Thus, this menacing figure reminiscent of Josef Mengele, of the Nazi concentration camp at Auschwitz, fathers her “art” of dying. She sarcastically repudiates his inauthentic “concern” for her but allows him his role in her fiery death and resurrection. Because she was “pure gold,” he expected profit from her. He pokes among her ashes for...