Student Question
Why does Sylvia Plath use Holocaust imagery in "Daddy" and "Lady Lazarus"?
Quick answer:
Sylvia Plath uses Holocaust imagery in "Daddy" and "Lady Lazarus" to convey intense suffering and victimization. In "Daddy," she portrays her father as a Nazi to express her pain and resentment, while in "Lady Lazarus," she extends this imagery to her own suffering, comparing herself to a Jew. This use of Holocaust imagery transforms her personal trauma into a universal symbol of suffering and vengeance.
Plath uses much sustained death imagery: both suicide and Holocaust imagery (comparing herself to a Jew and her father to a Nazi). She writes grim apostrophes to her executioners, her father in "Daddy" and the "brute amused" public in "Lady Lazarus."
In "Daddy," she calls her father a "Ghastly statue," a "Panzer-man," a "train" sending her to a concentration camp, a "boot" stepping on her face, a "black man" devil, a "vampire," and a "bastard." The bombardment of death and evil imagery presents the speaker as a victim coming from a patriarchy of death.
In "Lady Lazaraus," the speaker's tone is a bit more playful but no less gruesome in its images. The Holocaust imagery continues:
A sort of walking miracle, my skin Bright as a Nazi lampshade, My right foot A paperweight, My face a featureless, fine Jew linen.
The Jewish tradition is one of...
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suffering, and the paragon of suffering in the New Testament is Lazarus, who was plagued by leprosy. Instead of being healed by a Christ-figure, the speaker here is destined to suffer, as if in a pre-Christian world without a savior. Instead of a harangue against her father, the speaker addresses her audience who stare at her in grim amazement; they are her Nazi torturers ("Herr Doktor. So, Herr Enemy")
Overall, the speakers of both poems is victimized by a culture of death and adopts, in response, a voice that is both full of vengeance and resignation. She suffers from both an Elektra complex and a romanticized death wish.
In Silvia Plath's later poetry, some of the pain she felt at losing her father at such a young age comes to light. She was only eight when he died. Sometimes she would paint him as a Nazi in her poems, often representing herself as Jewish. She exorcised some of the painful events and memories of her own life, and the history in her father's background ( a Polish-German area) by working it through in poetry as she had done with other themes in her earlier works. In this way trauma from her own life underwent a transformation that made it applicable more universally - into something many people could identify with. in 'Daddy' she may have trying to present ideas of trying to be reuinted with her father through ending her own life.