Reference no: EM133308818

Topic: Although literary critics disagree about whether or not-or to what extent-Sylvia Plath's poetry should be read as autobiographical, it seems important to know something about Plath's own struggles with depression, rage at patriarchal figures, and suicide before you read "Lady Lazarus."

Plath's father, German-born biology professor Otto Plath, died of undiagnosed diabetes when she was eight years old. For the rest of her life, Plath wrestled with her feelings of abandonment and anger as a result of the loss of her father. The family's finances were unstable after Otto's death, and some biographers feel that the precariousness of their situation produced a self-consciousness, insecurity, and anxiety that Plath tried to cover up as an adult but never really overcame.

A precocious and dedicated student, Plath was awarded a scholarship to Smith College, a prestigious women's school in Massachusetts. Although she was successful in her academic life there, Plath struggled with depression and anxiety. After her junior year of college, she attempted suicide by taking sleeping pills and crawling under her family's house. She was discovered and admitted to McLean Hospital for psychiatric treatment.

After making an apparent recovery, Plath finished her degree at Smith and earned a prestigious Fulbright scholarship to study and write poetry in England. At Cambridge, she met the English poet Ted Hughes. The two were married within a year, embarking on a relationship that would prove rocky and fraught with tension. Plath seemed, at times, to have understood her attraction to Hughes as an expression of her unresolved feelings about her dead father and to have perceived him as a stand-in for her father. The marriage was plagued by feelings of sexual jealousy, professional competition, different assumptions about gender roles, and financial problems. Unable to deal with Hughes's infidelity, Plath asked him to leave after six years of marriage.

Plath then found herself alone, struggling to care for two young children and to balance her professional aspirations with the difficult realities of her domestic situation. In February 1963, after lining the door to the bedroom where her children slept with wet towels, Plath committed suicide by taking sleeping pills and gassing herself in the oven of her London flat. Some commentators have claimed that this suicide attempt was carefully orchestrated to fail and that Plath did not intend to succeed in killing herself (she left a note, including a doctor's phone number, and seems to have timed her attempt in a manner that didn't preclude the possibility of being found alive). Others, including friends close to Plath, assert that she fully intended to die.

Lazarus

The story of the raising of Lazarus from the dead-one of the miracles attributed to Jesus-appears in the Gospel of John in the New Testament. In the narrative, Lazarus is identified as the brother of Martha and Mary, two women who were followers of Jesus. When Lazarus became ill, the two women sent for Jesus, begging him to come to the town of Bethany to heal their brother. Jesus did not leave for Bethany for two days and told his disciples that he believed Lazarus to be dead before he set off on his journey. Arriving in Bethany, Jesus found that Lazarus had been dead for four days and had already been interred in a cave.

Moved by the sisters' sorrow, Jesus first assured them that anyone who believed in him would have eternal life and then wept for their brother. In the presence of a large crowd, Jesus ordered that the stone sealing the cave where Lazarus was buried be removed. He called inside the cave, telling Lazarus to come out. The story explains that "he that was dead came forth, bound hand and foot with graveclothes: and his face was bound about with a napkin" (John 11.44). Jesus ordered Lazarus freed from the bindings of the cloth wrapped around him for his burial. The narrative ends by explaining that many of the witnesses to this miracle of raising the dead believed in Jesus but that others were scandalized and reported him to authorities.

Question 1. How did you react to the pace and rhythm of this poem on your first reading? How would you describe the rhythm? Use textual evidence to support answer

Question 2. Does the form of the poem seem appropriate to its content? How do the sentiments expressed in the poem resonate with its meter and rhyme? Use textual evidence to support answer

Question 3. What different settings does the speaker imagine herself in? In what settings is she viewed as a kind of spectacle? Use textual evidence to support answer

Question 4. How does the speaker seem to feel about her own body? Use textual evidence to support answer

Question 5. Whom does the speaker address directly in the poem? Who is the intended audience for this poem? Are the addressees named in the poem and the intended audience the same? Use textual evidence to support answer

Question 6. How does the speaker feel about her apparently "exception[al]" (line 45) talent for the "art" (line 44)of dying? Is she proud? Embarrassed? Anxious? Triumphant? Distressed? All of these? Use textual evidence to support answer

Question 7. How would you describe the tone of the final stanza? What fate does the speaker predict for herself? Why does she warn her listeners to "beware" (lines 80-81)? Use textual evidence to support answer

Question 8. How would you describe the speaker's diction? When does she use short, even monosyllabic, words, and when does she use more complicated vocabulary?