The public's Pleasure in Pain

The Public's Pleasure in Pain

In the bible, Jesus brings back one man from the dead, and his name is Lazarus. The title of Sylvia Plath’s poem Lady Lazarus suggests her own experience in being brought back to life time and time again after her constant attempts of suicide. The poem as a whole is executed like a flashy performance and envelops a sarcastic tone targeted towards a bloodthirsty public.

She expresses her frustrations of being unsuccessful with suicide by referring to it mockingly as an art.

“Dying

Is an art, like everything else,

I do it exceptionally well.

I do it so it feels like hell

I do it so it feels real

I guess you could say I’ve a calling.”

Although advocating that the public eye curiously watches her attempts as a form of entertainment, she exhibits that her intentions behind each suicide attempt are real and not done with the expectation to fail her attempt. She fails repeatedly. Surviving suicide against her wishes illustrates the work of the hereafter.

“And I a smiling woman

I am only thirty.

And like the cat have nine times to die.

This is Number Three.

What a trash

To annihilate each decade

What a million filaments.

The peanut crunching crowd

Shoves in to see”

In this stanza she shows that she feels like she has been cursed with a gift of life that she doesn’t want, and finds it a waste of “each decade”. Feeling stuck on earth she feels the burden of the never-ending attempts of suicide she must perform before she can reach her final destination of the silence she craved in death.

Plath utilizes her poem to convey a message about the true nature of the public she experienced. Presenting her struggles ironically in the form of a “freak show” she is able to make us realize that the public is capable of finding entertainment in an individual’s pain. Unfortunately this is exponentially increased in contemporary times (2009). The audience, drawn to the ugliness in her life, reflects the reality of an ugliness that lives deep within the one’s who eagerly watch.

In the article “ Why I wrote the Yellow Wallpaper” Charolette Perkins Gilman states, “ It was not intended to drive people crazy, but to save people from being driven crazy, and it worked.” in reference to her motivation behind writing this story. Inspired by her own suppression of having “ but two hours' intellectual life a day," and "never to touch pen, brush, or pencil again", Gilman constructs a story that allows us to witness the gradual changes and internal struggles that occur within the mind of an unstable individual. By exposing us to the diary of this mentally disturbed woman, Gilman is able to help individuals in her audience who feel personally connected with her story, through their struggles. Gilman portrays the gradual decay of her heroine’s mental stability exemplified through external forces such as mental and physical restrictions that her husband strictly enforces upon her. Inadvertently, rather than helping her through her mental complexities, the power that he has over her causes her to loose a sense of who she was, driving her over the edge.

We are immediately introduced to several occasions suggesting the complete mental control that he has over her. As if to give her husband an excuse to have so much power over her, she writes,

“If a physician of high of standing, and one’s own husband, assures friends and relatives that there is really nothing the matter with one but temporary nervous depression- a slight hysterical tendency- what is one to do?”

Her husband’s official title gives her a sense of obligation to abide by his decisions on her health. This obligation to depend upon him becomes so overwhelming that she in turn suppresses any ideas that she has for her own health.

“I sometimes fancy that in my condition if I had less opposition and more society and stimulus- but John says the very worst thing I can do is to think about my condition, and I confess it always makes me feel bad. So I will let it alone and talk about the house.” (Page 2)

She constantly mentions her husband through out her diary and talks mostly of his opinions on any decisions that revolve around her. Exemplified by the quotes above, she values her husband’s ideas more than her own. Her inability to confront him by vocalizing her opinions gives her husband full control. This lack of self-confidence to become independent of her husband eventually makes her a stranger to herself.

Her physical entrapment was also a very impacting factor that played a large role in pushing her over the edge. In addition to her opinions constantly being suppressed, he isolates her from society by keeping her locked up in a room. Although she normally silences her feelings, she decides to actually address her inability to feel comfortable in her new room.

“At first he meant to repaper the room, but afterwards he said that I was letting it get the better of me, and that nothing was worse for a nervous patient than to give way to such fancies.” (Page 4)

After writing this, she then goes on to talk about the positive aspects of the room completely disregarding her original feelings of discomfort. Even after finally building up the courage to express her feelings to him she ends up completely replacing all of her own emotions with the emotions that he wants her to have.

The discomfort that overcomes her when talking about her own emotions is symbolically depicted through the woman that she sees trapped in the wallpaper. The first impression of uneasiness she experiences when encountering the wallpaper acts as a symbol of her uneasiness to confront her true feelings. At the end of the story when she “releases” the woman behind the wall, she hysterically tells her husband,“ I’ve got out at last,” said I, “ In spite of you and Jane. And I’ve pulled off most of the paper, so you can’t put me back!”(Page 15) After all of the constant suppression and containment she is finally able to physically liberate herself by letting the woman in the wallpaper, the symbolic form of her suppression, out. By unleashing the woman behind the wallpaper, we would like to assume that she would no longer allow herself to be bound by the boundaries that were once enforced upon her.

Gilman focuses on demonstrating and exposing various internal and external factors that influenced her into dependence. The lack of confidence that her friends and family members have in her, influence her to constantly doubt herself causing her to loose a sense of who she is. Similar to most of the novels we have read in this class so far, Gilman attempts to challenge our definition of insanity. These novels leave us to contemplate whether the insane actions of these characters define them as crazy or if their insane actions can be justified.