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.
I definitely hear the sarcastic tone in her expressing her suicide attempts as an art. I think your interpretation is right on. Its tragic to think that her existence on earth was simply to experience misery and pain for the awe and entertainment of others. Or at least it is tragic that she felt that way about herself, and was unable to find another path that could lead her out of that cycle.
ReplyDeleteI think that you do a great job of connecting the poem to the Bible, I actually didn't know that that was true, but I think that the name of the poem and the poem itself is clearer. I definitley agree with you about her sarcastic tone about suicide being an art. It's sad that she see's herself as just being entertainment for the other people around her especially since she is doing something as serious as attempting suicide. I think that your last sentence is very powerful and that it brings a lot more meaning to the poem and how it is being interpreted.
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