Alex Yamamoto

“I think I may well be a Jew”: Holocaust Imagery in Sylvia Plath’s Poetry
“I may be a bit of a Jew” (“Daddy”, 40). Sylvia Plath’s use of Holocaust imagery is not uncommon within her poetry. It effectively highlights her dark and deathly tones by giving vivid imagery that could connect with any reader. By relating her own personal experience to that of the Jews, the amount of pain and anguish she felt is passed on to the reader. In “Daddy” and “Lady Lazarus,” Holocaust images show suffering and relationships Plath had.
Plath’s use of Holocaust imagery invokes many emotions to the reader. More specifically in both “Daddy” and “Lady Lazarus,” Plath uses it to compare her suffering to the Jews and says, “I think I may well be a Jew” (“Daddy”, 35). She describes the suffering she felt when she says, “my skin / Bright as a Nazi lampshade” (“Lazarus”, 4-5), which is an allusion to the rumor that Nazis used Jew’s skin as lampshades. However, differences exist between the poems because in “Daddy” her suffering is physical pain, while in “Lady Lazarus” her suffering is mental. When trying to show physical pain, Plath uses the most vivid image of the Holocaust, “A Jew, to Dachau, Aushwitz, Belsen” (“Daddy”, 33). By directly referring to the concentration camps where Jews were inflicted with the most horrendous pain, Plath successfully shows the pain her father and husband caused her. While for mental suffering, she says, “That melts like a shriek” (“Lazarus”, 70), which uses the fact that Jews were killed in ovens to show the pain and suffering she feels within herself. Not only do the Holocaust images show suffering, they also show relationships Plath has.
In both “Daddy” and “Lady Lazarus” she shows relationships of resent and hatred. While “Daddy” is the relationship that Plath has with her father, “Lady Lazarus” is her relationship with death. Plath shows her hatred through Nazi imagery when she says, “I have always been scared of you, / With your Luftwaffe” (“Daddy”, 41-42). By directly comparing herself to the Jews and her father to the Nazis, the amount of resent and hatred seen is paramount. These images greatly enhance the dark tone of the poem and the theme of how she hates her father. In “Lady Lazarus” it is clearly seen that she is talking about suicide when she says, “like a cat I have nine times to die” (21). However Holocaust images enhance the feeling of death when she says, “I do it [commit suicide] so it feel like hell” (46). Just like the Nazi’s brutally tortured the Jews, Plath tortured herself, but unlike most Jews Plath survived her ordeals.
Plath’s Holocaust images have caused controversy because she is comparing her own experiences to the Jews of the Holocaust, even though she herself never experienced what they went through. However, even when taking that into account, her inclusion of Holocaust images greatly enhances the tone and the theme of her poetry and influences the reader greatly.