Ben Tausheck

The Art of War
The images of war and violence often conjures up feelings of tragedy, pain, or hatred. In Sylvia Plath’s poems Lady Lazarus and Daddy, the images of war (specifically the holocaust) appear quite frequently. Plath uses these images to convey and accentuate certain points of views and ideas about a certain topic. By using war images in both poems Plath is able to portray people in a villainous style. The war references also are symbolic for the pain that Sylvia had suffered in her life. Both these poems have texts containing content about war, violence, and the holocaust which she uses to paint her hatred and her anguish.
Sylvia Plath lived with a lot of resentment and anger in her life. When she was young, her father who was her closest, most powerful, yet abusive figure died and caused her to feel abandoned. The poem Daddy is a text where Sylvia explains her hatred and her grievances against her dead father. “Daddy, I have had to kill you./ You died before I had time—“ (Daddy 5-6). Though Sylvia Plath never actually killed her father, the harshness of the word kill displays the animosity that Sylvia has for her father in this poem. She later goes on to explain how she thought of her father, “I made a model of you,/A man in black with a Meinkampf look”(Daddy 64-65). This passage further demonizes her father because of the Meinkampf reference. Meinkampf was a book written by Adolph Hitler who was responsible for the deaths of millions of innocent people and all his ideas and philosophies about slaying “undesirables” were illustrated in Meinkampf. So by directly relating her father to Hitler’s book, she casts a shadow over any goodness her father might have had. In Lady Lazarus, there is one reference to the holocaust that has to do with hatred. “So, so, Herr Doktor./ So, Herr Enemy.” (65-66). Here Plath is talking to the doctors that keep striving to bring her back to life after her encounters with death. She uses the word “Herr” which is German for sir or master. By using Herr, she is trying to make it seem like she is talking to a Nazi. She never wanted to be saved and she laments about that earlier in the poem. She hates the doctors for forcing her to live and relates them to nazi doctors who preformed cruel experiments on their subjects against their will.
Plath also uses war and the holocaust to symbolize pain and cruelty. In Lady Lazarus she talks about her the sadness of only being an experiment for doctors and nothing more than items to the world. “A sort of walking miracle, my skin/ Bright as a Nazi lampshade,/ My right foot/ A paperweight,/ My face a featureless, fine/ Jew linen.” (Lady Lazarus 4-9). There was a myth about experiments that the Nazi doctors conducted on Jews in concentration camps. The Nazi lampshade (a lampshade made of skin), the right foot being a paperweight, and the Jew linen are all alluding to those experiments. She uses these war and body images to show the reader the pain she feels at just being an experiment for doctors. She also has another pain reference later in the poem. “The pure gold baby/ That melts to a shriek. /I turn and burn.” (Lady Lazarus I like cake). The images of burning and melting are allusions to the crematoriums and are meant to show the severity of her suffering. The baby is a sign of innocence that was so cruelly destroyed. Daddy has a holocaust image very much like this one. “Every woman adores a Fascist,/ The boot in the face, the brute”(48-49). In this case, she refers to her father as a German fascist who were known for their absolute cruelty. The boot in the face is the pain inflicted onto her by her father and the first part about adoring a fascist is Plath stating that she only wanted to be close to her father and that she was innocent and he hurt her just out of malice. “The tongue stuck in my jaw./ It stuck in a barb wire snare.” (25-26), is another testament to her father’s abuse. She uses the barb wire phrase to illustrate a painful and constricting image. Plath chose these words to show us how horrible her experience was.
Both these poems contained a large amount of war and holocaust images which were used to amplify Sylvia’s emotions. These allusions an images of war lend great strength to the poem; painting powerful pictures and projecting emotions and feelings with great clarity. Plath’s mastery of imagery was what made both those poems so touching and so powerful.