Darshana Prakasam

The Five Senses: How Sylvia Plath uses Imagery to Communicate

            Smell, taste, hear, see and feel.  These are how people experience the world.  Imagery or vivid descriptions in literature evoke these five senses to add meaning and life to the pieces.  A common literary tool, imagery frequently appears throughout Sylvia Plath’s poetry.  With it, she expresses her feelings and thoughts about the world around her.  Although she employs many types of imagery from death to season and weather, one specific types is that of the Holocaust and Nazism.  Sylvia Plath utilizes Holocaust and Nazi imagery in “Lady Lazarus” and “Daddy” to communicate her feelings of exploitation and pain.

            Both poems, with Holocaust and Nazi imagery, describe and explain the concept of exploitation.  In “Lady Lazarus”, Plath discusses wanting to die, but inevitably being saved every time. Moreover, each suicide attempt is publicized, turning her private story into a public story.   This leads her to feel exploited and used for the public’s benefit, leaving her with absolutely nothing for herself.  Consequently, when she writes, “A sort of walking miracle,/ my skin/ Bright as a Nazi lampshade,/ My right foot / A paperweight,” she communicates these feelings (“Lady Lazarus” 4-9).    Beginning with Nazi lampshade, this references the Holocaust when Germans would often experiment and sometimes create objects such as lampshades from the skin of Jews.  The lampshade from skin and the paperweight from her foot provide examples of how the Jews were not shown respect or their lives valued and how they were used for others’ benefit.  Something as personal as skin was taken and used as a household item.  By using this imagery, Plath says that she relates to that situation and is feeling what the Jews felt.  Likewise, in “Daddy”, recurring Nazi and Holocaust imagery explain the exploitation of her feelings, which led to her frustration with her father.   She writes, “Not God but a swastika / So black no sky could squeak through / Every woman adores a Fascist, / The boot in the face, the brute” (“Daddy” 46-49).  She uses the famous symbol of the Nazis, the swastika, and mentions Fascism to represent the power they brandished over everyone like a God, forcing people to listen and obey. They had to “adore” or they would receive a “boot in the face” (“Daddy” 47, 48).  They pushed their desires across, disregarding the feelings of the Jews.  It is a representation of how Plath felt when she communicated, or rather tried to, with her father.  He conveyed his own opinions and thoughts but she was not able to express her feelings in the same way.  In this way, she feels that her feelings were exploited and she was used as a tool for her father’s benefit.  Though “Lady Lazarus” and “Daddy” relate to different situations, they both similarly use Holocaust and Nazi imagery to convey the exploitation of feelings.

            Another employment of Nazi and Holocaust imagery, “Lady Lazarus” and “Daddy” represent the pain that Plath feels from her thwarted suicide attempts as well as her inability to communicate with her father.  In “Lady Lazarus”, when she writes that her skin was “bright as a Nazi lampshade”, a feeling of pain is immediately evoked. (“Lady Lazarus” 5)   It leads the reader to imagine the torture Jews must have gone through to have their skin used in such barbaric ways.  While this references physical pain, Plath uses it to correlate with her thoughts on being brought back to life every time she tries to end it.  She explains the pain of having to continue living without a desire to do so.  People were so intent on believing that saving Plath was a compassionate gesture, they ignored the point of view of Plath.  This is the same with the Jews who were not given an opportunity to voice their opinions against the actions of the Germans, unfairly put through physical pain.   Utilizing this powerful imagery, she conveys how saving her was just as malicious as what the Germans did.  Furthermore, in “Daddy”, she exhibits the pain she feels from the communication barrier between her and her “daddy”.  Physical and mental pain is portrayed when she writes that, “[her] tongue stuck in [her] jaw. / It stuck in a barb wire snare.” (“Daddy” 25-26).   Such a vivid image immediately presents an excruciatingly painful situation, but beyond that, it presents the barbwire fences of the Holocaust and the pain those camps brought to the Jews.  The fences cut them off from the rest of the world and prevented them from speaking out to the Germans.  Plath constantly refers to herself as a Jew by writing “I think I may well be a Jew.” (“Daddy” 35) and “I may be a bit of a Jew” (“Daddy” 40) and compares her father with a German with phrases such as “ your Aryan eye” (“Daddy” 44).  This further reinforces her symbolizing the concept of  just as the Jews were unable to express themselves to the Nazis, Plath was unable to articulate herself to her father.  “Lady Lazarus” and “Daddy” have different enveloping themes but their utilization of the Holocaust imagery paralleled each other. 

             Imagery is a useful literary tool that allows the reader to feel what the author feels, allowing the reader to feel a connection with the author.  Plath includes a lot of imagery in her poetry as almost extended analogies to her situations to make the reader better understand what she is describing.  With the Holocaust and Nazi imagery, she provides what she believes to be a point of comparison for she believes the magnitude of suffering of the Jews closely paralleled her own suffering.  Evoking the five senses, Sylvia Plath additionally evoked understanding and compassion from the readers.

Word Count: 924