Kara Richins

“Stuck in a Barb Wire Snare”: Holocaust Imagery in Sylvia Plath’s Poetry

“The blood jet is poetry/ There is no stopping it,” asserts Sylvia Plath in her poem “Kindness,” as a comment on how creating poetry overwhelmed her already unbalanced life (18-19). Plath sets a precedent for the treatment of the poetic self, using confessional poetry to intimate her depression and forthcoming suicide. Two of her poems, “Lady Lazarus,” which references the Bible in a feministic criticism about her own salvation, and “Daddy,” which expresses the bitterness relating to her father’s death, are especially poignant, with an intense combination of violent and disturbing imagery. Images of the Holocaust are a chief component of these riveting poems, incorporated by Plath to construct a metaphor for her suicide, as well as for the struggles which spawn from her father’s death.

Holocaust imagery is used in both “Lady Lazarus” and “Daddy” in connection with Plath’s suicide. “Lady Lazarus” itself is an easier-acknowledged reference to her death than the more subtle correlation that Holocaust imagery presents in “Daddy.” The first poem uses a response to John 11: Lazarus to show how it was harmful for her to keep being saved from the many deaths she attempted, and therefore the imagery present forms a more direct parallel than “Daddy,” which focuses more on her father’s death than her own. “Lady Lazarus” opens with an admittance that she has “done it again,” then says, “A sort of walking miracle, my skin/ Bright as a Nazi lampshade/…My face a featureless, fine/ Jew linen” (1, 4-5 & 8-9). The original confession ties to the images within stanzas one and two; this structure is used by Plath to link her suicide to the Holocaust. The imagery describes the unsubstantiated claims that Jew skin was once used to make Nazi lampshades, and how her other body parts would have been used for other household items. Together, the first three stanzas show that within her attempts at death, she feels experimented on by those around her. The poem “Daddy,” instead incorporates her suicide as a minor theme in a sea of Nazi imagery. Plath again combines her ideas between stanzas to strengthen the themes of each poem. The lines, “At twenty I tried to die/ And get back, back, back to you,” a stark confession of her reasons for desiring death, are followed by the lines, “…then I knew what to do/ I made a model of you/ A man in black with a Meinkampf look” in the next stanza (58-59 & 63-65). Plath ties an allusion to Hitler with her suicide; in between these lines she also describes how she was saved and put back together with glue, similar to her description of rescue (62). She claims her father displayed Hitler-like qualities, contributing to her reasons for wanting to die. Throughout the two poems, she expresses her surrender to death, using Holocaust imagery to strengthen the central ideas behind these poems.

How Plath coped with her father’s death is also portrayed in “Lady Lazarus” and “Daddy” through Holocaust imagery. She faced feelings of abandonment and betrayal after her father’s death when she was a child, for she felt he could have avoided his diabetes-related demise by seeking treatment. These feelings form the basis for the poem “Daddy.” Her father is depicted as heartless, ruthless, and oppressive in this poem, through an excess of Nazi-related images. Plath takes her father’s German ancestry to a new height, saying “Not God but a swastika/ So black no sky could squeak through” (46-47). She uses the provocative image of the swastika to show how her father’s death suppressed her sky, her freedom, by robbing her of her childhood innocence. She also addresses her fear of her father with her words, “I have always been scared of you/ With your Luftwaffe, your gobbledygoo/ …your Aryan eye, bright blue” (41, 42 & 44). Plath trembled at her father’s paternal criticisms and punishment through a child’s perspective, feeling as if he wielded a powerful superiority. Plath maintains that her father’s death draped over ill-fated life, which appeared in association with the feelings of anger and abandonment that reemerged when her husband left her for another woman. Plath felt exploited, a sentiment she introduces in “Lady Lazarus.” She symbolizes her father, and husband, with the title “Herr Doktor,” an allusion to the German SS doctors who performed horrific experiments on humans during the Holocaust (64). Plath suggests that her emotions were subject to experimentation, writing, “I am your opus/ I am your valuable/ The pure gold baby/ That melts to a shriek” (66-69). This refers Nazis that stripped valuables away from those they imprisoned, melting the items back into raw precious metals. “A cake of soap/ A wedding ring/ A gold filling,” a further insinuation to the plundering Nazis, demonstrates how Plath felt victim to thieving paternal and romantic love, feeling as though she was the Jew whose her wedding ring was taken by the Nazis (75-77). The images in “Lady Lazarus” and “Daddy” provide a means for Plath to exemplify the effect that her father and his death had on her life.

Plath integrated Holocaust imagery into “Lady Lazarus” and “Daddy” to reveal her thoughts about killing herself and her experiences after her father’s death. She felt the most effective approach to relaying these themes was through the relationship of Jews and Nazis. Plath was committed to this situation because of her German ancestry, but instead substituted herself for the Jew. Plath released her grief and bitter remorse symbolically as a means of attaining closure. It is ironic that when Plath finally succeeds in committing suicide, she escapes her responsibilities to those she loved, which had been exactly why she herself felt victimized.

Word Count: 939