Shahrnaz Zarafshar

Poetic Dissection: Body Part Imagery in Silvia Plath’s Poetry
“The big strip tease./Gentlemen, ladies/ These are my hands/My knees” (“Lazarus” 29-32). Throughout the range of poems she wrote, Silvia Plath was known for using recurring motifs in each, such as particular types of imagery. In both of the poems, “Lady Lazarus” and “The Colossus”, she uses the distinctive imagery of body parts. Due to different subject matter, this descriptive pattern serves to stress particular points in one poem that are not contained in the other. Plath discusses her suicide attempts and subsequent resurrections in “Lady Lazarus” with allusions to the Holocaust and a circus. The enormous statue from Rhodes serves as the title for her poem, “The Colossus”, in which she explains her troubled relationship with her deceased father. Therefore, the poems, “Lady Lazarus” and “The Colossus”, are correlated through Plath’s use of body part imagery, which emphasizes detachment from society and connection to her father.
The appearance of body part imagery is significant when analyzed in relation to the accompanying allusions and metaphors. Along with her body part imagery, Plath applies references to the Holocaust and a circus in “Lady Lazarus”. She compares herself to a Jew in World War II, oppressed by the Nazis. “My skin/Bright as a Nazi lampshade,/My right foot/A paperweight” contains two mentions of body parts, her skin and right foot (“Lazarus” 4-7). Historically, it is believed that Nazis utilized the bodies of Jews to manufacture products, such as lampshades. This allusion suggests that Plath is criticizing the people who seek to exploit her, even when she is dead. Plath’s disparagement of parasitic people is again emphasized with her reference to a circus in the line “The peanut-crunching crowd/shoves in to see” (“Lazarus” 26-27). Here she is broadly applying the label of being insensitive and shameless to the public for striving to satisfy their curiosity without considering her need for privacy. Yet in the poem, “The Colossus”, very different points are asserted through her use of body part imagery.
In describing her father as a great, fallen statue from ancient history, Plath employs this particular kind of imagery to form a picture of a whole. For example, she writes “Over the weedy acres of your brow/To mend the immense skull-plates and clear/The bald, white tumuli of your eyes” in order to allow the readers to be able to create a mental image of her interpretation of the Colossus (“Colossus” 13-15). Plath describes the body parts as in a state of disrepair, which she hopes to rectify with “glue pots and pails of Lysol” (11). Additionally, the body parts of the Colossus are depicted with evocative adjectives, such as “fluted bones and acanthine hair” (“Colossus” 20), whereas “Lady Lazarus” contains body part imagery that is only physically detailed through metaphors. Thematically, the imagery serves to establish Plath’s perception of social detachment and her connection to her father.
Using body part imagery, Plath addresses her feeling of separation from society and her paternal bond. Throughout the poem “Lady Lazarus”, the speaker’s body is described part by part, without any connections drawn between the sections mentioned. In the second stanza, the mentioning of the skin, right foot, and face of the speaker are only tied in their allusions to the Holocaust. The theme of undoing the links that bond the overall body as a whole unit is affirmed by the lines, “To see/Them unwrap me hand and foot/The big strip tease” (“Lazarus” 27-29). The speaker, who is interpreted as Plath herself, is showing the separation from society through physical descriptions of the division. Later on in the poem, it states that “A very large charge/For a word or a touch/Or a bit of blood/Or a piece of my hair or my clothes” (“Lazarus” 61-64). The crowd pushing to view the speaker on display is willing to pay money just for one bit of contact, but they do not show any desire of wanting to become acquainted with Plath personally. This separation of body parts that displays the lack of ties between the speaker and subject of the poem is also found in “The Colossus”. As Plath progressively distances herself from her father until she eventually severs the relationship, the imagery similarly becomes more disconnected in the later stanzas. However, the earlier body part imagery is used with enjambments that connect the flow of the poem. When the poem’s subject is about mending the statue, the imagery corresponds by describing parts from the same area of the body, such as the face in stanza 3. This reinforces the idea of the speaker trying to reconstruct the Colossus by allowing the readers to create an intact image of the statue.
In conclusion, Plath’s body part imagery is used to show detachment from society, as well as her relationship with her father. Through her imagery in “Lady Lazarus”, she disparages the public’s interest in her and implies that it actually is very demeaning. The poem contains references that are from different portions of the body and do not fit together to form a complete picture of Plath. The use of imagery from unrelated body areas is continued in the poem, “The Colossus”, which results in weakening and ultimately breaking the bond between Plath and her father. However, the poem starts with imagery that causes readers to recognize that Plath is initially trying to salvage her connection to her father before ultimately surrendering. In both poems, the use of body part imagery signifies Plath’s rapport with others, such as society and her father.
Word Count: 897