Sharvani Srivastava

“A Man with a Meinkampf Look”: The Nazis of Plath’s Life
Shots could be heard as the hordes of men ran towards each other. Bomb blasts followed by a shower of dust decorated the field. Bodies lay on the ground, motionless, as some miles away, a race was to be exterminated through torturous death. It was a dismal scene, yet still a scene used commonly in Sylvia Plath’s poems. Her style being confessional poetry, Plath wrote of her like and motivations for committing suicide. Plath thought the pain she experienced was comparable to the suffering the Jews endured in the Holocaust. Using what she thought was a similarity, Plath incorporated World War II and Holocaust imagery in many of her poems to more accurately reflect her agony. Though in both “Daddy” and “Lady Lazarus” Sylvia Plath uses Holocaust imagery, these two poems differ in the way they portray Plath being controlled, her enemy’s role, and her attempts at suicide.
As a woman, Plath feels controlled by society in general, and since specific parts of society control her differently, she uses the two different poems “Lady Lazarus” and “Daddy” to address the two parts that influence her. In “Lady Lazarus”, Plath talks of her desires and attempts to commit suicide, but also tells of how each time she has attempted suicide she has been prevented from doing so by being saved. By the tone of the poem, Plath portrays her dislike of being saved since it causes her excessive physical and emotional pain. However, she realizes her saviors disregard her thoughts since they believe it right for her to be stopped, and they, as a result, gain glory for saving her life. Her saviors are controlling whether she dies or not without her own permission. To portray this matter of life and death, Plath turns to Holocaust imagery. She shows that similar to the Jews in the Holocaust, an outside source has the final say of whether a person should die or not, however, in opposite ways: the Jews are controlled and tortured by the Nazis who sentenced them to death, however ironically, Plath is controlled and tortured by those who sentence her to life. However in “Daddy”, Plath is controlled differently by the same use of Jew and Nazi imagery. In “Daddy”, Plath claims she “barely [dared] to breath” in her black shoe “in which [she has] lived like a foot” (“Daddy” 2-5). In her time, women did not have much freedom, and Plath herself found it difficult to be a wife, mother, and a poet at once. She had to live within the roles of women in society, her black shoe, which was dictated by the men in her life. However, the poem progresses to become more personal, rather than just comment on the rigid roles of women. Her father’s death, she claims, in turn controlled her mental state as to want to die and “get back, back, back to [him]” (“Daddy” 59). Later her husband also slowly mentally killed Plath and caused her to consider suicide as well since she says as a comparison he “drank [her] blood for…seven years” (“Daddy” 73-74). In “Daddy”, Plath is a Jew that is controlled mentally since both her father and husband leave her, but in “Lady Lazarus”, she in controlled physically since the matter of life and death is dictated.
Each time Plath is portrayed as a Jew, her poem always has an enemy of hers and of the Jew’s portrayed as a Nazi. Plath addresses “Herr Doktor. So, Herr Enemy” contradicting the norm since most people would consider a doctor beneficial, one who aids the hurt, however, to Plath a doctor is no better than a Nazi (“Lady Lazarus”65-66). During the Holocaust, the Nazi doctors determined whether a Jew should be killed, making them the Jews’ enemies. For Plath the doctors determine whether she lives, also making them her enemy. The sentence to death and life are both forms of torture for the recipients. Contrarily, the poem “Daddy” speaks of Plath’s father and how she has “always been scared of [him], with [his] Luftwaffe, [his] gobbledygoo” (“Daddy” 41-42). Plath is again controlled by a cruel German who she personifies not to be a savior like in “Lady Lazarus”, but her own father. Before and after his death, Otto Plath had a large influence on Plath, and since “every woman adores a Fascist”, when he died, Plath felt the need to replace one dominating male figure with another, her husband Ted Hughes (“Daddy 38). Alas, Ted Hughes left Plath too, and the betrayal of the men she loved the most caused Plath to commit suicide, thus making them her enemies. Contrarily to one another, “Lady Lazarus” names Plath’s enemies as those who save her from death, however, “Daddy” claims her enemies are those who caused her to commit suicide in the first place.
The use of Holocaust imagery was to help the audience understand the torment Plath had to face. The idea of the pain caused by wanting to die and hating those who prevent her from doing so is a difficult concept for mentally stable people to understand, but by referring to the Holocaust, a widely known event, Plath ensures that the audience can at least begin to comprehend the level of pain she endured. Yet, this use to Holocaust imagery can only be taken to a certain point, and many argue that Plath crossed the line and lowered the actually historical effect the Holocaust has on people. Plath’s pain and suffering was nowhere close to that of the Jews in the Holocaust, and her father and husband were defiantly not Nazi-like personas, and the doctors, unlike the Nazis, had only good intentions for Plath. Yet, her disillusioned idea that the sufferings were comparable, just adds to the notion that Plath was mentally unstable and needed poetry since it was the only way to express and possibly try to cure herself.
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