Xinyi Lin

“Wars, Wars, Wars”: Sylvia Plath’s Use of the War Imagery

Despite of the harshness she had to overcome since childhood, Sylvia Plath accomplished an extraordinary achievement in her career. The traumatic life of this particular well-known confessional poet played a crucial role in her artistic work.
Two of Sylvia Plath’s infamous poems, “Daddy” and “Lady Lazarus,” appeal to the imagery of World War Two, during the Holocaust period, which was one of the cruelest, most inhuman, and traumatic examples of persecution in human history. Sylvia Plath applies this war imagery along with the Holocaustic description in both poems to reveal her disgust towards her father’s death and the suffering she encountered as a result of his death.
In both “Daddy” and “Lady Lazarus,” Sylvia expresses her mixed emotion and disgust towards the death of her father by comparing her father to a German Nazi, as she is the suffering Jew, which shows Holocaustic war imagery. Due to her father’s absence since her early childhood, in “Daddy,” Sylvia exaggerates the effect on her misery which resulted from her father’s death by stating “I thought every German was you...chuffing me off like a Jew” (Daddy 29-32). With the same attitude in “Lady Lazarus,” Sylvia states, “my skin/Bright as a Nazi lampshade…My face a featureless, fine/Jew linen” (Lady Lazarus 5-9). It refers to the fact that the Nazis did “peel off the napkin” (10) as they peel of Jews’ skins to make lampshade. This brutal imagery is used by Sylvia to shows her loathing and the pain which was caused by her father. Both poems indicate that due to the abandonment by her father when she was the age of eight, his death has been haunted Sylvia and she is not able to overcome his death. She constantly suffers with depression and pain, like the Jewish people who were being tortured and persecuted by German Nazis during World War Two. Sylvia describes her father as a cruel dictator who controls her life and, as a result of his death, she will never be able to erase this permanent scar in her heart.
Although both “Lady Lazarus” and “Daddy” shared lots of similarities, there are few differences between those two poems. In “Daddy,” Sylvia uses lots of repetitive references to the war imagery. Such as, “In the German tongue…wars, wars, wars” (Daddy 16-18). The word “Jew” is also used more frequently than in “Lady Lazarus,” such “A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen./ I began to talk like a Jew./ I think I may well be a Jew” (33-35). In contrast, “Jew” only appears one time in “Lady Lazarus,” which is stated in line stanza 4, “Jew linen.” Another difference between these two poems is that Sylvia Plath is not only reveals her resentment towards her father, but also her “replica father”- her husband. Sylvia furthermore uses suffering imagery to describe her husband. In “Daddy,” there is a major shift of the persona that Sylvia is attacking. “If I’ve killed one man, I’ve killed two---/The vampire who said he was you/And drank my blood for a year./Seven years, if you want to know.” When Sylvia changes the subject from her father to her husband, she exposes her disastrous marriage, which made her suffer pain similar to that which she suffered with her father’s death.
Sylvia Plath’s traumatic life experience is a key component for this great confessional poet’s inspirations. Her tragic life is “haunted” by her father’s death and her marriage is an example that she suffers like a Jew. She implies the Holocaustic war imagery in both “Lady Lazarus” and “Daddy” reveals her inner and complex emotions.

Word Count: 604