The Life and Works
Of Sylvia Plath

Biography

�    Sylvia Plath was born in Boston Massachusetts on October 27, 1932 to Otto Plath, a young man of German descent, and Aurelia Schoeber, a young woman of Austrian ancestry.

�    In September 1950, Sylvia Plath began studying at Smith College in Massachusetts.

�    At the end of Plath�s third year at Smith College she was named to be the guest managing editor of the magazine Mademoiselle. and she was given a month of �working vacation� in New York City.

�    After returning from New York City in August of 1953 Sylvia suffered from a nervous breakdown and attempted suicide. She was hospitalized and given shock treatments and psychotherapy.

�    After making it through her first semester of senior year without any problems she submitted her English honors thesis. titled �The Magic Mirror: A Study of the Double in Two of Dostoevsky�s Novels� in January 1955. In June she graduated from Smith College with the title of summa cum laude.

�    It was at Cambridge in the winter of 1956 that Sylvia met Ted Hughes, a young British poet whom she would soon wed.

�    Hughes and Plath were married on June 16, 1956 in London.

�    In 1957 she submitted her manuscript of poetry entitled, �Two Lovers and a Beachcomber� for the English tripos and M.A. degree at Newnham College.

�    In the early months of 1960 Plath found out that her book of poems titled �The Colossus� was going to be published by William Heinemann.

�    After finding out about her book publishing she found out she was pregnant and gave birth to a daughter, Frieda, on April 1, 1960.

�    In early February 1961 Plath was pregnant again, but she miscarried this child and then underwent an appendectomy surgery later in the month. In the same year as her miscarriage Plath was given a grant to enable her to work solely on her novel. The Bell Jar.

�    On January 17, 1962 she gave birth to another child. This time it was a boy that was named Nicolas.

�    In July of the same year Plath learned that Ted Hughes had been having an extramarital affair with Assia Gutman.

�    Attempting to rebuild their marriage the young couple journeyed to Ireland together in September and almost immediately Hughes returned alone to London and began living with his mistress.

�    That winter she moved into a small London flat with her two children and tried to recreate the family that they once had.

The Poem "Daddy"

You do not do, you do not do

Any more, black shoe

In which I have lived like a foot

For thirty years, poor and white,

Barely daring to breathe or Achoo.

Daddy, I have had to kill you,

You died before I had time �

Marble-heavy, a bag full of God,

Ghastly statue with one grey toe

Big as a Frisco seal

And a head in the freakish Atlantic

Where it pours bean green over blue

In the waters off beautiful Nauset.

I used to pray to recover you.

Ach, du

In the German tongue, in the Polish town

Scraped flat by the roller

Of wars, wars, wars.

But the name of the town is common.

My Polack friend

Says there are a dozen or two.

So I never could tell where you

Put your foot, your root,

I never could talk to you.

The tongue stuck in my jaw.

It stuck in a barb wire snare.

Ich, ich, ich, ich,

I could hardly speak.

I thought every German was you.

And the language obscene

An engine, an engine

Chuffing me off like a Jew.

A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen.

I began to talk like a Jew.

I think I may well be a Jew.

The snows of the Tyrol, the clear beer of Vienna

Are not very pure or true.

With my gypsy ancestress and my weird luck

And my Taroc pack and my Taroc pack

I may be a bit of a Jew.

I have always been scared of you,

With your Luftwaffe, your gobbledygook.

And your neat mustache

And your Aryan eye, bright blue. Panzer-man, panzer-man, O You �

Not God but a swastika

So black no sky could squeak through.

Every woman adores a Fascist,

The boot in the face, the brute

Brute heart of a brute like you.

You stand at the blackboard, daddy,

In the picture I have of you,

A cleft in your chin instead of your foot

But no less a devil for that, no not

Any less the black man who

Bit my pretty red heart in two.

I was ten when they buried you.

At twenty I tried to die

And get back, back to you.

I thought even the bones would do.

But they pulled me out of the sack,

And they stuck me together with glue.

And then I knew what to do.

I made a model of you,

A man in black with a Meinkampf look

And a love of the rack and the screw.

And I said I do, I do.

So daddy, I�m finally through.

The black telephone�s off at the root,

The voices just can�t worm through.

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.

Daddy, you can lie back now.

There�s a stake in your fat black heart

And the villagers never liked you.

They are dancing and stamping on you.

They always knew it was you.

Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I�m through.

-Sylvia Plath (The Riverside Anthology)

-Sylvia Plath (The Riverside Anthology)

Analysis of �Daddy�

In the poem �Daddy� Sylvia Plath takes on the idea that she is the Eastern European Jew being persecuted during World War II by a Nazi, who is personified to be her father. When writing �I thought every German was you. And the language obscene/ An engine, an engine chuffing me off like a Jew. A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belson.� Plath is showing her own emotions of being thought of as the Jew while her father (the German) ordered her around and sent her on her way to these terrible places. Plath also uses color imagery to show her meaning in this poem. The reference to the color black when describing various objects such as a shoe and the telephone and her reference to her father as �A man in black with a Meinkampf look� shows Plath�s need to show the contrast between the Nazi and herself. . This poem shows Plath�s vision of herself as a product of a male society, molded by males to suit their particular needs. In the poem she is also attempting to find her own identity by destroying her �creators�, in this case her father. The last two stanzas of the poem �Daddy� allow Plath to be victorious over her �creator� by Plath�s words of �Daddy, you can lie back now. There�s a stack in your fat black heart�� This poem allows Plath to show the complexity and the depth of her own parent-child relationship and allows the reader to place their own relationship within the poem. The reader can go through the steps of imagery by making their own father first a shoe, a nazi, a teacher, and finally a vampire. When analyzing �Daddy� the vampire metaphor shows that the poem can also be interpreted to attack the speaker�s husband on a symbolic level and her father on the literal level. �Daddy� can portray Hughes as a monster and Otto Plath as a vampire and can show that Plath was attempting to overcome her feelings for her estranged husband while she was also dealing with issues of abandonment over her father�s death from when she was a mere eight years old.

The Poem �Lady Lazarus�

I have done it again.

One year in every ten

I manage it -----------

A sort of walking miracle, my skin

Bright as a Nazi lampshade,

My right foot

A paperweight,

My face a featureless, fine

Jew linen.

Peel off the napkin

O my enemy.

Do I terrify? --------

The nose, the eye pit, the full set of teeth?

The sour breath

Will vanish in a day.

Soon, soon the flesh

The grave cat ate will be

At home on me

And I a smiling woman.

I am only thirty.

And like the cat I have nine times to die.

This is Number Three.

What a trash

To annihilate each decade.

What a million filaments.

The peanut-crunching crowd

Shoved in to see

Them unwrap me hand and foot ----

The big strip tease.

Gentlemen, ladies

These are my hands

My knees

I may be skin and bone,

Nevertheless, I am the same, identical woman.

The first time it happened I was tem.

It was an accident.

The second time I meant

To last it out and not come back at all.

I rocked shut

As a seashell.

They had to call and call

And pick the worms off me like sticky pearls.

Dying

Is an art, like everything else.

I do it exceptionally well.

I do it so it feels like hell.

I do it so it feels real.

I guess you could say I�ve a call.

It�s easy enough to do it in a cell.

It�s easy enough to do it and stay put.

It�s the theatrical

Gentlemen, ladies

These are my hands

My knees

I may be skin and bone,

Nevertheless, I am the same, identical woman.

The first time it happened I was tem.

It was an accident.

The second time I meant

To last it out and not come back at all.

I rocked shut

As a seashell.

They had to call and call

And pick the worms off me like sticky pearls.

Dying

Is an art, like everything else.

I do it exceptionally well.

I do it so it feels like hell.

I do it so it feels real.

I guess you could say I�ve a call.

It�s easy enough to do it in a cell.

It�s easy enough to do it and stay put.

It�s the theatrical

Comeback in broad day

To the same place, the same face, the same brute

Amused shout:

�A miracle!�

That knocks me out.

There is a charge

For the eyeing of my scars, there is a charge

For the hearing of my heart ------------

It really goes.

And there is a charge, a very large charge

For a word or touch

Or a bit of blood

Or a piece of my hair or my clothes

So, so, Doktor.

So, Herr Enemy.

I am your opus,

I am your valuable,

The pure gold baby

That melts to a shriek.

I turn and burn.

Do not think I underestimate your great concern.

Ash, ash ---------

You poke and stir,

Flesh, bone, there is nothing there --------

A cake of soap,

A wedding ring,

A gold filling.

Herr God, Herr Lucifer

Beware

Beware.

Out of the ash

I rise with my red hair

And I eat men like air.

-Sylvia Plath (The Riverside Anthology)

Analysis of �Lady Lazarus�

�Lady Lazarus� reveals Plath�s awareness of the lingering ties and stands as an encapsulation of her whole life�s quest for identity from passivity, to passive resistance, to active resistance, and finally to the violently imagined destruction of those people who first gave and then shattered her life: men. �Lady Lazarus� is a poem where the speaker is developed as a character of true religious prosecution. Plath�s use of extended metaphors and allusions help to develop the imagery of her terrifyingly gruesome attempts at suicide. Plath attempts to describe her suicides as a form of entertainment such as �peanut-crunching crowd� and her living is simply described as �the big strip tease� which can be a form of entertainment for others and not for Plath herself. �In the New Testament of the Bible, Lazarus is a man who rises from the dead at the command of Jesus Christ (John 11:38).� The title �Lady Lazarus, where the Lady most likely refers to Plath herself, is a true example of confessional poetry. In Lines 65-79 Plath uses metaphor and allusion to compare the doctors who helped revive her after her attempted suicide to Nazis giving her life which, according to the poem the speaker �Plath� felt to be more horrible than killing her. The speaker also uses apostrophe to address the doctors in her past: �So, so Herr Doktor, So, Herr Enemy.� These so called �doktors� are being pictured as evil Nazis that must be reckoned with. To help so the stupidity of the �doktors� Plath uses assonance such as �charge, large charge� to mock the �doktors� that are attempting to save her life. The speaker in the poem also continues to identify herself as a Nazi�s victim. She uses allusions to Nazi death camps as her own way to develop this idea:

Ash, ash, ----

You poke and stire.

Flesh, bone, there is nothing there.

A cake of soap,

A wedding ring,

A gold filling.

In this section of the poem the speaker is referring to the Nazi death camps to describe her own attempts at suicide. �Ash, ash� can be used to reflect on the ovens that the Germans placed the Jews in to burn the remains of their dead bodies. �Wedding rings� can be used by saying that these were items that were taken from the Jews right before they lost their lives.

The �Lazarus� motif also exists in the poem. The first metaphor referring to this is found in the poem�s title. Lazarus� resurrection by Christ is mentioned throughout the poem. The �napkin� can be conferred to be the linen wrappings of Lazarus, and the �grave cave� can be the tomb in which he was buried after his death. Sylvia Plath is the �Lady Lazarus.�

In �Lady Lazarus� the use of poetic devices such as allusion, metaphor, apostrophe, extended metaphor, and irony are used to help develop the speaker�s feelings of confusion, paranoia, and her own contempt for herself.

Conclusion

Sylvia Plath�s own life deeply affected her poetry. Poems such as �Daddy� and �Lady Lazarus� show her own contempt for men liker her father and her husband and her contempt for herself. Her experiences in life such as her father�s unusual death and her husbands adultery have caused her to be confused and to doubt herself which has been reflected in her poetry.

Works Cited

Austin, David Craig. Scribners � Sylvia Plath 1932-1963. Modern American Women

Writers, 1991. P.411-424

Cady, Ben. An Interpretation of Sylvia Plath�s �Lady Lazarus� Online. October 1999.

Available: May 21, 2001 http://www.cityhonors.buffalo.k12.ny.us/city/rsrcs/eng/placady1.html.

Cam, Heather; Dejong, Mary G.; Ramazani, Jahan; & Srivastava, K.G. . Sylvia The

Vampire Slayer. Online. 1992. Available: June 7, 2000. http://members.aol.com/raisans/plath.htm

Encyclopedia Brittanica. �Sylvia Plath: Personal Influences on Sylvia Plath�s Writing�

Online. Available: May 21, 2001 http://acler.cwrl.utexas.edu/slatin/sexton/plath.html

Frank N. Magill, et al. Critical Survey of Poetry 1847-2300 MacL � Qua. Englewood

Cliffs, New Jersey, Salem Press, 1982.

Other Great Sylvia Plath Links

http://www.geocities.com/Paris/Caf�/3986/pagetwo.html (This is a great site for Pictures of Plath and her childhood home)

http://www.poets.org/Lit/poet/splath.htm (Great site for general knowledge about Plath)

http://www.gurlpages.com/music/ariel_doll/velvet.html (This page is great it has other poems besides the ones that you can find on this page)

-Carrie Throckmorton