“I am only thirty,” the narrator of Sylvia Plath’s monumental 1962
poem, “Lady Lazarus,” announces early. “And like the cat I have nine
times to die.” Like the biblical Lazarus, she has returned from the
silent room from which one is never supposed to return; she also
resembles Plath herself, who attempted suicide multiple times. Read in
light of Plath’s history, her resurrections become the failures of both
women’s suicidal attempts, a failure at once triumphant, in that she
gets to live again, and tragic, for the same reason.
In an introduction to the poem for the BBC in December of 1962, Plath
described Lady Lazarus as “a woman who has the great and terrible gift
of being reborn. The only trouble is, she has to die first. She is the
phoenix, the libertarian spirit, what you will. She is also,” Plath
added, “just a good, plain, very resourceful woman.”
For some of us, Death offers her hand more than once for a dance in
her ballroom. We may want her to, fed up as we are with life, or we may
be swallowed up by the grey of depression, not even fully realizing we
have taken Death’s dark-nailed fingers in ours. We sway, her blue curls
brushing our cheeks, her soft scent become almost familiar after the
second time around the floor under the pink-black lanterns, but we
always find ourselves, with rage or relief, back beyond the dancefloor,
breathing. We fail to die, try as we might.
If Lady Lazarus is defined by her brushes with and ultimate defiance
against death, such is also the case, though more poignantly, with
another heroine of Plath’s, Esther Greenwood, the narrator of her only
finished novel, The Bell Jar. (She had started composing at
least two other novels before her death, one manuscript of which Plath’s
mother claimed was lost to fire; only The Bell Jar was completed.) Though finished in 1961, the part-autobiographical novel—its early titles were Diary of a Suicide or The Girl in the Mirror, the latter of which emphasizes Esther’s connection to Plath—was
published in England in January, 1963, mere weeks before Plath would
kill herself. Early reviews seemed tepid; Plath felt stung. Her abusive
husband, Ted Hughes, had abandoned her, leaving her to raise two
children—Frieda, three, and Nicholas, one—alone. Early in the morning on
February 11th, in the London flat William Butler Yeats had once lived
in, she ended her life by placing her head in an oven, gas switched on.
Wishing to spare her children, if not herself, she opened the window and
sealed off the kitchen door with tape and wet towels, so that the
lethiferous carbon monoxide would not leak through. In her last parental
act, small but heartbreaking, she left out mugs of milk for her
children before turning on the oven. ... [mehr] https://lithub.com/on-sylvia-plath-and-the-many-shades-of-depression/
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