Dramatic monologue in "Lady Lazarus"

 Dramatic monologue is a literary form where a writer takes on the voice of a character and speaks through them. It is often used in theater and prose, but is more commonly referred to as a persona poem. The speaker reveals surprising information about their character or situation to an implied or explicit audience, often not the reader. The narrator of a persona poem or dramatic monologue is usually a person, but can also be animals, objects, places, or abstract concepts. Poets who write dramatic monologues or persona poems are sometimes referred to as monologists. Sylvia Plath is known for her confessional poetry, is praised by feminist critics for her use of dramatic monologues. In her poems "Daddy" and "Lady Lazarus," she is assumed to be confessing aspects of her personal life, such as her German father's daughter and her attempted suicide. However, these poems still use the dramatic monologue genre, where the speaker articulates an idea through another persona. Plath's poetry, using dramatic monologues, combines personal and political struggles with symbolism. Her ironic tone and symbolism add weight to her work, as seen in her dramatic monologue "Lady Lazarus," where the speaker is not the male Lazarus of the Bible but a female who does not want to live. Lady Lazarus, as a resurrected woman, she mocks the doctor and the society that brought her back to life. According to Plath herself “the speaker is a woman who has the great and terrible gift of being reborn. The only trouble is, she has to die first. She is a phoenix, the libertarian spirit what you will. She is also just a good, plain, very resourceful woman (curley )” She explicitly blurs the lines between the poet and the speaker in the poem, she uses irony and humour to talk about the crowd’s cold fascination with her. “what a million filament./ the peanut-crunching crowd/shoves in to see”. The details in her poem is relatively realistic. “The first time it happened I was ten/ It was an accident” or when she calls ‘Herr Doktor’ ‘Herr Enemy’ when she recalls the German Fascism, while playing with the sound herr and her. In ‘Lady Lazarus’ Plath uses her failed suicide as a source of power, not disempowerment. Her haunting words at the end emphasize her strength of spirit, despite doctors believing they are the source of her life. She eats men like air, a frightening and uncontrollable devouring frenzy that is a testament to her resilience and strength. She not only produces women like Lady Lazarus and destroys men with sarcastic writing like physicians, therefore her art is not dying alone. Throughout the poem she is mocking the idea of a woman who is brought back into routine after attempting suicide. Plath connects a repressive, violent societal framework with her own psychological issues. She can, however, distance herself from the situation and not equally compare her suffering to that of the Holocaust victims by blending the lines between her real-life self and the character in the poem. This enables her dramatic monologue to be confessional while also connecting the personal to the political.