Analysis Of Sylvia Plath 's ' Daddy And Lady Lazarus '

Sylvia Plath lived from 1932-1963, dying at the age of 30. In her short life, however, she witnessed World War Two and the Cold War. Both of these events inimitably influenced her life and writing style, which can be observed in her works “Daddy” and “Lady Lazarus”, where she uses Holocaust imagery to draw connections between her life and the lives of the Jewish people held captive in concentration camps. Through her use of imagery she tackles personal and political issues encapsulating feelings of victimization, loss of individualism and fear for an impeding reoccurrence of a worldwide holocaust through nuclear buildup. Politicians during the cold war, oftentimes employed doubletalk to provide ambiguous responses, evading stance defining questions. Plath wrote a series of letters describing her ill-contempt for doubletalk. Plath believed that drawing a direct connection between her victimization by modern society to that of the Jewish people during the holocaust would, “Combine the public and the personal in order to shock and cut through the distancing doubletalk in contemporary conformist, cold war America.” (dkafkj) Her victimization by society can be observed in the poem “Daddy” where she compares her maltreatment by a domineering misogynistic figure to the Nazi regime. Even though on the surface of the poem it appears to be superficially about her father and her husband, it extends much further into the ideological views of the time, defining the roles of men and