claire m. tylee
so the poems inArielarefreighted with the horror of the Eichmann revelations,
long before they became clich ́es.^41 The most (in)famous is ‘Daddy’, where the
addressee is a ‘Panzer-man’ who speaks an obscene language—German—which
is an engine ‘chuffing me off like a Jew.|A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen’.^42
The other poem widely cited in condemnation of Plath’s (mis)appropriation of
Holocaust imagery is ‘Lady Lazarus’. In that poem Plath’s poetic persona manages
terrifyingly to resurrect herself, displaying her body to an indifferent audience, her
‘skin|Bright as a Nazi lampshade’ but crawling with worms ‘like sticky pearls’. It
might seem that all that would have been left in the ashes of her burnt body is
Holocaust detritus: ‘A cake of soap,|A wedding ring,|A gold filling’; but she warns
that she will rise again, ‘with my red hair|And I eat men like air’.^43 Critics of this
work cite one of the instigators of the debate about Plath, George Steiner, who in
1965 wrote that artists ‘commit a subtle larceny when they evoke the echoes and
trappings of Auschwitz and appropriate an enormity of ready emotion to their
own private design’.^44 The critical debate is now lengthy, but it depends largely on
whether Plath is taken to be writing personal, confessional poetry, and means her
claim to ‘be a bit of a Jew’ literally, or whether it is possible to interpret her poetry
as drawing on her own experience to express a political response to the patriarchal
ideology that is responsible for the fact that ‘Every woman adores a Fascist’.
The second of the two critical extremes is exemplified in a feminist anthology
edited by Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar,The Norton Anthology of Literature by
Women: ‘The mythologizing of self and family that energizes Plath’s later poems has
led to much critical misunderstanding. The problem with...a good many attacks
that have been mounted against Plath is that the literary figure of ‘‘Daddy’’ in the
poem of that name (like the father figure inThe Colossus) is not identical with, but
rathergeneralizedfrom, Plath’s literal father.’^45 The opposite extreme is to be found
exemplified in a recent article by Leah Keren inThe Jewish Quarterly,whichangrily
accuses Plath of ‘Holocaust envy’: not only did Plath appropriate Jewish suffering as
a literary subject, ‘in her suicide, she appropriated the Holocaust mode of death—a
gas oven.... A powerful imagination may give Plath the right to write about the
Holocaust but it does not give her the right to consider herself a Jew.’^46 Nevertheless,
Keren concedes that Plath was writing at a time when Holocaust survivors were
only just beginning to speak, and ‘her speech, especially in the first person, made
(^41) Tim Kendall,Sylvia Plath: A Critical Study(London: Faber, 2001) 55–6, 169–71.
(^42) Plath, ‘Daddy’, inCollected Poems, ed. Ted Hughes (London: Faber, 1981), 222–4.
(^43) Plath, ‘Lady Lazarus’, ibid. 244–7. The contrast with Paul Celan’s ‘Death Fugue’ (‘your golden
hair Margarete|your ashen hair Shulamith’) is surely no accident, nor that Plath presents her persona
as a femaleLuftmensch; this is not an elegy, but a cry of rage.
(^44) George Steiner, ‘Dying is an Art’, inArt and Silence(London: Faber, 1967), 324–34.
(^45) Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, inidem(eds.),The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women:
The Tradition in English(New York: Norton, 1985), 2024–5.
(^46) Leah Keren, ‘Trying to be ‘‘A bit of a Jew’’: Sylvia Plath and the Holocaust Controversy’,Jewish
Quarterly, 192 (Winter 2003/4), 63–5.