Lady Lazarus: Historical and Literary Context

Confessional Poetry

Confessional poetry—a style that marked Sylvia Plath’s work—played an influential role in the development of midcentury American verse. The literary critic M. L. Rosenthal first coined the term “confessional poetry” in his review of Robert Lowell’s 1959 book, Life Studies. Lowell’s book consisted of poems written in a direct and colloquial style, and which discussed his personal experiences with marriage and mental illness. Though Rosenthal well understood that every poet draws on their own life, he found something new in the poems’ naked honesty. Lowell, of whom Plath was a student, had effectively stripped away of the polite veneer of social life to reveal the ugly reality that hides underneath, in our most personal and intimate experiences. Life Studies won the National Book Award for Poetry in 1960, and confessional poetry went on to dominate the decade that followed. Significantly, it was primarily critics who classified as “confessional” the autobiographical work of Lowell as well as Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath, and others. Indeed, many poets, including Elizabeth Bishop and Adrienne Rich, rejected the designation when critics called their work confessional. Today, it remains up for debate whether confessional poetry was really something new, or just an extension of the lyric tradition of first-person narrators.

The Feminist Movement

As a poem that concerns the psychic torment of its female speaker, “Lady Lazarus” must be situated within the feminist movement. By the time Plath’s poem was first published, in 1965, the feminist movement had been alive for the better part of a century. In the United States, the so-called “first wave” of feminism began in the late nineteenth century and lasted through the first half of the twentieth. This wave of feminism initially focused on winning women the right to vote. Once female enfranchisement had been secured in 1920, the movement shifted its emphasis to matters of gender equity. In the 1960s, a second wave of feminism emerged that sought to develop solidarity among women from different social, economic, and racial backgrounds. Second-wave feminism got its impetus from Betty Friedan’s bestselling 1963 book, The Feminine Mystique. Friedan’s book challenged the idea, dominant at the time, that women derived fulfilment primarily from domestic life as wives and mothers. By contrast, Friedan argued, women were unhappy with the limitations that prevented them from pursuing their own self-fulfillment. Many critics have interpreted “Lady Lazarus” as an expression of the violent repercussions such limitations can have on women’s psychic well-being.