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Motifs are recurring structures, contrasts, or literary devices that can help to develop and inform the text’s major themes.

Holocaust References

For many readers, the most controversial aspect of “Lady Lazarus” relates to the poem’s Holocaust references. The first reference appears very early (lines 4–9), when the speaker describes herself as

     A sort of walking miracle, my skin
     Bright as a Nazi lampshade,
     My right foot

     A paperweight,
     My face a featureless, fine
     Jew linen.

Here, the speaker alludes to a common postwar rumor that Nazis made lampshades from the skins of murdered victims. By likening her own skin to the “featureless, fine / Jew linen” purportedly used to make such lampshades, the speaker identifies herself with Jewish victims. The speaker reiterates this identification at the end of the poem, when she addresses one of her doctors as “Herr Doktor” (line 65). Here, she uses the German form of address (Herr, meaning “mister” or “sir”) to suggest a link between her own physician and those Nazi doctors who engaged in ethically troubling medical experiments. Finally, the speaker describes herself as being burned to ash—“Ash, ash” (line  73)—again like those victims the Nazis murdered and cremated during the Holocaust. Taken together, these references controversially equate the speaker’s suffering to that of the Jews. Such an equivalence is clearly an overstatement. Even so, the overstatement arguably points to the intensity of the speaker’s anguish and despair.

Body Parts

Throughout the poem, the speaker makes various references to individual body parts to suggest the painful experience of objectification. The opening stanzas of the poem describe a kind of unveiling, as though the recently revived speaker has been wrapped in gauze that must be stripped away. Unwrapping this bandage exposes, first, the speaker’s face, which she immediately breaks into its component parts, asking: “Do I terrify?—— / The nose, the eye pits, the full set of teeth?” (lines 12–13). As the poem proceeds, the speaker continues to imagine the scene of her unwrapping, complete with a group of eager onlookers:

     The peanut-crunching crowd 
     Shoves in to see

     Them unwrap me hand and foot——
     The big strip tease.
     Gentlemen, ladies

     These are my hands
     My knees.

Here (lines 26–32), the speaker reframes the unwrapping as a “strip tease,” which gives the event an erotic charge. This reframing also suggests a sense of objectification in the revelation of hands, knees, and feet. This sense returns later, when the speaker likens herself to a saint whose body is a holy relic that pilgrims pay to see and touch. Despite there being “a very large charge” (line 61) to examine her scars or take some blood or a piece of hair, the imaginary pilgrims’ demand for body parts has a denigrating effect on the speaker’s psyche.

The Number Three

Iterations of the number three appear everywhere in “Lady Lazarus,” in ways both formal and thematic. Perhaps most obvious is Plath’s use of three-line stanzas, also called “tercets.” The choice to write the poem in tercets echoes the poem’s other investments in the number three. For instance, the speaker organizes her narrative around three suicide attempts. The speaker’s three suicide attempts have, furthermore, been equally spaced in time, occurring once a decade across the three decades of her life, making the most recent attempt “Number Three” (line 22). Aside from its importance in relation to the speaker’s suicide attempts, the number three also connects to the speaker’s twisted invocation of the Christian notion of the Holy Trinity. Traditionally, the Holy Trinity consists of God the Father, Christ the Son, and the Holy Ghost. In “Lady Lazarus,” however, the speaker invokes a sort of Unholy Trinity that represents the evils of patriarchy. This altered Trinity consists of “Herr God, Herr Lucifer” (line 79), and “Herr Doktor” (line 65)—that is, the doctor who thwarted her most recent suicide attempt.

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