Baby Lazarus: Listening to the Rebirths in “Lady Lazarus”

This paper examines the meaning and significance of the rebirths narrated in Sylvia Plath’s “Lady Lazarus.” While the previous readings of the poem have regarded the speaker’s rebirth as a single event, this paper aims to understand its plurality and the underlying problem of language and sound by listening to the poet’s own reading of the poem. I argue first that the sound structure of the poem can be characterized by the poet’s unique employment of vowel sounds. Drawing upon Plath’s another poem entitled “Morning Song” and Julia Kristeva’s concept of the chora, I contend that the poet’s vowels signal her desire for regression to the pre-Oedipal space where sound and body are in direct contact without the interference of language. It is my conclusion that the rebirths in “Lady Lazarus” dramatize the poet’s ongoing struggle to bypass the symbolic language in order to make her body heard.