A spotlight focused on a pale woman, wrists bandaged, scarred, and bleeding. Now standing on display, the feature in a showcase of medical miracles, now regarding the ringmaster in his white doctor's uniform, a red swastika in place of his name badge. The crowd shoves in to see. Step right up, get your peanuts, hot popped popcorn in greasy red stripped bags. Tapping the heart monitor with a chubby digit the ringmaster announces his transcendent power through a rusted megaphone as her heart continues to thump and she, always a performer, takes her bows. Once more she has tempted death and lived. But behind her stage makeup she is the same woman, the same troubled, suicidal Lady, biding time until her next trick. Sylvia Plath's life and poetry show a hidden life, one of a highly intelligent passionate soul trapped in the role of a traditional 1950's woman. Over and over in her journals and writing she conveyed the importance of putting on an outwardly pleasant show for her ever-present audience. Only through her prose and poetry could she be truly free. Perhaps that is why "Lady Lazarus" and so many of Sylvia Plath's other poems are autobiographical. They are testimonials and extremes of a life she could not live in the real world.
             The title, "Lady Lazarus" is taken from the story of Lazarus. The New Testament tells a story of a man, Lazarus, who was mortally ill. The man's sisters sent word to Jesus for him to help their brother. Jesus deliberately did not go to help, instead he waited until the man was dead and had been buried four days. Jesus went to the grave of Lazarus, a cave covered by a stone, and he and his disciples "took therefore the stone away [... Jesus] cried with a loud voice: Lazarus, come forth. And presently he that had been dead came forth, bound feet and hands with winding bands; and his face was bound about with a napkin. Jesus said to them: Loose him, and le...