The poem "Lady Lazarus" reflects Plath's obsession with death and suicide. There are several ways the theme of death is evoked, some direct and some reflecting Plath's own prototypical imagery and obsessions.
The title itself evokes the Biblical figure of Lazarus who died and was raised from the dead by Jesus. The narrator is someone who has been rescued after a failed suicide attempt and is lashing out at the people who saved her life. The poem is "confessional" in that Plath herself attempted to commit suicide multiple times until finally succeeding in 1963.
She addresses the audience in a bitter, sardonic tone, resenting that they have dragged her back from the brink of death and also speaking angrily about the way people seem to view the failed suicide as a freak show or spectacle. She describes herself as like the revived corpse of Lazarus or a victim of the Holocaust.
She feels a special sense of identity with the Jews slaughtered by the Nazis (despite herself being raised in the Unitarian Church as a middle-class daughter of a professor and attending the elite Smith College and Cambridge University). She evokes the theme of death in the Holocaust by mentioning the image of a Nazi lampshade made of human skin; one should note that the rumor that Ilse Koch had lampshades made from the skins of human victims at Buchenwald concentration camp was actually an urban myth.
The reference to "a bar of soap" which is part of the poem's death theme is based on an urban legend that the Nazis made bars of soap from the bodies of murdered Jews. The rumors themselves may have been propagated by some of the Nazis to frighten prisoners in concentration camps.
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