In "Lady Lazarus," Sylvia Plath transmutes domestic images into the macabre as she glorifies the narrator's self-determined encounters with death: "A sort of walking miracle, my skin/ Bright as a Nazi lampshade,/ My right foot/ A paperweight,/ My face a featureless, fine/ Jew linen." Plath transforms victim into heroine but not without sacrificing believability. Suicide is not a heroic act. She admits that it's not even particularly hard to do: "Dying/ Is an art, like everything else./ I do it exceptionally well." Her comparison of herself with the Holocaust victims is an attempt to glamorize her suffering, but it is an attempt that fails, because her sufferings are all self-inflicted: "I do it so it feels like hell./ I do it so it feels real./ I guess you could say I've a call."
Furthermore, by making analogy between her suffering and the Holocaust victims' suffering, she loses the reader's empathy. There is something vaguely obscene in drawing parallels between the Jews who lost their lives by no fault of their own and her attempts at suicide. She cannot know what it is like to have your body turned to "Ash, ash--/ You poke and stir./ Flesh, bone, there is nothing there--/ A cake of soap,/ A wedding ring,/ A gold filling."
Heroism is defined in Merriam Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, Tenth Edition as "heroic conduct especially as exhibited in fulfilling a high purpose or attaining a noble end. The deliberate extinquishing of a life cannot be termed an act of heroism. Her hallucinatory imagery overblows her problem and creates a mythical gravity without foundation. She is not the phoenix rising from the flames but a scared individual running from her plight.
