Lady Lazarus

“Don't you worry, folks, we took out all her teeth”

Community readers hear Plath's "Lady Lazarus" throughout the song: the staged, circus-like resurrection performed for a "peanut-crunching crowd," the set of teeth peeled off for the audience, the asylum imagery, and the defiant "Do I terrify?". The Bell Jar's hospitalisation sits behind the same charge. Where Plath turns her own near-destruction into a theatrical comeback, the speaker leaps from the gallows and returns more dangerous.