A Level Exam Question: Compare the ways Sylvia Plath and Lily Allen transform personal pain into public performance.
There are few moments more alarming than flipping over an A Level paper and realising the exam board has gone rogue. That’s exactly how it felt in my imaginary Paper 3 this morning, when the unseen comparative poem turned out to be Sylvia Plath’s ‘Lady Lazarus’, paired without warning with Lily Allen’s ‘Pussy Palace’.
Somewhere in a parallel exam hall, the invigilator cleared their throat and said: ‘You may now begin. Please note, there will be explicit content.’
‘I rise with my red hair’ vs ‘I didn’t know it was your Pussy Palace.’
In one corner, Plath resurrects herself in mythic, incantatory rage, defying death and decorum alike. In the other, Allen surveys the ruins of modern love not with tragedy, but with a sharp-eyed smirk and an explicit hook.
Both are performing reclamation: Plath’s speaker is a phoenix rising from patriarchal flame; Allen’s emerges from the very same ashes in the soft glow of social media’s lights. Both take what was meant to humiliate them and turn it into a show in which they write the script.
Plath’s fury arrives in tercets that breathe like scripture, each enjambment a gasp of rebirth. Allen’s anger comes in rhyme and repetition, a spoken confession disguised as a pop banger. Plath builds a ritual of resurrection; Allen builds an earworm. In different forms, both insist: you will listen, and you will watch.
Plath’s 1960s America medicalised women’s emotion; Allen’s 2020s Britain merchandises it. Yet both know the performance required of them: be authentic, but not too authentic; be angry, but smile for the cover shoot.
Plath turns suffering into theatre, the ‘peanut-crunching crowd’ gaping at her spectacle. Allen turns betrayal into a headline, a confessional single that plays on loop. Both expose the audience as much as themselves: what exactly are you here to consume? By the end, the comparison writes itself: two artists in different centuries using art to stand centre stage in the very circus that tried to eat them.
Thanks to Marina Hyde for the comparative idea: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes vs Lily Allen and David Harbour.
A banger analysis that gives us peanut crunching crowd members food for thought!
Fascinating and clever comparison. Loved the 'tercets that breathe like scripture' comment and will be shamelessly stealing it!
That has given me something to think about.
Brilliantly thought-provoking as always Sophie!
Loved this! Would be an edgy but fantastic question to pose. And generally studying “Ladies Wot Burn” should be compulsory for all students. Thanks