"Mirror" – Sylvia Plath - Critical Summary

Introduction:

The Mirror was written by Sylvia Plath in 1961, but wasn’t published until 1971, eight years after her death by suicide. The poem is written from the perspective of a mirror and details what it sees and how it relates to the woman and other objects within its view. It symbolises the troubled self of the woman, especially the woman artist who has to reject the given masks imposed on her by the patriarchal society and see herself as an artist and an individual.  The mirror imagery in Plath’s poetry therefore, signifies the consciousness of the woman-speaker who verbalises the creative process of a woman artist in the domain of male-dominated literature. The woman artist has to resist the critical and judgemental male gaze to arrive at her own autonomous self-expression.

Mirror and Women’s Passivity:

Freedman believes that, “Plath uses mirror as a symbol of female passivity, subjection, and Plath’s own conflicted self-identity caused by social pressures to reconcile the competing obligations of artistic and domestic life”. The mirror represents the unfeeling male view of a woman and what is socially expected of her: possessing an idealised beauty and ever-lasting youth. As the persona ages over the years, the mirror cruelly reflects the changes in her appearance. Age becomes the persona’s defect and shortcoming and thus her source of anxiety and dismay. The mirror projects what is thought of as the woman as she grows older. It claims to reflect the truth, and by implication, the representation of the patriarchal perception of a woman’s existence, her worth only as a beautiful object,  and her worthlessness when she is no longer young and beautiful. Against the male’s definition of womanhood, which idealises beauty and youth, the persona looks inside to discover her true self, what she was as a person, and what she has become, maturing by age. The woman’s autonomous identity and perception of the self are, therefore in conflict with the stereotype of the dominant male society. The tension increases as the persona is perplexed by this identity crisis. If she chooses her inner self and her own independent definition of identity, when looking in the mirror, she no longer sees the beautiful girl, but the terrible fish.

The Struggle of Aging:

The woman returns to the mirror – in the symbolic form of a lake – to re-examine her appearance. She wants to know the truth that only the mirror provides. The woman realises that she is aging, and it upsets her. “She rewards me with tears and an agitation of the hands”. The woman understands that candles and the moon don’t offer an authentic and realistic view of who she is – only the mirror can do that. Nonetheless, she is saddened by the reality that she is no longer a young woman and has been replaced by an old woman. “In me she has drowned a young girl, and in me an old woman rises toward her…” The woman struggles with the loss of her beauty and innocence as she has aged. She is devastated and shocked by what she sees on the mirror.

Human-like Character of the Mirror:

Plath gives the mirror human-like traits, such as a heart, even though it doesn’t offer judgment. These traits help the reader understand why the woman is emotionally connected to it. The mirror has looked at the opposite pink, and speckled wall a long time, that it says, “I think it is part of my heart”. Even though the mirror is not a living, organic object, it notices the wall opposite, the darkness and the faces that stand before it. The mirror understands how significant it is to the woman and says, “I am important to her”. Its human-like traits give the woman a reason for trusting in it for self-reflection – “Searching my reaches for what she really is”.

Conclusion:

This conflict between subjective and objective realities, which reflects the persona’s internal conflict, develops further in the poem. The mirror represents rational and objective judgment: cold and cruel in its pronouncements. The woman is reduced to a dependent, marginalised victim. Her expectation about the reflection of her identity is subjective and impressionable. She is condemned to hear a dreadful death sentence as the mirror identifies her as “a terrible fish”, not even rendering her humanity. Hence the source of problem in this poem is the woman’s absolute reliance on the mirror’s projection of her. The woman shows a desperate need to view herself through this reflection, which is part of the patriarchal conditioning of society. 

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Credits: This article has been excerpted from a research article by Parvin Ghasemi of Shiraz University, and the link is given to the right of this blog.

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