Essay "Mirror" by Sylvia Plath

In the poem “Mirror” Sylvia Plath reflects the way society puts pressure on the way you look and can destroy you. “Mirror” is a poem told in first person by the reflection in the mirror. I believe that the mirror, the lake, and the woman are all one. She is judging herself the whole time through different objects, talking as if she is the mirror, the woman, and the lake. Sylvia Plath proves her point in the first stanza by describing how she feels about herself through the mirror. Plath describes the mirror as being lonely. I think Plath describes the mirror as being lonely because in the poem she says, “Most of the time I meditate on the opposite wall (Plath 6). When “most” of the time you meditate on the opposite wall I think you are bored and lonely. She is pretending to be the mirror and what the mirror would say to her. She talks as being the mirror, “I am silver and exact. I have no preconceptions” (Plath line 1). She thinks of herself “Just as it is, unmisted by love or dislike” (Plath 3). Sylvia Plath’s poem is based on a true story of how she felt about herself, that is why I believe the mirror, the lake, and the woman are all her. I believe she looks into the mirror with despair because she sees herself as old and useless. Plath had a rough life being insecure about herself. Her father’s death had a negative impact on her life because it made her insecure with herself. Fathers have a big impact in your life they make you feel important and valuable. With her father’s death so early in life she grew up having no security in herself, as you can tell in the poem she has no security with the way she looks when in line 14 she says, “She rewards me with tears and an agitation of hands”. She didn’t think she was valuable to anyone or anything as she described seeing herself through the mirror’s eyes, which are hers. She doesn’t believe what anyone tells her, she only wants to see what she wants. She thinks she is truthful and everyone else is a liar. (Palgrave Bio) Plath only believes the mirror, but the mirror is her, it is what she sees that she wants to believe. What I mean is that she talks for the mirror, I believe the mirror and lake are her. Her real life experiences contributed to the way she felt. In a biography by Jennifer S. Uglow she explains that Plath found out about an affair her husband had and suffered great depression. He had left her with two children. The divorce with her husband, I believe, made her feel even worse about herself, thinking she was not good enough for him. Sylvia says, “she turns to those liars, the candles or moon” (Plath 12), which I believe signifies others but in a metaphorical way. She calls others liars. Those who try to cover her up like the candles in the mirror that give a different light when she sees her reflection, and the moon in the sky that gives a light that fixes her reflection are all liars to her. Plath’s husband is one liar. She probably thought all those times her husband told her she was beautiful and loved her were lies since he eventually left her for someone else. (Palgrave Bio) Sylvia Plath had a deep relationship with the mirror. She thought it was the most important thing, which means she cared about the way she looked, but so far to where I would say she was addicted to her appearance. She describes the mirror as, “ The eye of a little god, four-cornered” (Plath 5). To describe anything as a god you must be obsessed with it. I took this line as a shock. To be that obsessed and a call a mirror a god is just crazy. The mirror itself is an object, which she describes as a god. She does not describe herself as a god by being the mirror; she describes the object as a god. The mirror is all she had and honored it, it was everything to her because it showed her the way she looked and she was obsessed with her appearance in a bad way. The mirror was like a drug to her, she couldn’t live without it. But a mirror just gives you a reflection you are the one who does the judging. That is why I believe it is her talking about what she thinks the mirror is seeing. It is not the mirror that is, “not cruel, only truthful” (Plath 4) it is her judging herself reflection. I think Plath thought of the mirror as a human like her prized possession. Plath being so hard on the way she looked and not loving herself made her become obsessed with the way she looked that it destroyed her life. She did not enjoy life itself and her children, the things that really matter in life. Sylvia Plath was in deep depression, which comes out, through her writing. Her not loving herself was torturous. In the second stanza the persona is suffering from depression. She sees herself aging and does not like it. In the poem when she says, “ A woman bends over me, searching my reaches for what she really is” (Plath 10-11), it tells me that she is searching for something more than herself. She is searching for a lie; she doesn’t want to see what her reflection shows her in the lake. I believe that Plath could not accept the fact that she was old and does not look the same. Plath is searching for what she really is beyond the reflection as she says in the poem, “Searching my reaches for what she really is”. It is torture for Plath to not accept herself. I believe the way she felt about herself tortured her so far to where she commits suicide in real life. To me Plath expressed herself through her poems. In the poem “Mirror” you can see her depression about the way she looks. (Palgrave Bio) I believe Sylvia Plath wrote the poem in first person. I came up with this idea because in her biography Sylvia Plath suffered from depression. She hated the way she was. She had no confidence in herself, which made her doubt herself and her beauty. Throughout my paper I have compared parts of Plath’s poem to her real life experiences. It is her talking to herself that she is not good enough. Aging is something inevitable. For woman aging is something that comes very hard at them. In Plath’s poem Plath is concerned with her appearance. She continues to be heartbroken with the laws of nature. You cannot control nature. (Palgrave Bio) Society wants you to look one way but we are all different. It is hard to go through the cycle of aging. Plath says, “In me she has drowned a young girl, and in me an old woman / Rises toward her day after day, like a terrible fish” (Plath 17-18). To me these lines were the strongest. They truly described how she felt about herself. She felt herself aging quickly and did not like what she saw. Plath won’t accept that she is aging, “she has drowned a young girl” (Plath 17), but in reality she is an old woman and she wakes up everyday miserable. In line 18 when Plath says, “like a terrible fish” it was a horrible way to describe herself. Fish are slimy and are not known as one of the most beautiful creatures in the world. When she describes herself as rising like a fish it sounds like she wakes up everyday as if she is dead and there is no use for her. When I think of a fish rising it makes me think of a dead fish. Fish don’t rise, they swim up when they are alive, and a fish only rises when they are dead. To wake up like a dead fish means she’s waking up without wanting to like there nothing for her. Being obsessed with her beauty drowned her. I don’t believe in the poem she died or killed herself. I believe it is a true story on how she felt about herself while she was living before she committed suicide. She woke up everyday as if she prefered to be dead. To be able to take your own life you have to be suffering drastically. Sylvia Plath did not love herself and you can tell by this poem and many of her other poems. But physical wise I believe she hated the way she looked, as she got older. It was not as if she was eighty with wrinkles, she was thirty when she died so she could not have gotten to old. Sylvia hated herself and it lead to her committing suicide. It destroyed her. The world pushes people to look a certain way. You are your own judge, but when others judge you it hurts more. (Palgrave Bio)

Works Cite:
Plath, Sylvia. “ Mirror .” Literature and the Writing Process. Ed. Elizabeth McMahan. 9th Edition. 637. Print.
"Plath, Sylvia." The Palgrave Macmillan Dictionary of Women's Biography. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2005. N. pag. Credo Reference. 27 May 2009. Web. 26 Sept. 2012.