9. Sylvia Plath

Feminism in "Mirror"

1. Introduction

Sylvia Plath’s life was difficult. She wanted to become a famous writer and escape the rules that society placed upon women. She had enough talent to succeed, but she was always Ted Hughes’ wife. Now her work has been recognized and she is more famous than his husband.

2. About the Poet

Sylvia Plath was born on October 27, 1932, in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts, United States. Knowing his parents’ background is important to understand her thoughts. Her mother, Aurelia Plath, suffered the same social pressures which Sylvia would later face. Aurelia rebelled against her father and pursued an intellectual career. She graduated with a Master degree in German Language at Boston University, where she met Otto Plath, a biology and German professor who had also rebelled against his family, who wanted him to become a Lutheran minister. Once they were married, Otto told her to become a housewife and Aurelia had to resign herself to society.

Otto died when Sylvia was eight years old victim of diabetes. His death caused Sylvia to abandon religion. Nevertheless, Sylvia was a normal child who excelled at Winthrop public school and whose writings skills allowed her to have her first poem published at the age of eight. She enrolled at Smith College in 1950, where she began to date boys in an act of rebellion against society’s double standards. More of her poems and stories were published and she was awarded with a guest editor position at Mademoiselle magazine. Sylvia had optimistically planned her life as a writer, but her experience in New York during the time he worked for the magazine was depressing. Suffering from bipolar disorder and depression, Sylvia attempted suicide by swallowing pills but didn’t succeed and was committed to a mental institution where he received electroshock therapy. She recovered and graduated from Smith with honors, winning a Fulbright scholarship to study at Cambridge University.

In Cambridge she met fellow poet Ted Hughes and after eight weeks of dating they got married in 1956. Sylvia thought that his marriage would be a happy one, but soon she had to leave her career aside to become a housewife and a mother. Her first book of poetry, "The Colossus", was published in 1960 but her style hadn’t been developed yet. Ted’s infidelity triggered a new period of rebellion: she tried to kill herself once again and the separation from her husband made her develop her own poetic style. She left for England with her children in 1962. She had financial difficulties and her depression returned but that fueled her creativity and she published her second book of poetry, "Ariel", in 1962. Her autobiographical novel, "The Bell Jar", was published just one month before she committed suicide on February 10, 1963.

3. Plath as a token in second-wave feminism

Society defines what does it mean to be a woman — being young, beautiful, submissive, a mother and a housewife. The patriarchal society considers women a complement of men, an inferior being worth only for her beauty. However, beauty is not eternal and when women reach past their thirties their beauty starts to decline and so does their value. An old man was seen as wise, but an old woman was almost worthless.

Another example of double standard is that men could openly enjoy sexuality, but if women did so they were seen as whores. Plath struggled against this conception by dating many men, and when she met the poet Ted Hughes she thought her marriage would be different.

Plath wasn’t recognized as an individual artist, she was always Ted Hughes’ wife. This was one of Plath’s many frustrations: it was mandatory that the man was the intellectual half of the relationship, whereas the woman was expected to stand away from those activities and support his husband at the expense of her personal growth. Moreover, women were supposed to be mothers and take care of their children. Plath gave birth to two children in the span of two years, suffering one miscarriage in between. Meanwhile, her husband was having an affair with her friend Assia Wevill, who also feared getting old and committed suicide in a similar fashion to Plath.

Second-wave feminists demanded the same rights as Plath defended in her writings. Also called Women’s Liberation Movement, second-wave feminism claimed the same social rights as men in the fields of sexuality, family and work. Their most controversial demand addressed reproductive rights and the personal choice of not having children. It is said that Plath’s second and last book of poetry, "Ariel", awoke the critical spirits of women all over the country who saw in Plath the figure of a genius overshadowed by the sexist American society. Published in 1966, her book was one of the many works used by feminists in the 60s and 70s in their fight for gender equality.

4. Style

"The Mirror" is written in free verse, it doesn’t rhyme and it doesn’t have a constant rhythm scheme. It has a total of eighteen lines divided into two symmetrical stanzas, each of them depicting a different setting.

Sylvia Plath’s early poems followed traditional models but in her late works her style became more free and most of her late works fall under the category of confessional poetry, also practiced by poets like her friend Anne Sexton. This type of poems are very intimate because the poet talks about controversial topics such as sexuality, mental illness or death just as it appears in their mind.

The most outstanding rhetorical devices are the personification, first a mirror and then a lake, and the metaphor, the essential element in confessional poems. The metaphors in this poem are related to water, which Plath uses as a symbol of time and change.

5. Summary

"Mirror" uses two reflective surfaces to talk about growing old and losing one’s beauty. First, a mirror hangs in front of a pink speckled wall and reflects everything faithfully, with the passivity of a woman. Next, a lake reflects an old woman’s image, which makes her sad because she is already old and the days when she was young and beautiful came to an end long ago.

6. Analysis

The first stanza is written from the point of view of a mirror. It is "silver and exact" and has "no preconceptions" — "whatever" it sees, it "swallows immediately" because the mirror displays reality instantly just as it is (1-2). It shows people’s good and bad qualities, it shows an unaltered image "unmisted by love or dislike" (3). This line suggests that human opinions and conceptions are always biased and based on tradition, but since the mirror has no preconceptions, its opinion is clear, raw. For some people its reflection might be scary, but the mirror says it is not "cruel, only truthful" and compares itself to "the eye of a little god, four-cornered" (4-5). This "god", rather than an omnipotent entity, symbolizes someone that can control people; it knows that people, especially women, are fatally attracted to crude representations.

Now the metaphor of the pink wall with speckles has many different interpretations. I think symbolizes femininity, the traditional values and behavior expected from a woman. The mirror has "looked at it so long" that it thinks "is a part of [his] heart" (7-8). Plath has been exposed to these preconceived ideas since she was a child because her mother, whom Plath loved and hated at the same time, adhered to them strictly. But this interpretation may be confusing because in the next line the mirror seems to be sad when he’s not able to see the wall because "faces and darkness separate [them] over and over" (9). The wall comes off as something stable and calming and the mirror suffers when it can’t reflect it. The confusing idea is that traditional femininity was something which Plath rebelled against, so separating herself from that idea should bring comfort instead of anxiety; maybe she has been so exposed to those ideas that she has given up and has accepted them as part of herself. Another interpretation would be that the wall represents Plath’s real character, which she loses in front of society.

In the second stanza the speaker has transformed into a lake, which also reflects images. A woman bends over the lake, "searching [its] reaches for what she really is" (11). She doesn’t want to see her reflection, she is searching for something deeper, her real self. It can be inferred that the woman didn’t like what the lake truthfully reflects because "then she turns to those liars, the candles or the moon" (12), whose soft light makes people look more beautiful — they show a biased reflection. As said in the first paragraph, women are fatally attracted to faithful representations so this woman eventually turns back to the lake, whom she "rewards" with "tears and an agitation of hands", which means that she is frustrated (14).

The lake is "important" for the woman because "she comes and goes" and "each morning it is her face that replaces the darkness" searching for her true self (15-16). The woman has resigned herself to the passage of time and her young, beautiful appearance has "drowned" and morphed into "an old woman" who looks like a "terrible fish" that "rises toward her day after day" (17-18).

7. Conclusion

There’s a phenomenon named after her that states that creative writers, especially women, are more prone to mental diseases. Another example of this is Plath’s friend Anne Sexton, who was also mentally unstable and committed suicide. Besides suffering from depression and bipolar disorder, both of them were discriminated against in the literary world because of their genre. Their works helped gain women’s rights in the 1970s, and now feminism has already reached its third wave that focuses on ethnic consciousness, transgender and homosexual rights and reproductive rights such as abortion and the use of contraceptives.