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Sylvia Plath: Images in the Mirror
A poem highlights the struggle between one's true self and what is internalized.
Posted February 8, 2025 Reviewed by Margaret Foley
"The Mirror," a poem by Sylvia Plath, is about a woman looking in the mirror and evaluating the image she sees there. In the poem, Plath explores the mirror image as a doorway to the unconscious, and it turns out to be a paradoxical situation. The mirror contains both an image of herself, but also not her. Looking in a mirror one is the observer and the observed, the watcher and the watched.
Sylvia Plath was an American poet of the mid-20th century who killed herself at age 30. She was married to British poet laureate Ted Hughes, but the poem does not portray relationship or love. He had affairs. For years she struggled to fulfill the expected and correct social image while her real self was trying to find out who she was. Her writings show intense self-exploration, and their dramas and conflicts were made more poignant, although causing critique, as she aligned her personal struggles with the collective human experience.
Sylvia Plath represents the imposter or "as-if" personality type who experienced early emotional misattunements, continuing through her life, creating distress, depression, and disappointments that she turned toward herself. From the lack of sufficient parental attachment, she learned to develop masks and facades that were set to please others but became an obstacle to her real self. Several of her poems, including "The Mirror," describe this in the distance set up between who she is and who she wants to be.
A mirror needs a receptor to reflect. In the poem, it is a woman striving to find herself in this external object while she interiorizes the role of the watcher being watched. An idea of who one is becomes shaped from the act of looking into a mirror, building connection between the consciousness looking inward and the person looked at. If one is spellbound by the image portrayed on the surface, one becomes confined in narcissism, seeking confirmation from the mirror and from others. The woman protagonist in the poem listens to the mirror, described as male in its harsh assessment and critical judgment.
Sylvia Plath’s mirror is a metaphor for the struggle between the true self and what is internalized between herself, her mother, other women, and the collective images men have of women. Although the speaker of the poem is a mirror, the true protagonist is the woman who is more mirror than person and who sees herself both in and as the mirrored reflection. She is objectified as it portrays an internalized counterpart of the watching consciousness.
The mirror narrates a lifetime of interactions with a nameless, faceless woman. She also notes the natural process of living and aging as disfigurement. It is unclear in the poem if the woman is seen in her entirety or if she can take in the whole material context of herself. Plath illustrates how the woman in the mirror recoils from her reality. Not liking the self it sees, the mirror illustrates how the mind projects a false self-image to protect the true self from being seen. The underlying self-disdain and critique are rampant and accepted as true.
The poem illustrates that it is not easy or pleasant to be confronted by the mirror, which is described as square, metallic, hard, and cold. The flat wall behind the woman in the poem reveals her body as indistinct and merely part of the darkness in the background, hardly separate from the wall. Moreover, this situation has gone on for so long that the woman is basically now a nonentity, avoiding or denying the whole. This wall reflects a blankness that also symbolizes the lack of response afforded women by society, the betrayal that characterized her marriage, and the publishing strictures women of her time struggled against.
The woman is drawn into the mirror even though it repulses and upsets her. The question is, what is it she sees in this mirror that keeps her coming back, obsessed day after day, even though she is upset by it? The mirror reveals the narcissistic needs while illustrating the impact and inevitability of time, age, and the obsessions with superficial vanity inevitably and inescapably taking her over.
In the second section of the poem, the mirror changes to a lake with a woman bending over and searching for something. A lake reflects like a mirror but has depth. Both mirror and lake reflect the surface but can also reach into the depths where the shadow resides as the woman searches for herself. The image suggests the lake contains a monster in the depths. This is called a ‘terrible fish’ and can represent a woman's personal demons and the unrest lurking beneath the surface. The monster in the depths is also the monster on the surface, perhaps more accurately the monstrosity of being mere surface with lack of depth. The horror is to be trapped within this one-sidedness and without escape.
The poetic within the personality is expressed by Plath’s life of sorrow and depression mixed with her many accomplishments, although to her they were never enough. Her words put a visage on the inner chaos poignantly exposed through her poem. The psychological process includes desire mixed with the destructive powers of the psyche tracing the issues for establishing a solid sense of self.
Plath's passion and energy, fierceness, originality, and descriptive embodiment of psychological and societal conundrums remain powerfully present to this day. Artists like Sylvia Plath exhibit the courage to be shaken by life truths not easily quelled. She remains a model of writing from deep within to reveal the complex process of finding oneself. Her writings reverberate with people today because the malign and destructive aspects within her are within us as well. The discontent, disequilibrium, and inner tension were also her sources of artistic energy, breaking with tradition and expressing her individual self in the continual search for transformation and renewal.
