Sylvia Plath’s “Mirror” discusses the emotional effect of time and appearance among individuals by using personification, imagery, and irony to create an intense relationship between the mirror and the things it reflects. With age comes a loss of beauty, which many individuals often have a difficult time accepting. Mirrors reflect images, and are found all around. They appear in homes, bathrooms, dressing rooms, and are sometimes even used as decorations. As perfecting appearance has become important, so has looking at yourself in the mirror. In order to critique and fix the things that are not perfect, we use mirrors to judge and evaluate ourselves over time. Plath’s “Mirror” focuses on the ideas of aging, including the emotional aspect of growing older, passing time and the reality of it all. It is integral to mental health to take into account personality and values, and feeling negative solely based on appearance is not accurately conclusive or healthy. Plath explores the idea of dependency on mirrors to see, along with the deeper meaning behind becoming transfixed with seeing yourself, who you are and who you are becoming by gazing at your reflection.
Told from first person narrative while using personification, Plath makes a mirror come alive as the speaker in the first stanza. The mirror bluntly tells the reader some characteristics, and then dives into the deeper idea of what a mirror exactly does. Unlike people, mirrors do not have “preconceptions” (Line 1) about anyone, they do not judge, lie, hate, or love. A mirror does not care who you are, but shows you as you are. Without prior thoughts, mirrors simply reflect the thing before them. They are not deceptive, but “truthful” (Line 4) and accurate. A mirror reflects exactly what is standing before it, as it is. Representing reality, a mirror can see accurate and precise physical features, while the individual being reflected may see an illusion. He or she may look at themselves and see something in their reflection that is not really there, only imagined to be. In this way, the metaphor “The eye of a little god, four-cornered” represents the power and omniscience of a mirror as an all knowing, “little god” of reality and illusion. While confined to a cornered, limited space, mirrors provide detail and accuracy to whatever is looking at them, whether it is a living being or an inanimate object. Plath’s “Mirror” sits facing a wall, in a pink room. Further personifying it, Plath gives the mirror feelings, saying it believes the wall “is part of my heart” (Line 8) and that when it stares at the wall, it “meditate[s]” (Line 6). The mirror does not just reflect the pink wall, things come between the two, like “faces” and “darkness” (Line 9), at times. The mirror has a connection that has been developing over the period of time it has spent doing its job of reflecting the pink. The wall is important to the mirror, and the mirror wants to believe it is important to the wall too. By becoming obsessed and transfixed on the image the mirror provides, you give the it preconceived power which only furthers yourself from the reality of who you really are. When things come between the mirror and wall repeatedly, the mirror refers to the things as “separate[ing]” (Line 9) the two, even if it is a brief “flicker[s]” (Line 8). “Over and over” (Line 9), “I have looked at it for so long” (Line 7) and “Most of the time” (Line 6) are used to represent the passing of time between the mirror and the life it lives inside the pink room. By repeatedly judging yourself on appearance over time, a falsified dependence is created between you and your image, when personality and self growth are what really matter to an aging individual.
In stanza two the speaker of the poem, the mirror, has now consciously changed to a lake. The mirror has been given depth, instead of simply a four-cornered object. The reader is then introduced to a figure, a woman, who is assumed to be the same individual who lives or lived in the pink colored room. Pink represents femininity and youth, so the young girl who used to live in the pink room with the mirror has grown older and now looks at a lake to see her reflection. “Searching my reaches for what she really is” (Line 11) introduces a deeper theme going beyond just simple reflection. The woman is looking for an identity, an inner strength that can explore something further than her appearance. Not satisfied with what she sees, the woman tries to use candles and the moon to see in a different light. The lake knows it is not deceptive, but truthful and “faithful[ly]” (Line 13) and the woman realizes she knows this too, she knows the lake reflects her true self. She cries, disappointed with who she is and who she has become, an old woman. Plath writes that the lake believes the woman “rewards” (Line 14) her by crying. Ironically, the lake takes this to mean it is “important to her” (Line 15). Showing time again, the woman “Comes and goes” (Line 15) back to the lake “Each morning” (Line 16). The woman is dependent on seeing herself, she has become dependent on trying to deny who she now is. The lake accurately reflects her body, but she can only look beyond appearance when she finally accepts she is aging. Then will she realize all she has become and what she has to offer the world, beyond looks. Every day the woman’s face replaces the darkness for the lake and the woman looks in, thinking about what and who she sees. Each day she hopes to see something different. Just as the woman has become obsessed with seeing her reflection, the lake has become obsessed with providing it. The woman “drowned a young girl” (Line 17) in the lake. Over time, the young girl has aged and now “rises” (Line 18) as “an old woman” (Line 17) every day. The words “drowned” and “rises” contrast drastically. The intensity of the word drowned brings an eerie tone to the ending of the poem, and to the overall message. The imagery it brings is negative and unsettling: a woman who has lost herself over the years and is disappointed with how she appears to herself and others. The woman spends so much time negatively critiquing herself by simply staring into a reflection. She becomes so transfixed with her own appearance, resulting in resentment for her aging body. Obsession with looks and how you feel others see you physically can result in focus on things that are not important, which can actually result in others seeing you as negatively as you see yourself. Finally, the last phrase of the poem is a simile, comparing the now old woman to that of a “terrible fish” (Line 18), like that of a monster emerging from the lake, and the overall person she believes she has become.
As individuals grow older, features about themselves change. The woman in Plath’s “Mirror” is no longer happy with her life. Nostalgic for a previous time, she cannot come to terms with the person she now is, an older woman. She sees herself as a monster, one that may have ruined her younger self’s future. Besides from her inner self, the woman is no longer happy with her physical appearance. She peers into the lake every day and cries. Her self-hatred depicts the stress and denial of aging, lack of emotional and physical care for ones-self over time, and the dismissal of other characteristics like looks when evaluating yourself.