The Divided Self in Sylvia Plaths Mirror

Sylvia Plath, who was one of the most famous American poet and novelist, has always been most debated poet due to her successful poetry and personal life. Born to middle class family in Massachusetts, Sylvia Plath had always been forced to perfection in every field of her life and every profession which she attempted. Not only dutiful child of her family, she was also successful and popular in her educational and academic life which includes so many prizes, awards such as the position of guest editor at Mademoiselle magazine in New York and Fulbright Scholarship at Cambridge. Her literary success was also full with over four hundred poems that are based on the genre confessional poetry which includes personal information of the poets such as mental illness or traumas. This ideal success and perfection could not prevent revealing of fractures in her personal identity and lead to question everything she succeeds and fails because of external interventions to her life. The double personalities in her inner world are always indicated in her literary works and even in her graduation thesis at Smith College with The Study of the Double in Two of Dostoevskys Novels. Her difficulties in her marriage and family life lead the increase of her inherited depression to the schizophrenia at least to her death or suicide. Therefore, many of her poems have been interpreted and criticized in the light of psychoanalytic criticism in addition to the feminist interpretation for the better understanding her inner conflicts and divisions in her identity. The analysis of the poem Mirror is also under the heavy influence of psychoanalysis and feminism. The poem is written from the perspective of a mirror that is looking into itself and in the first stanza the mirror describes itself as though a machine which is programmed, I have no preconceptions, whatever I see, I swallow immediately. Indeed, with this metaphor, Plath portrays the disturbing portrayal of a womans conflict with herself. Despite the struggle

of women to identify her true self, the mirror controls her self-perception. In spite of the claims of the mirror for the objectivity with the reflection what is seen, Plath highlights the inevitable marginalized reflection of women related to patriarchal observation. According to William Freedman, Plath uses the mirror as a symbol of female passivity, subjugation and Plaths own conflicted self-identity caused by social pressure to reconcile the competing obligations of artistic and domestic life(2). This mirror reflects the indifferent male view of woman in related to the social expectations to be a woman such as having idealized beauty or ever-lasting beauty. In the poem, Plath holds the mirror for the readers so as to see themselves in and as a mirror. She puts on emphasis the difference between the critical male dominated gaze to women and female passivity and meekness for accepting that constructed self. This difference is described in two stanzas and presents the meaning of being a woman in patriarchal perception which values women only in her youth and beautiful or attractive appearance. Simone de Beauvoir was also aware of this patriarchal control of society and phallocentrism that identifies the phallus as the source of power in culture. Beauvoir emphasizes how women becomes the other in social life when are defined as object by dominant male. For her this is cruel labelling that imposes humanity is male and man defines woman not as herself but as relative to him(). Therefore, Plath points out the identity crisis of women in male dominated society in the poem and Plaths mirror also reflects the desperate efforts of a woman for the search of identity, A woman bends over me, searching my reaches for what she really is. With the rebellion of traditional assumed roles of women, this woman demands to see the independent reflection of her identity. However the desire for the true and objective reflection of women in the mirror is impossible for the persona and she is forced to stay in male defined world, she turns to those liars, the candles or the moon. According Freedman, this is the subjugation of women for the conformation of the man-pleasing myth of perpetual youth, docility, and

sexual allure. This is also the popular romantic fantasies that confines woman into mere a sexual object rather than an individual. Thus, the poetry of Sylvia Plath puts another mirror to the male reading of texts and reflects the male ideals, fantasies, dreams or desires as the mirror reflects only reality. Freedman also explains the difference of being a woman writer who reflects and introduces this marginalized victim woman as the other to the society rather than only male perception in the text: But as speaking mirror, the woman becomes a narrating reflector of herself as mirror and of whatever passes before it. She becomes the writer who writes of the mirror in which she perceives herself and of the mirror she is. She becomes the text in which that recording occurs. Through these lenses, the question of the object of perception gives place to the now central question of the nature of the narrator. The mirror as woman or mother reflects the other to itself. The mirror as text or writer reflects self and world in language that becomes a kind of mirror itself. In the second stanza, the mirror image transforms into the lake and the persona begins her personal and internal journey in her past, present and future. Contrary to the male imposed version of female identity, the persona searches ways to escape the idealized femininity with the help of incarnation of the self. After staring into mirrors reality, this woman enters into the world of her unconsciousness where the consciousness is separated and opposed to her, Faces and darkness separate us over and over. This separation also reminds the main distinction between the self and the other, mother and the child after the encounter of the infant in the mirror stage. Jacques Lacan explains the child, who lives an idealized identification with his mother as the natural appendix of her, encounters his own image as different from his unity with his mother. After this broken and deconstructed image of the self with the recognition of the other, the self is divided between the imaginary where the maternal and speechless unity exist and the symbolic where the reality of phallus, law, order, language and father exists.

In the depth of the lake, the persona searches this unbroken maternal unity which does not include any labels or symbols to define women and the roles in symbolic order, she searches for what she really is before the loss of the maternal wholeness in imaginary or preoedipal order. However, she recognizes that this sense of the unity is taken from the woman, similar to infant, due to the reality of Phallus which includes the male dominated ideological order of life. Rather than gaining her Identity, the woman is confined into the sexual or fantastic male world of candles or moon. The wholeness of the woman is socially castrated and fragmented with the recognition of the other or the constructed, imposed self in patriarchal or symbolic world. Sylvia Plath divides the psyche of the persona as the object and subject. The mirror now reflects the divided self, the true self and imposed version and explains the importance of the mirror and beauty for this other type of women, I am important to her. She comes and goes, each morning it is her face that replaces the darkness. Plath underlines the importance of the mirror and beautiful appearance in womens lives as it is imposed in social world. She personifies this male gaze with the mirror the eye of a little god, four cornered on the opposite wall. Plath puts the mirror as the strict and tightly disciplines achiever who glitteringly fulfilled all expectations, a perfect mirror of acquired parental and social standards of elegance, beauty and achievement (Freedman 12). In addition to the woman dependency the appearance on the mirror, the poem also reflects the process of the womans transformation from a young, beautiful girl into an old woman. Plath describes this period of the women as the speaker of the years with the mirror, In me she has drowned a young girl, and in me an old woman rise toward her day after day, like a terrible fish. Each morning, this woman is forced to look into the mirror at her old face which many days she does not recognize to be her own. The worries about the appearance bring the cruel and unknown image into the mirror on which she cannot recognize her own image and only sees a monstrous creature rather than a woman or a human.

The interpretation of the monster is based on the reflection of the speechless woman whose verbal sound and language are disposed. This image is the other side of the mirror which is rejected as the other against the male idealized self. This monster no longer belongs to the male defined freedom. Therefore, monster is the sign of the rebellion against the idealized beautiful, fair and gentle woman when she is subject to the nameless and voiceless portrayal in the social life. Freedman compares Mary Elizabeth Coleridges woman in her poem The other Side of the Mirror to the Plaths woman and points out the eruption of silent and alone woman into the words and poetry with the independent identity. He also interprets this Plaths image in his essay as the sign of the rebellion to male constructed woman: The terrible fish is not just a symbol of approaching old age, the fish is the

autonomous persona and author. It is the role rejecting woman / mother who, even as she proclaims her acceptance of the task, refuses passivity to mirror, man, infant or whatever else is set before it (Freedman 11).

This monstrous reflection of the woman is also analyzed in the Freudian perception The Uncanny Image. In his essay The Uncanny, Freud describes the anxiety and the fear of human with known and familiar things in the past. For him the uncanny is anything is experienced in adulthood that carries earlier psychic stages, of aspects of our unconscious life or of the primitive experience of the human species. Thus, this concept can be interpreted as the repressed, unconscious feelings that are captured in Id by the authority of super-ego such as utopian dreams, wishes, hopes that are suppressed by the reality principle rather than pleasure (Gray, III). Thus, the origin of the monsters and horrifying creatures in the myths and folk tales can also be explained with this uncanny concept as the reflection of the ugliness and horror of human. This term is also for the explanation of the double identity of man. This double personality is constructed when the child loses his narcissist self-love with

multiple selves" and displaced his plurality with his dualism between the moral and primitive, uncanny, field of the mind. The double personality of the persona is also constructed when she loses her self-love after the mirror stage in the lake. The reflection of the woman with multiple selves on the lake which includes many faces and veils is replaced with the double identity as idealized and monstrous images. This is the embodiment of the repressed desires of a woman or repression of the social norms that believes the necessity of the unity in sexuality, family, love, and friendship, religion with the inflexible or constructed stereotypes. As Freud indicates that when infantile complexes which have been repressed are once more revived by some impression or when primitive beliefs which have been surmounted seem once more to be confirmed, all these unaccepted desires, fears, anxiety; sexuality return as the powerful embodiment of the terrible fish whose humanity is taken from her because of her alienated appearance to social life as the other. Thus, in Sylvia Plaths poetry the sea, lake, mirror or glasses are so important metaphors for the deep search of the identity and for the reflection of the real image of the internal world. As a result of the reflection, the persona both dives into the multiple selves to find the real one and breaks the self into pieces that leads the birth of the independently released image even if it is defined as the terrible fish in patriarchal society or symbolic order. This transformation is also summarized with the words of Linda K. Bundtzen as a result of mirror imagery in Plaths poetry:

All of these mirror relationships between woman and her archetypes of feminine perfection- the youthful beauty, the virgin, the ideal, the housekeeper, the sexually prized harem wife, and the all- good, all giving mother- are brutally mocked and tested by Plath to discover what truths about female psychology they might convey()

This is the embodiment of the repression The Other Side of the Mirror," the "woman, wild," "bereft of loveliness," her mouth a "hideous wound" bleeding "in silence and in secret," erupts into her poetry and fiction as demonic emblem of her independent identity, her monstrous renunciation of the mirroring angel. The speaker in Coleridge's poem is not a lonely, but a common figure. For like Coleridge, "the literary woman frequently finds herself staring with horror at a fearful image of herself that has been mysteriously inscribed on the surface of the glass." Plath's "Mirror" is in this tradition, its terrible fish a menacing image of its own self-terrifying achievement

he woman achieves autonomy in Plath's "Mirror" and comparable works by rejecting the phallocentric language whose fixed truth fixes woman as the mirroring or speechless other. The rejection of the false and insulting "truth" of woman's identity is effected in a language that undermines the very possibility of definable identity and truth. Woman achieves freedom from male definition at the price of all definition, freedom from the name with which the masculine text identifies her in the affirmation of unnamability. Yet, as in Conrad, the unnamed, too, may be a form of monstrosity or horror: the chilling truth at the heart of the darkness may be an unnamed evil or the evil of unnamability itself, the fearful prospect of truth as mere illusion. The stakes are perhaps lower in "Mirror," the curse a mixed blessing of menacing independence and creativity. But the merging dichotomy is present here as well. In these terms, the terrible fish is not only the monstrous autonomy of woman as personally or artistically creative self. It is also the impossibility of all autonomy or self-definition. Defining herself in and as that which cannot be defined, the woman writer comes perilously close to her previous condition of subjectlessness. That is the price of creative autonomy viewed in terms of resistance and dissociation.

; she is the other side of the mirror, the perpetuation of the mirror's male-inscribed ideal in a form that otherwise rejects it. The contradictions travel in both directions. The announcement of a mirroring silence or self-effacement implicitly rejects the identity it affirms. Yet the monstrous shape this autonomy assumes attests to the persistence of the woman's sense of self as dependent and faceless.

According to feminist criticism, the interpretation of the monster is based on the reflection of the speechless woman reconstruction of the speechless woman whose language deconstructs her verbal confession of mere reflective silence.

Regardless of whether or not the woman dislikes her own reflection, she cannot help but return to the mirror each morning-"She comes and goes. Each morning it is her face that replaces the darkness." The woman actually becomes dependent upon the mirror or her reflection in general. As the poem comes to an end, the mirror proclaims- "In me she has drowned a young girl, and in me an old woman rises toward her day after day, like a terrible fish". From this line, it is obvious that the mirror has been a part of this woman's life since she was young. It has witnessed the changes in her appearance as she grew older and is constantly observing her as the woman morphs into an old woman. It becomes abundantly clear that each

morning, the woman is forced to look into the mirror at her old face which many days she does not recognize to be her own. I believe that the point that Plath was trying to make was that, eventually, we will all have to face the truth about ourselves and accept who we are and what we look like before worrying about our appearance consumes our entire life and we never again feel true happiness. In the end, the mirror actually was "cruel", just as the world we live in, because ultimately what is cruel is reality itself.

The image that finally appears in the mirror, at the end of the poem, is an old woman who is described as a terrible fish.

Syliva Plath also

Plath's emergent monster, then, is not an imagined other, a beckoning fulfillment of hopeless ambition. It is the reconstruction of the speechless woman whose language deconstructs her verbal confession of mere reflective silence. This reconstructed self still bears the conscience of the complaint, and therefore the image of autonomy is not a thoroughly positive figure of assertive strength. The woman continues to subscribe to the male dread of female sexuality and to the male identification of female defiance or aggression with bestiality. The monster, then, does not so much dwell on the other side of the mirror; she is the other side of the mirror, the perpetuation of the mirror's male-inscribed ideal in a form that otherwise rejects it. The contradictions travel in both directions. The announcement of a

mirroring silence or self-effacement implicitly rejects the identity it affirms. Yet the monstrous shape this autonomy assumes attests to the persistence of the woman's sense of self as dependent and faceless. he woman achieves autonomy in Plath's "Mirror" and comparable works by rejecting the phallocentric language whose fixed truth fixes woman as the mirroring or speechless other. The rejection of the false and insulting "truth" of woman's identity is effected in a language that undermines the very possibility of definable identity and truth. Woman achieves freedom from male definition at the price of all definition, freedom from the name with which the masculine text identifies her in the affirmation of unnamability. Yet, as in Conrad, the unnamed, too, may be a form of monstrosity or horror: the chilling truth at the heart of the darkness may be an unnamed evil or the evil of unnamability itself, the fearful prospect of truth as mere illusion. The stakes are perhaps lower in "Mirror," the curse a mixed blessing of menacing independence and creativity. But the merging dichotomy is present here as well. In these terms, the terrible fish is not only the monstrous autonomy of woman as personally or artistically creative self. It is also the impossibility of all autonomy or self-definition. Defining herself in and as that which cannot be defined, the woman writer comes perilously close to her previous condition of subjectlessness. That is the price of creative autonomy viewed in terms of resistance and dissociation.

or, of course, is the brilliant surface Plath presented to the world, as both woman and poet. As poet, Plath the mirror is the precise measurer and recorder of minutiae, the fourcornered goddess of aesthetic control. As woman, Plath the mirror is the strict and tightly disciplined achiever who glitteringly fulfilled all expectations, a perfect mirror of acquired parental and social standards of elegance, beauty and achievement--the persona that emitted what Lowell called "the checks and courtesies," her "air of maddening docility," and what

Alvarez called an "air of anxious pleasantness." It is the persona that, as Plath herself described it, "Adher[ed] to rule, to rules, to rules," that, seemingly untroubled by her numbed submission, "Stay[ed] put," like the mirror fixed on the wall, "according to habit." It is the side George Stade labeled the "social cast of her personality, aesthetic, frozen in a cover girl smile. . . ." It is the ambitious but distinctly anti-feminist cook and housekeeper whose accents "are those of the American girl as we want her."

am

important

to

her.

She

comes

and

goes.

like in the trauma of the monster:

The mirror attempts to solve the crisis of identity Plath demands to place the woman in the After the appearance of darkness and facest, .

le-defined ideal or as the ideal manqu, the woman who desires to remain forever the "young girl" and who "turns to those liars, the candles or the moon" for confirmation of the man-pleasing myth of perpetual youth, docility, and sexual allure. As such, she is the personification--or reflection--of the mirror as passive servant, the preconditionless object whose perception is a form of helpless swallowing or absorption.

The poem is written from the perspective of a mirror who takes us (the reader) on a journey focused on its purpose as well as the importance of the mirror's existence. Ultimately, this poem is a rather unsettling portrayal of a woman's conflict with herself. The entire first stanza introduces the reader to the mirror. It begins with the mirror describing itself with cold, hard facts, as if the mirror were a machine just muttering out what it was programmed to say. The first stanza establishes the mirror as a force of objectivity and describes the important qualities of the mirror itself which allows the reader to feel greater emotion toward the mirror. The mirror represents truth; it acts as the only real place that one can actually find the unbiased and raw truth that we all may not want to see, but rather need to see.