Analysis Of Mirror By Sylvia Plath

Nonfiction is a genre of writing in which the author reflects on actual events in history. Lucy Grealy writes about an intense part of her life in a memoir. A memoir is written by the person it is about, usually written on the topic of something the author did or witnessed. Throughout this book, the author gives off vivid imagery and themes in order to help us understand just how difficult her life was. For example, in chapter 12, “Mirrors” on pages 207 to 208, Lucy describes just how a man loving her could change her view on life. Imagery, diction and setting also help to bring Lucy’s memoir together. Although this section seems to be about Lucy finding love, it is actually about the search and acceptance of self-identity as we can see from

One day I was watching a television show; many people have watched it before and have finished. That show affected me more, in my perspective than anyone else I knew. It was about the past of a high school student and what went on in her life. I never told anyone about my past, this made an old struggle come back even stronger and more difficult to overcome again. It was just my mom and I watching this show yet my mom skipped almost half of it because she didn't want me to see parts, yet I filled them in with my own imagination.

The mirror itself challenges the link between representation and truth‹the images January sees are reconstructions/reflections, rather than the women themselves. Furthermore, the mirror is not even real. It is the poet's metaphor, itself another kind of reconstruction, and so the reader becomes twice removed from these women who are being represented. January bases his non-visual assessment of these women not on direct interaction but on hearsay; it is their reputation among the people that determines what he thinks of their characters (ll. 1591-2). The mirror becomes a metaphorical space in which January can appraise

“One day when I was able to get up, I decided to look at myself in the mirror on the opposite wall. I had not seen myself since the ghetto. From the depths of the mirror, a corpse was contemplating me. The look in his eyes as he gazed at me has never left me,” (pg. 115, Wiesel). The author’s message is revealing how someone should be able to overcome their struggles if they truly have confidence in themselves. Being that almost everyone goes through struggles at least once a day, the message about looking pass through the obstacles that seem really hard by thinking that it is achievable. It connects to everyone because of how people go through hardships in their life time varying in their age drawing out the conclusion that everything is achievable if only you believe that it is possible to do.

I just wished someone else in her family thought to break the cycle sooner like her mother. If the did her daughter wouldn’t have had to face all these problems. The mirror represents the cycle of Stewart's family. It just keeps getting passed on person to person destroying lives as it goes. All it takes is breaking what it destroying lives and then you can start fixing yourself. Stewart was right to break that mirror and didn’t feel bad about breaking it.

Doesn’t everyone wish they could grow up faster when they are younger, but when they actually start to grow up, they just want it to slow down? Aging is a unique experience to everyone and each person deals with it differently. This theme of aging and how people see themselves can be seen both similarly and differently in “Mirror” by Sylvia Plath and “The Road Not Taken” by Robert Frost. These similarities and differences can be seen through each author’s tone, each poem’s structure, and each poem’s overall message.

In the short story “Initiation” by Sylvia Plath, the protagonist Millicent, a girl at Lansing High School is being tried as a member of an elite sorority. The girls must go through a week of being an older sister’s servant to be then tried on Friday at Rat Court. Only the most popular girls are accepted into the sorority. These popular girls are also the ones who get the most, popular boyfriends. Everything seems like a dream to Millicent except for the fact that her best friend Tracy wasn’t even considered. Although she wants to belong in the sorority, Millicent finds out that things might not be as perfect as they seem. In “Initiation” by Sylvia Plath, the author uses the point of view third person omniscient to allow the reader to

Wrapped in gaseous mystique, Sylvia Plath’s poetry has haunted enthusiastic readers since immediately after her death in February, 1963. Like her eyes, her words are sharp, apt tools which brand her message on the brains and hearts of her readers. With each reading, she initiates them forever into the shrouded, vestal clan of her own mind. How is the reader to interpret those singeing, singing words? Her work may be read as a lone monument, with no ties to the world she left behind. But in doing so, the reader merely grazes the surface of her rich poetics. Her poetry is largely autobiographical, particularly Ariel and The Bell Jar, and it is from this frame of mind that the reader interprets the work as a

The mirror on the bedroom wall examines the public perception of her private life. Looking only at its reflection, the audience cannot tell the room is in a mess; the rosebush and the dirt trail are not apparent to the audience. In the mirror, only the back of woman’s head is evident. Her face and her emotions are hidden from the mirror. It appears as if she is doing an ordinary task; she could very well be sitting on the bed, reading a book. She turns her back to the mirror and denies it a true reflection.

Especially through the disease neurosis, which Esther had, she never connected her mirror image to her inner image, even when she seems to look “normal:” “Then my ears went funny, and I noticed a big, smudgy-eyed Chinese woman staring idiotically into my face. It was only me, of course, I was appalled to see how wrinkled and used up I looked” (Plath 18). Esther doesn’t immediately recognize herself in an elevator reflection, which startles her and causes her to believe she is not alone in the elevator. Later in the novel, after her signs of depression have began to emerge, she starts to cry during a magazine photoshoot.

It is clearly shown that the mirror is hanging behind the woman because by her right wrist it shows the change from the red wall to the golden mirror frame. The setting is a theater as it's shown through the reflection of a lady’s bare legs with light green shoes on the top left-hand corner of the painting. The Folies Bergere was a Moorish influenced place that turned into a bar/theater where prostitution was suspected to be held (Manet 2). Also, by looking at the man's eyes it appears that he is looking down at her breasts, and that is why she looks distanced from the viewer. The overall interpretation of what Manet is saying is that the mirror doesn't always hold the truth because it seems as the mirror only shows the exterior of the person's image not what she or he is feeling.

In 1963 on a cold winter day of February 11th, Sylvia Plath ended her life. She had plugged up her kitchen, sealing up the cracks in doors and windows before she was found with her head inside of her gas oven inhaling the dangerous fumes. She was only thirty years old, a young woman with two small children and an estranged ex-husband. A tragic detail of her life is that this is the second time she had tried to commit suicide. Plagued with mental illness her whole life, which is evident within her poetry. She would write gripping, honest portrayals of mental illnesses. Especially within Ariel, the last poetry book she wrote, right before she took her life. Although it’s hard to find a proper diagnosis for Sylvia Plath, it is almost definite that she at least had clinical depression with her numerous suicide attempts and stays in mental hospitals undergoing electroshock therapy. Sylvia Plath is now famously known for her writing and the more tragic parts of her life. Such as the separation from her husband, Ted Hughes, mental illness, etc… Plath may not have intended for her life and art to become inspiration to many people but that has become the end result. Sylvia Plath writing shows symptoms of her suicidal thoughts. To study specific moments in Sylvia Plath’s life, it can be connected to certain writing’s of her’s, such as “Daddy”, The Bell Jar, and “Lady Lazarus”.

Sylvia’s Plath’s “Metaphors” is about a woman feeling insignificant during the midst of her pregnancy. Striking imagery is used to explore the narrator’s attitudes about having a child. Plath uses metaphors in every line, including the title itself, making the poem a collection of clues. The reader is teasingly challenged to figure out these clues, realising that the metaphors have

Why is the mirror so important to her? Do you think the mirror might have any symbolic significance? If so, what?

mirror. Who are almost getting in the way so to speak of its life and