Mirror By Sylvia Plath

The last few lines seem to attribute her depression to her age, and maybe the fact that she never got to enjoy her childhood, her young years, and she despises seeing herself grow old in the reflection of the lake.

The women of the story are not treated with the respect, which reflects their social standings. The first image of the women that the reader gets is a typical housewife. They are imaged as “wearing faded house dresses and

A Woman named Catherine Woodiwiss once said “Trauma permanently changes us. … There is no ‘back to the old me.’ You are different now, full stop.” In the book Night by Elie Wiesel The main character, the author, and his family go through a traumatizing experience. This story is told from the point of view of Elie but is focused around him and his father’s lives in the concentration camps. The story demonstrates a lot about Elie’s emotional state and actions throughout the story and he changes overtime in many ways. Elie Wiesel has been through experiences that have entirely transformed himself from a young, innocent, religious, and weak boy to a strong, caring, and persevering young man.

Referring to the quote, “never shall I forget those moments that murdered my god and my soul and turned my dreams to ashes,” (Wiesel 34) it is relevant to the struggles faced by the Jewish people during their imprisonment in a holocaust camp, particularly Eliezer’s struggles. When he and his father arrived at their first camp they were greeted by an immense crematorium, with black smoke rising from its chimney. Jews stood in the freezing cold with only the miniscule amount of clothes on them, waiting to be told to go somewhere. Eliezer watched as many small children, as well as women, were herded into the crematorium, and turned into nothing but smoke. He came to realize that this could have easily been his fate, had he not lied about his age. Seeing innocent people turned into nothing but ashes and smoke made him question life itself. He had the belief

Similarly, Plath’s poem ‘Edge’ illustrates how patriarchy seizes the identity of woman, leaving them to be nothing but sexual entities. ‘The woman has been perfected’, society has shaped her into being socially and sexually pleasing. She has been moulded, making her ‘perfect’ to the naked eye, a ‘flower’, a ‘rose’, a ‘Greek necessity’ with no identity. In the second stanza the speaker states that the ‘body wears the smile of accomplishment’ she is now socially accepted.

• Does her poetry and her personal life reflect the theory of feminism or in another word does Sylvia is a feminist writer ?

“A lorry drew up at the pit and delivered its load - little children. Babies! Yes, I saw it with my own eyes… those children in the flames.” (Elie Wiesel, 24) This memoir, told by Elie Wiesel in his book “Night” and published in 1956, describes his experiences surviving the Holocaust. He and his father are forced to endure extremely traumatic experiences. Throughout “Night”, there are moments that are incredibly powerful. These moments are powerful because it really shows how horrible the Holocaust was, and the terrors not only Elie went through, but that almost all Jewish people experienced.

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.

I feel like the book Night lets off a very sad a depressing mood. The setting of this book is a various amount of concentration camps that Elie and his dad go to. The main central idea of Night is to explain the experiences in the Holocaust. I personally think that this book is a good book for young adults and not kids because it uses some language and it’s very descriptive.

The novel, Night, by Elie Wiesel is written with tremendous detail to transport the reader into a life in a concentration camp. Elie Wiesel is one of the few survivors of the Holocaust; her book is written based upon her own experiences. I have read other novels about the Holocaust, but since Elie has lived it, I feel the story is expressed more vividly. For example, the scene Elie depicts in words of infants being thrown into a flaming ditch of burning carcasses is appalling. Throughout the novel Elie portrays the emotions of not just herself and her family, but of the entire Jewish community. She described the ignorance of her community at each stage of the journey, from their homes to the camps. Everyone was optimistic until they were packed

The poem “The Mirror” is told from an interesting perspective. In this poem the story is being told from the point of view of the mirror itself. The author uses personification to bring the mirror to life. It tells us what it sees and how it perceives things. The first stanza of the poem is intriguing and optimistic as the mirror describes itself. The mirror is “silver and exact” (L 1) alluding that it is perfect, and makes no mistakes. It will show exactly what it sees with no bias towards who or what it is reflecting. It is truthful not cruel. It also refers Itself as “the eye of a little God” (L5) meaning that the mirror reflects truth, sees all things and sees who we truly are. This stanza represents youth and naivety. The poem then takes a depressing turn. Throughout the

This is what society saw as their ‘mental illness,’ but the real suffering they experienced is reflected the same way their mentalities are. Esther’s breakdown, for example, is “precipitated by the discovery of an inner deathliness concealed under the glossy surface of New York and her own compulsive drive to achievement” (Harris). The process of this is lengthy, whereas with Sylvia it seems to happen all at once, which is the only difference between them. Plath’s discovery of her inner deathliness being concealed under a perfect New York life happened in May of 1953, where she wrote “New York: Pain, parties, work… Carol vomiting outside the door all over the floor- and interviews for TV shows, and competition, and beautiful models…” (Hughes 87). She began to realize how her high expectations had ruined her trip, and how her mental illness was feeding off of the life she was living, which, like Esther, causes her to go back home in July more depressed than when she left.

While reading both “On Growing Up Between Genders”, by Stephen Burt and “The Female Body” by Margaret Atwood, I was so moved by both poets writing that I felt as though I was living their experiences with them. Throughout the course of both pieces, I felt emotionally drawn to obstacles of both writers, while understanding their wants of an experience very different from the ones previously given to them.

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

Esther Greenwood, the main character, is the most obvious comparison to Sylvia Plath herself. Esther is a troubled girl who is gifted with intelligence and scholarships to fancy schools and opportunities, but still finds herself in a pit of depression she can’t crawl out of. Both Esther and Sylvia are extremely intelligent, Sylvia being gifted with an IQ of 160. Sylvia shows her descent into depression through Esther, gradually getting worse and worse as she goes through college and realizes she has no idea what to do with her life.