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A Reflection in Sylvia Plath's Mirror

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A Reflection in Sylvia Plath’s Mirror
Amanda L. Wilson
Eng:125 Introduction to Literature
Professor Lyndsey Lefebvre
November 18, 2013

A Reflection in Sylvia Plath’s Mirror Sylvia Plath’s poem Mirror (1963) is evocative, provocative, and expressive. According to Clugston (2010) these are important components of poetry. Sylvia Plath’s first line is a projection of the mirror providing its introduction saying, “I am silver and exact”(Plath, 1963, line 1). The mirror is the protagonist who performs a dramatic monologue about the reflections it observes throughout the days and years of its life. The mirror’s identity awakens the reader to the identity of the woman which it sees, but the mirror not only sees the woman, it becomes her. William Freedman (1993) writes, in The Monster in Plath’s “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 (pg 156). Plath develops the character of the mirror, and the woman this mirror observes, through the personification of the mirror. Plath’s Mirror, maneuvers through figurative language, free verse form, personification, and metaphor. The primary language of Mirror is figurative. Figurative language is defined by Clugston (2010) as “the use of words in ways they are not normally used in order to create a distinct imaginative effect or impression” (10.3). “I am silver and exact. I have no preconceptions” (Plath, 1963). Generally, it is not logically accepted that a mirror would have a voice. As written in William Freedman’s, Sylvia Plath’s, “Mirror of Mirrors”(1987), “Language may not say what the speaker means (though only other language can determine or do that)” (pg. 59). What Freedman proclaims is that only figurative or metaphoric language can

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