.gif "Smile (93)")
وعليكم السلام ورحمة الله وبركاته
Many of Plath's works contain prevailing themes of feminist criticism, and "Mirror" is no exception. Maria B. Hinkle, of the University of Delaware, writes in the Research Guide to Biography and Criticism that Sylvia Plath's poetry, while increasingly becoming the focus of multiple poetic categories, "...continues to be valuable for feminist criticism" (920). In "Mirror" for instance, we find a poem of two stanzas where the entire second stanza preoccupies itself with a woman and her relationship to her mirror, which we come to see is really the woman's relationship to the view of herself. The middle section of this stanza, lines 14 and 15, display this best: "She rewards me with tears and an agitation of hands. / I am important to her" ("Mirror" 633). In saying the mirror is "important to her," we can see how much the woman in this poem cares about the way she looks. This is expounded upon with the preceding lines regarding the woman's "tears" and the "agitation of her hands" upon looking into the mirror. This idea of an emphasis being placed on how a woman looks is an idea that was not new when Plath took to writing this poem, and which is still a potent issue facing women today. This poem is a written criticism of that idea. The idea is explored further in the last two lines, where it says, "In me she has drowned a young girl, and in me an old woman / Rises toward her day after day, like a terrible fish" ("Mirror" 633). The woman in the poem is no longer a young, beautiful woman; she is aging, and in the woman's eyes that is a "terrible" thing.
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