SOURCE: "The Monster in Plath's 'Mirror,'" in Papers on Language and Literature, Vol. 108, No. 5, October, 1993, pp. 152-69.

In the following essay, Freedman discusses Plath's use of the mirror as a symbol of female passivity, subjugation, and Plath's own conflicted self-identity caused by social pressure to reconcile the competing obligations of artistic and domestic life.

For many women writers, the search in the mirror is ultimately a search for the self, often for the self as artist. So it is in Plath's poem "Mirror." Here, the figure gazing at and reflected in the mirror is neither the child nor the man the woman-as-mirror habitually reflects, but a woman. In this poem, the mirror is in effect looking into itself, for the image in the mirror is woman, the object that is itself more mirror than person. A woman will see herself both in and as a mirror. To...