Anamaria Marijic Buljubasic
Ms. Hazell
English Period 7 176 February 2016
I will neither give nor receive unauthorized aid.
Beneath The Surface
In Sylvia Plath’s poem “Mirror,” she uses personification and simile to convey a woman’s growing fear about her appearance and aging. Plath personifies the mirror, attributing certain human characteristics to an inanimate object. The reader also learns about the mirror 's life and its perspective on things it sees.
The mirror describes itself:
I am silver and exact. I have no preconceptions.
What ever you see I swallow immediately
Just as it is, unmisted by love or dislike.
I am not cruel, only truthful. (Plath 1-4)
The mirror reflects exactly what it sees. …show more content…
In the second stanza, the circumstances have changed. The reflection at first was merely a reflection but now it has become a reality. “Each morning it is her face that replaces the darkness. / In me she has drowned a young girl, and in me an old woman / Rises toward her day after day, like a terrible fish” (16 – 18). The woman’s image changes from the reflection in a mirror to a reflection in water. The reader learns that the woman searches the water for who she is. The women searches in her reflection constantly which means that she thinks that the definition of herself lays in her physical appearance. However, she doesn’t realize she only wastes her time looking in the wrong place. …show more content…
She seems so ignorant to understand her true self worth to such an intense degree, almost like she was raised and taught to think so much about the surface that she forgets about the importance of inner identity. She denies the reflection because she doesn’t even believe in its existence, let alone the reality. When the author uses the simile, “the old woman rises up like a terrible fish,” to illustrate how her past of youth and beauty is drowning beneath the depths of the water, and an unwanted, negative, aging future rises to meet her at the surface. The woman believes that her reflection in the water could reveal something about herself, hopefully youthfulness. She doesn’t have the ability to look past society and their standards, which includes the idea of the importance of physical appearance. This obsession with her appearance leads to the ignorance and shallowness she experiences when she is faced with an accurate reflection. The” young girl drowning” and the “old woman rising” illustrates the idea that the water represents time, or aging. This simile of “drowning and rising like a terrible fish”
Ms. Hazell
English Period 7 176 February 2016
I will neither give nor receive unauthorized aid.
Beneath The Surface
In Sylvia Plath’s poem “Mirror,” she uses personification and simile to convey a woman’s growing fear about her appearance and aging. Plath personifies the mirror, attributing certain human characteristics to an inanimate object. The reader also learns about the mirror 's life and its perspective on things it sees.
The mirror describes itself:
I am silver and exact. I have no preconceptions.
What ever you see I swallow immediately
Just as it is, unmisted by love or dislike.
I am not cruel, only truthful. (Plath 1-4)
The mirror reflects exactly what it sees. …show more content…
In the second stanza, the circumstances have changed. The reflection at first was merely a reflection but now it has become a reality. “Each morning it is her face that replaces the darkness. / In me she has drowned a young girl, and in me an old woman / Rises toward her day after day, like a terrible fish” (16 – 18). The woman’s image changes from the reflection in a mirror to a reflection in water. The reader learns that the woman searches the water for who she is. The women searches in her reflection constantly which means that she thinks that the definition of herself lays in her physical appearance. However, she doesn’t realize she only wastes her time looking in the wrong place. …show more content…
She seems so ignorant to understand her true self worth to such an intense degree, almost like she was raised and taught to think so much about the surface that she forgets about the importance of inner identity. She denies the reflection because she doesn’t even believe in its existence, let alone the reality. When the author uses the simile, “the old woman rises up like a terrible fish,” to illustrate how her past of youth and beauty is drowning beneath the depths of the water, and an unwanted, negative, aging future rises to meet her at the surface. The woman believes that her reflection in the water could reveal something about herself, hopefully youthfulness. She doesn’t have the ability to look past society and their standards, which includes the idea of the importance of physical appearance. This obsession with her appearance leads to the ignorance and shallowness she experiences when she is faced with an accurate reflection. The” young girl drowning” and the “old woman rising” illustrates the idea that the water represents time, or aging. This simile of “drowning and rising like a terrible fish”