Sylvia Likens

Sylvia Plath utilizes personification and simile to illustrate women’s struggles with accepting the ‘flaws’ that come with aging. Through the usage of personification, Sylvia Plath describes the harsh truthfulness of a mirror. The mirror says, 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 (Sylvia Plath 1-2). The mirror doesn’t alter the appearance in its reflection; it has no bias.…

Lunacy: The Portrait of a Student Sylvia Plath once wrote, “The floor seemed wonderfully solid. It was comforting to know I had fallen and could fall no further.” I wish I could say my descent into madness was graceful, but yet that wasn’t the case. I had hit rock bottom. Actually I had cannonballed into it. I was a shadow of a girl then, but I wasn’t always like that. I felt on top of the world, I had graduated 20 out of 639, and I had gotten into my dream school. My collapse taught me that it…

The title of Lucille Clifton’s “What the Mirror Said” resembles a parallel to the story of Snow White. The Evil Queen constantly looks into her mirror and asks it whom is the fairest in the land; the answer usually points to her, but one day it mentions that a younger woman that is even more beautiful. This poem may take the form of either the Evil Queen, having her self-confidence snatched away from her after years of assurance or of Snow White, a woman who was deemed because of both her…

a. Jeffrey Eugenides and Sylvia Plath both carefully create characters that exist to exhibit the lives of teenage girls, and their inherit suffering during adolescent. The lives of these teenage girls in The Virgin Suicides and The Bell Jar are shaped by mental illness and isolation, stemming from a withdrawal from society and any kind of community thereafter. The Lisbon Sisters and Esther Greenwood are more often than not, forced to interact with communities and families that prove to be…

A very prominent theme throughout the book, The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath was that thoughts haunt people which creates a bell jar around people, trapping them in the vortex of madness which is their mind. In the beginning of the book Esther contemplates what it would be like to be “burned alive” through electrocution (1). This thought essentially comes back to haunt Esther when she talks to Hilda who is “glad [the Rosenbergs are] going to die (99),” which contributes to the accumulation of…

Sylvia Plath can very easily be considered one of the brightest minds in all of confessional poetry. She wrote hundreds of poems in her lifetime and three books: “The Colossus”, “Ariel”, and “The Bell Jar”. Despite all of her brilliance, she was plagued with a sea of mental illnesses. “The Bell Jar” was written to chronicle the events that occurred before and after her first suicide attempt. Her most famous poem, “Daddy”, mentions how she tried to join her father in death. There is even a…

Both “Daddy,” by Sylvia Plath, and “My Papa’s Waltz,” by Theodore Roethke are poems centering around the parent-child relationship between the authors and their fathers. At first glance, Plath’s “Daddy” pivots around an abusive father, and Roethke’s “My Papa’s Waltz” revolves around the joy filled evening of play that the narrator and his father participate in. While Sylvia Plath’s “Daddy” and Theodore Roethke’s “My Papa’s Waltz” parent-child relationships are seemingly quite different, once one…

Similarly, Plath shows the importance that appearances have on individuals as they grow older. Imagery is employed to show the lack of attention the woman had about her appearance when she was younger. The mirror states, “Faces and darkness separate us over and over” (9). The use of the word “darkness” and “over and over” portray the image of lights getting turned off frequently leaving the mirror to reflect the dark. Children spend most of their day playing outside or watching cartoons. They…

Sylvia Plath’s “Daddy” and Theodore Roethke’s “My Papa’s Waltz” are two poems that detail the dysfunctional relationship between the speakers’ and their fathers. Although a similar longing for fatherly love is expressed by both speakers in the two poems, the tones and speakers’ view of their fathers of the two poems are quite different. Upon reading both poems it is revealed that both speakers’ long for fatherly love from their fathers; as a result of not receiving any the speakers suffer. This…

Sylvia is not afraid to voice her opinions and even goes on to state, “This seemed a dreary and wasted life for a girl with fifteen years of straight A’s, but I knew that’s what marriage was like.” (P. 84). Plath is not afraid to express her disagreement…