The Monster in
Plath's 'Mirror'
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 look into the glass is to
look for oneself inside or as reflected on the surface of the mirror and to
seek or discover oneself in the person (or non-person) of the mirror.
The
"She" who seeks in the reflecting lake a flattering distortion of herself
is an image of one aspect of the mirror into which she gazes. She is the woman
as male-defined ideal or as the ideal manqué, the woman who desires to remain
forever the "young girl" and who "turns to those liars, the
candles or the moon" for confirmation of the man-pleasing myth of
perpetual youth, docility, and sexual allure. As such, she is the
personification--or reflection--of the mirror as passive servant, the preconditionless object whose perception is a form of
helpless swallowing or absorption. The image that finally appears in the
mirror, the old woman as "terrible fish," is the opposite or
"dark" side of the mirror. She is the mirror who takes a kind of
fierce pleasure in her uncompromising veracity and who, by rejecting the role
of passive reflector for a more creative autonomy, becomes, in that same
male-inscribed view, a devouring monster. The woman/mirror, then, seeks her
reflection in the mirror/woman, and the result is a human replication of the
linguistic phenomenon the poem becomes. Violating its implicit claim, the poem
becomes a mirror not of the world, but of other mirrors and of the process of
mirroring. When living mirrors gaze into mirrors, as when language stares only
at itself, only mirrors and mirroring will be visible.
This
parallel between person and poem suggests that the glass (and lake) in
"Mirror" is woman--and more particularly the woman writer or artist
for whom the question of mimetic reflection or creative transformation is
definitive. For the woman--and especially for the mother--per se, the crucial
choice is between the affirmation and effacement of the self: will she reflect
the child or more generalized "other" as it presents itself for
obliging reflection, or will she insist on her own autonomous identity and perception.
To do the latter is to risk looking into the mirror and seeing, not the
pleasing young girl, but the terrible fish.
Viewed
in these terms, "Mirror" may be read as a broadening and more
sophisticated extension of poems like "Morning Song" and "Medusa,"
which question or reject the maternal role. "I'm no more your
mother," announces the voice of "Morning Song," "Than the
cloud that distills a mirror to reflect its own
slow/Effacement at the wind's hand." To say as much, however, is to
acknowledge what it denies. The statement succeeds only in rejecting the
maternal identity for one that is identical with it, for that of the vaguely
insubstantial image (the cloud) that is ultimately erased from the surface of
its other, equally effaced identity as maternal mirror. The escape from mirror
and mother to cloud does not permit an escape from their mutual fate as
depersonalized victims of erasure. And the ambiguity of "its own"
suggests that the mirror as well as the cloud is effaced by the wind that blows
the child into the mother's life. "Morning Song" ends with
reconciliation and acceptance, an acceptance reflected in the developing
animation of the poem's imagery: of the child from watch and statue to moth,
cat, and singer; of the mother from walls and cloud to cow-heavy woman.
"Medusa"
ends with the rejection that presumably motivated it, the rejection of the
poet's own mother as a kind of terrible sea creature that poisons, paralyzes,
and devours:
Off,
off, eely tentacle!
There
is nothing between us.
Even
here, however, there is an injected sense of the speaker as mother as well as
child. The Medusa, apparently the mother, is also the child/mother's own
newborn infant, a "tremulous breath at the end of my line . . . dazzling
and grateful, / Touching and sucking." She is
"Fat and red, a placenta" who, like a new unwelcomed baby, was not
called, yet "steamed to me over the sea . . . Paralyzing the kicking
lovers." The obliterating mother, then, is at the same time the infant whose
emergence sucks life and identity from the child-cum-mother. Indeed, the
evocation of the mother as devouring monster seems to be a reactive inversion
of the perhaps more primitive sense that the speaking child consumes or
threatens to consume its sacrificial mother. "Who do you think you
are?" She asks harshly. "A Communion wafer? Blubbery Mary? / I shall take no bite of your body, / Bottle
in which I live." Here Plath as embryo or new offspring rejects the
sacrificial offer of the mother's body, and the poem's enraged rejection of the
monstrous mother may at bottom be a rejection of the mother's ironically
devouring self-annihilation. A letter Plath wrote to her brother in 1953
reflects such an image of their mother:
You
know, as I do, and it is a frightening thing, that mother would actually kill
herself for us if we calmly accepted all she wanted to do for us. She is an
abnormally altruistic person, and I have realized lately that we have to fight
against her selflessness as we would fight against a deadly disease . . .
After
extracting her life blood and care for 20 years we should start bringing in big
dividends of joy for her . . . (Letter to Warren, May 12, 1953).
A
passage from Jung's "The Development of Personality," which Plath
transcribed, describes the phenomenon of crushing maternal self-annihilation
that Plath experienced and transformed into poetry. "Parents," wrote
Jung,
set
themselves the fanatical task of always "doing their best" for the
children and "living only for them." This claimant ideal effectively
prevents the parents from doing anything about their own development and allows
them to thrust their "best" down their children's throats. This
so-called "best" turns out to be the very things the parents have
most badly engaged in themselves. In this way the children are goaded on to
achieve their parents' most dismal failures, and are loaded with ambitions that
are never fulfilled.
The
parents Jung describes assume contradictory roles, just as Plath's image of the
mother-woman-mirror as terrible fish assumes contradictory or at least contrary
forms. On the one hand, it is an image of a monstrous autonomy that cannot
perform the self-effacing function of infant-confirming mother. Instead,
"reflecting its own mood or, worse still, the rigidity of her own defenses," it generates in the child the threat of
chaos that produces the disturbed obsession with distorting mirrors in Plath's
poetry. Conversely, this terrible fish or medusa may be the image of maternal
self-annihilation, the mother's guilt-inducing refusal of autonomy. The
required self-denial of new motherhood, if perpetuated or exaggerated, may, as
Jung suggests, be as threatening as its opposite. As
virtually exclusive nurturer of the infant and small child, the mother cannot
win. Caught between annihilation of self and annihilation of other, and lanced
on the sacrifice of self that may efface the other, her denigration, rejection,
and perceived monstrosity are all but insured.
The
same near-identity of assertive autonomy with an at least seemingly
contradictory self-annihilation characterizes the language of
"Mirror" and colors the poem's implicit
treatment of the woman as writer. The poem is finally about language and
imitation, about poetry and its relation to what it describes. As such, it is a
poem that assumes a central place in the literature of female authorship, the
literature that takes as its subject the woman as writer and her obligation to
create for woman and herself a resistant and resilient language of her own. The
popularity of Plath's relatively few poems of aggressive threat and power,
poems such as "Lady Lazarus" and "Daddy," misleads us. Far
more of her poetry presents protagonists or personae who
are basically passive and depersonalized, victimized and helpless. Like the
mirror, the speakers in these poems--dolls, mannequins, stones, patients--are
typically confined, often inanimate, absorbently
passive, and devoid of personal initiative or will. They are, in short, images
of the woman who, as Gilbert and Gubar document,
inanimately animate the "mirror of the male-inscribed literary text."
Much
of Plath's poetry, in other words, is a mirror of the male text as mirror, a
replication of the passive images caught on its surface. Just as the mirror can
only reflect reality, the woman writer can only reflect male ideals and
desires. Devoid of subjectivity and the power of narrative, the woman in many
of Plath's poems "speaks" not only to the
plight of woman generally, but, more particularly, to the woman as writer. For
as Gilbert and Gubarargue, the mirror in much 19th-
and 20th-century women's poetry and fiction is the locus of authorial
self-discovery, the place in which the woman author or would-be author
perceives both her silent subordination and the fierce urgency of repressed speech.
The
image of woman as reflector functions in several ways. As mother or woman, the
mirror's principal and imposed obligation is to reflect infant and other--that
is, she must present herself as the image mirrored in man's eyes. But as
speaking 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. She becomes the
text in which that recording occurs. Through these lenses, the question of the
object of perception gives place to the now central question of the nature of
the narrator. The mirror as woman or mother reflects the other to itself. The
mirror as text or writer reflects self and world in language that becomes a
kind of mirror itself. But in both forms the principal conflict is between a
self-suppressing recapitulation of male expression and an autonomous resistance
to the conventional truths and methods of his inscriptions. The connections are
further entangled by the fact that a selection of a narrative technique
inevitably determines the treatment of content. To let the mirror speak in
self-defining ways that resist prior definition or restriction is to alter the
image in the glass. That resistance is what is represented by the substitution
of the "terrible fish" for the more attractive young girl in
"Mirror."
The
mirror's opening announcement of its identity calls that identity into question
and begins to transform the mirror from a passive reflector into an active
speaker. The poem mirrors language's resistance to simple representation and
reflects the resistance of the woman writer and the feminine text to the roles
assigned them. It is this rebellion, this presumptuous arrogation of autonomy, that accounts for the shocking image of the
terrible fish in the poem's concluding line. The terrible fish is not just a
symbol of approaching old age: it is the image of "monstrous
autonomy" that stares back at the literary woman in so many of her texts,
often out of the mirror of that text into which she gazes in embittered
self-search. "The woman writer's self-contemplation," Gilbert and Gubar maintain, "may be said to have begun with a
searching glance into the mirror of the male-inscribed literary text." It
continues in her own text, where, as in Mary Elizabeth Coleridge's "The
Other Side of the Mirror," the "woman, wild," "bereft of
loveliness," her mouth a "hideous wound" bleeding "in
silence and in secret," erupts into her poetry and fiction as demonic
emblem of her independent identity, her monstrous renunciation of the mirroring
angel. The speaker in Coleridge's poem is not a lonely, but a common figure.
For like Coleridge, "the literary woman frequently finds herself staring
with horror at a fearful image of herself that has
been mysteriously inscribed on the surface of the glass." Plath's
"Mirror" is in this tradition, its terrible fish a menacing image of
its own self-terrifying achievement.
There
is, of course, a biographical dimension to this poem and its governing images,
which intensifies the purely literary force of the work. Plath had a dual image
of herself: she was a brightly silvered surface concealing a demonic form that
threatened to tear the fragile membrane--in other words, both a mirror and a
fish. The mirror, of course, is the brilliant surface Plath presented to the
world, as both woman and poet. As poet, Plath the mirror is the precise
measurer and recorder of minutiae, the four-cornered goddess of aesthetic
control. As woman, Plath the mirror is the strict and tightly disciplined
achiever who glitteringly fulfilled all expectations, a perfect mirror of
acquired parental and social standards of elegance, beauty and achievement--the
persona that emitted what
This
Plath, in short, is the mirror that reflects back what others wish to see and
that is itself a perfect reflection of the feminine ideal in male eyes. But
this Plath--it has become a commonplace--was only a facade, a fragile surface
laid thickly over an inner turmoil Plath herself perceived as a slouching beast
struggling for release. "There are two of me
now," Plath writes grittily in "In Plaster": "This new
absolutely white person and the old yellow one." The white person, like
the mirror, "had no personality . . . she had a slave mentality." But
the old yellow one, "ugly and hairy," is one of a profusion of
monstrous forms threatening the placid surface from below. As in "Lady
Lazarus," it is a cannibal fury rising from the dead. In "Fever
103°" it is a flaming sinner and a "pure acetylene / Virgin." In
"Daddy" it is the Electral avenger who
stakes the vampire's heart; in "Stings" the sleeping queen bee with a
menacing "self to recover," a "lion-red body" that, as
Plath's demons typically do, rises as a "red scar" and a flaming
comet. In "Mirror," the poem's deflective subject is itself a defense against its intimidating imagery and import. The
"terrible fish" is not simply the image of aging and decay apparent
in the surface narrative; it is another incarnation of the barely suppressed
demon of sensuality and rage that charges Plath's poetry as it haunted her
life. What is more, it is, appropriately, the devouring monster of the deep,
disturbingly at home in the depths of Plath's element.
In
an autobiographical essay, "Ocean 1212-W" Plath recounts a crucial
memory: "When I was learning to creep, my mother set me down on the beach
to see what I thought of it. I crawled straight for the coming wave and was
just through the walls of green when she caught my heels. What would have
happened," Plath wonders, "if I had managed to pierce that
looking-glass?" The sea is a looking glass in which she claims to have
discovered, at two and a half, the "awful birthday of otherness,"
"the separateness of everything" and ultimately therefore of herself.
The sea is the terrible country of the void, of the "darkness [that] is
leaking from the cracks." The true habitat of the horrific buried self, it
is also the environ of her father. As
Plath confessed in a BBC interview. "I probably wished many times
that he were dead. When he obliged me and died, I imagined that I had killed
him." In a number of her poems, her father is the victim of suicide or
murder, usually by drowning, for the sea is her
father's element, and it is there she takes her revenge. When she announces in
"Full Fathom Five," "father, this thick air is murderous / I
would breathe water," she identifies herself as a dark swimmer in its
waves, in effect the terrible fish who would return to her father. Whether she would return in order to love him like Electra or to
destroy him as in "Daddy" matters little. Forbidden love and
murder are but two faces of the same resurgent beast.
That
the appearance of the demonic in Plath's poetry is typically associated with
the imagery of sea and water helps explain, in biographical terms, the
substitution of lake for mirror in the poem. The terrible fish is implicit from
the outset. It is contained in the rebellious rejection of the mirroring role
in the opening lines of "Mirror" that ostensibly accept and define
it. It is implicit, too, in the barely concealed harshness of the relentless
veracity of the mirror's reflection, whose cruelty she unconvincingly denies.
And it is explicit in the mirror's urge to "swallow immediately"
whatever it sees. But the image of the fish's emergence requires that the
mirror be transformed into water, Plath's symbol of the hideous depths in which
the monster lives.
The
terrible fish, then, is Plath's personal demon, the witch she strove to conceal
beneath the snow white surface or to transform into the "pure gold
baby" of "Lady Lazarus." In this reading, the poem's attempt to
undermine the mirror's veritical claims with a
figurative language that belies them is a linguistic replica of the poem's
content, of the effort of the woman who "turns to those liars, the candles
and the moon" to avert the terrible truth of her mounting ugliness and
decay. Here, the flight from clarity and truth is also a flight, parallel to
the young woman's and the author's, from the horrifying image of the woman as
the devouring other. Her shocking emergence at the end of the poem marks the
fearful triumph of a psychological reality over the linguistic efforts to avert
it. The woman outside the mirror or lake is of course the woman whose image as
terrible fish is also inside it, visible in its depths. To perceive oneself in
the mirror or lake, then, is to recognize one's Jungian shadow as the dark
underside of the shining surface. The terrible fish is not simply the
time-transformed identity of the young girl; it is the Hydean
alter-ego of the mirror or lake in whose depths it is shudderingly
disclosed.
Inside
the woman-as-mirror, in other words, behind this physically restricted,
passive, depersonalized reflector of the external world, lurks the minatory
force that will emerge with full power and vengeance in some of the Ariel
poems. To escape the obligations of literal truthfulness is not to escape the
mirror of male texts that identify her as the obedient angel, but the opposite.
It is to evade the monstrous truth the angel herself knows best and fears no
less than does the male who protectively angelicizes
her in order to prevent her transformation into monster. It is to look into the
mirror and pretend one does not see the monster.
Because
it recognizes the danger both of reflecting and ignoring the world,
"Mirror" can be seen as the turning point in Plath's development. The
voice in poems such as "Stones," "Lorelei,"
"Tulips," "Love Letter," "Crossing the Water,"
"Purdah," "Face Lift," "Two
Campers in Cloud Country," "Childless Woman," and dozens more is
that of a woman who has accepted her depersonalization and passivity or who
longs for the numbing purity it promises. In many of these poems, the stone,
jade, plaster, or anesthetized persona shares the muted stage with old yellow,
the lioness, the acetylene virgin, or other threatening figures from the
depths, though it is not until her final poems, principally "Daddy"
and "Lady Lazarus," that the menacing avenger explodes onto the
surface as the dominant force in poems of assertive threat and rage.
"Mirror" represents a kind of middle-ground between the extremes of
passivity and action, numbing self-cancellation and aggressive self-assertion.
It achieves its special position and effect by adopting the former guise in
ways that renounce it for the latter. To assume the mirror's role is implicitly
to accept the male-proscribed image of woman and mother. But the poem's method
and equations situate the terrible fish within the lake and mirror and quietly
establish an identity between them. The poem's implicit rejection of the
mirror's claim to literal reflection is what generates the image of threatening
female autonomy that the poem ostensibly disavows. The fish that is in effect
in the mirror from the outset charges towards the mirroring surface at the end,
its identity and import disguised by a subject that deflects our attention to
figures apparently external to the speaking mirror. Blending passive inactivity
with devouring hostility, the poem presages the vengeful uprising of "Lady
Lazarus" and "Daddy" while maintaining the innocent,
expressionless appearance of paper, stone, mannequin, or doll.
"Mirror," in other words, lends to the monster in the attic (or
basement) the face of the angel in the house.
The
dread fish is identified with the passive mirror by its presence within or
behind it. But their identification with one another may have another source as
well. The speaker sees herself "in" the mirror or lake in two senses:
She is the fearful image in the depths beyond the glass and she is the mirror
itself. The implication here is that Plath found her defenses
hardly less repulsive than the assault they were created to ward off. The
terrible fish observed in the lake's depths and rising toward its surface is
identifiable with the mirror that reflects, neutrally and passively, whatever
swims before it. The monster in the depths, in other words, is also the monster
on the surface, perhaps more accurately the monstrosity of mere surface or lack
of depth. The identification of the mirror with the terrible fish, then, erases
the separation the dual identity was constructed to sustain. It suggests on the
one hand that the mirror contains the fish, that
beneath the angel in the house lurks the monster in the depths. But it may
propose as well that a two-dimensional image of the angel is also is a form of
monstrosity.
In
"Crossing the Water," the title poem of Plath's second volume, the
speaker is identified as one of "two black, cut-paper people"
floating across the water as they float over the surface of their lives. Yet,
as she observes, "the spirit of blackness is in us, it is in the fishes."
And here, too, the double meaning suggests itself. The spirit of blackness may
refer to a dark force concealed beneath the cut paper surface. But, since the
paper itself is identified as black, the stronger reading points toward an
identification of two-dimensionality with blackness--and both flatness and
darkness are identified with the fish made terrible in "Mirror."
The
monster is seen not only in the mirroring self, but "in" that self as
surface reflector. The woman as the passive, selfless reflector is inscribed in
psychoanalysis, motherhood, and the male text and is submissively adopted by
the woman as her own identity. But Plath shows it to be a monstrous evasion of
reality and suppression of self. A woman who adopts the reflecting role is cruel
primarily to herself. It is therefore inevitable that the last image the
reflector swallows is that of the terrible fish, which is at once its concealed
opposite and its concealing self.
The
mirror is an image of the woman writer in her two conflicting roles as
wife/mother and as author. In the first she is the selfless reflector of man
and infant, in the second the self-conscious, self-centering
reflector of herself and of the world as she willfully
perceives it. Traditionally the roles were seen, by women as well as men, as
not merely conflicting but mutually exclusive. It was, in fact, the collective
view of psychoanalytic theory that the woman who has "created" a
child required no other creative exercise or outlet, and women felt the power,
if not always the validity, of that argument in their lives. Some women writers
have so internalized this argument that they have felt the fear Susan Sulciman describes: "With every word I write, with
every metaphor, with every act of genuine creation, I hurt my child." The
guilt this idea elicits necessarily produces feelings of aggression. In Plath's
"Mirror," and in many more of her poems on motherhood and entrapment,
this aggression wins out over any feelings of tenderness.
Like
the women in the writing of Anne Finch and Anne Elliot, Emily Dickinson and the
Brontë sisters, the persona in a few of Plath's
poems--in "In Plaster," the Bee poems, "Lady Lazarus" and
"Daddy"--articulates what virtually her entire body of poetry
represents: the striving of the fundamentally powerless woman for autonomy.
"The great woman writers of the past two centuries," Gilbert and Gubar argue, "danced out of the debilitating looking
glass of the male text into the health of female authority. Tracing subversive
pictures behind socially acceptable facades, they managed to appear to
dissociate themselves from their own revolutionary impulses even while
passionately enacting such impulses." Plath hardly seems at home in this
tradition. The female authority she stole or discovered assumed no healthy
form. Rather, her work seems dangerously divided between poems in which she anesthetically dissociates herself from her aggressive or
rebellious impulses and those, mostly later poems, in which she ferociously
enacts them. In "Mirror" the contrary impulses come together--even as
she dissociates herself from aggression, she acts it out. And while the poem's
repression does not bespeak a thoroughly healthy freedom, Plath has found a way
to allow her aggression to triumph over tenderness, but only within a
controlled system that maintains the integrity of poem and personality alike.
In
"A Sketch of the Past," Virginia Woolf recalls a dream in which
"I was looking in a glass when a horrible face--the face of an
animal--suddenly showed over my shoulder." What she sees is a variant of
the monster in the mirror familiar to women's poetry and fiction, the image of
rebelliously monstrous autonomy typified by the madwoman in the attic and an
uneasy crowd of ominous female forms that darken the mirroring text of women's
fiction. As in Plath's poem, the young woman sees in the mirror the dread
reflected image of a beast that is clearly an aspect of the self Woolf
elsewhere identified as a self-less mirror for man's magnification.
Mary
Elizabeth Coleridge's "The Other Side of the Mirror" offers a more
pertinent parallel, for it implies more strongly still the connection between
feminine writing and monstrosity. In this poem, Coleridge traces the emergence
of the monster from behind the angelic facade, a creature whose rage betrays
the shallowness and fragility of the submissive pretense.
This figure arises, as Gilbert and Gubar observe,
"as if the very process of writing had liberated [her] . . . from a
silence in which neither she nor her author can continue to acquiesce." In
Plath, too, I believe, it is the writing that liberates the monster--or rather
generates her. To quote Gilbert and Gubar one final
time, "If she is to be a poet the woman must deconstruct the dead self
that is a male 'opus' and discover a living 'inconsistent' self." And the
implicit reference to Plath's "Lady Lazarus" in the word
opus--"I am your opus, / I am your valuable, / The
pure gold baby / That melts to a shriek"--is as apt as the verb that
effects the metamorphosis. For it is precisely by deconstructing the masculine
mimetic language that entraps the woman in her traditional role that the
speaking mirror exchanges the anxious young woman for the monstrous autonomy of
the terrible fish. The fish is the woman as autonomous person and author. It is
the role-rejecting woman/mother who, even as she proclaims her acceptance of
the task, refuses passively to mirror man, infant, or whatever else is set
before it. And it is the woman-as-writer who, even as she proclaims her
obedient adherence to the mimetic model, adopts that model only to tease and
overturn it. "She accepts the woman's role as accurate reflecting mirror
in order to transcend it, to show how that very role inevitably thwarts and
transcends itself." The mirror as woman and as writer takes on the figure
of the four-cornered glass in order to shatter it against the non-mirroring
language with which she affirms the comfort of the fit--to shatter it, too, by
focusing on herself, making herself the subject of her
own attention and the poem. It is the nature and occupation of the mirror
self-effacingly to reflect the other. In "Mirror," however, the glass
is both subject and speaker at once. The poem begins with "I," a
pronoun that appears five times in the first four lines and, together with
"me" or "my," seventeen times in this poem of only eighteen
lines. The mirror/woman, who is by definition without
identity, defines and identifies herself. The persona that has no story, tells
it, and in the defiant mirror-breaking act of doing so, she becomes the
terrible fish of assertive selfhood. To tell one's own story, even if it is, as
it must be, the story of absence and effacement, is to
establish a presence and to display, perhaps for the first time, the face
behind the angelic silver mask.
Plath's
emergent monster, then, is not an imagined other, a beckoning fulfillment of hopeless ambition. It is the reconstruction
of the speechless woman whose language deconstructs her verbal confession of
mere reflective silence. This reconstructed self still bears the conscience of
the complaint, and therefore the image of autonomy is not a thoroughly positive
figure of assertive strength. The woman continues to subscribe to the male
dread of female sexuality and to the male identification of female defiance or
aggression with bestiality. The monster, then, does not so much dwell on the
other side of the mirror; she is the other side of the mirror, the perpetuation
of the mirror's male-inscribed ideal in a form that otherwise rejects it. The
contradictions travel in both directions. The announcement of a mirroring
silence or self-effacement implicitly rejects the identity it affirms. Yet the
monstrous shape this autonomy assumes attests to the persistence of the woman's
sense of self as dependent and faceless.
The
woman achieves autonomy in Plath's "Mirror" and comparable works by
rejecting the phallocentric language whose fixed
truth fixes woman as the mirroring or speechless other. The rejection of the
false and insulting "truth" of woman's identity is effected in a
language that undermines the very possibility of definable identity and truth.
Woman achieves freedom from male definition at the price of all definition,
freedom from the name with which the masculine text identifies her in the
affirmation of unnamability. Yet, as in Conrad, the
unnamed, too, may be a form of monstrosity or horror: the chilling truth at the
heart of the darkness may be an unnamed evil or the evil of unnamability
itself, the fearful prospect of truth as mere illusion. The stakes are perhaps
lower in "Mirror," the curse a mixed blessing of menacing
independence and creativity. But the merging dichotomy is present here as well.
In these terms, the terrible fish is not only the monstrous autonomy of woman
as personally or artistically creative self. It is also the impossibility of
all autonomy or self-definition. Defining herself in and as that which cannot
be defined, the woman writer comes perilously close to her previous condition
of subjectlessness. That is the price of creative
autonomy viewed in terms of resistance and dissociation.
Different
in several ways from other poems on "monstrous" female autonomy,
creativity is not the manifest subject of "Mirror," and the terrible
creature is not the acknowledged alter-ego of the speaker. The image, moreover,
retains more of its primordial menace as both monster and internal threat than
in most of the poems of the genre. There is little apparent nobility or dignity
in the terrible fish, and its immediate if not
exclusive prey seems to be not man or "the oppressor" but the mirror
(or lake) itself and the young woman who is drowned in it. Almost to the very
end Plath remained ambivalent, retained her dual identity, and could not
celebrate liberation or defiance unperplexed. Unlike
Lady Lazarus, Plath's mirror is a cannibal Charybdis
who either has not yet identified the enemy or is not
prepared to attack it. Finally and most impressively, however, unlike most
poems that consciously identify their beast of creative enterprise,
"Mirror" generates its emblem of autonomy in the language and
processes of a poem that has ostensibly made its peace with mere reflection.
The terrible fish is not so much an image in the poem as an image of the poem
and its achievement, the self-generated product of its method.
William
Freedman, 1993
Papers
on Language and Literature, Vol. 108, No. 5, October, 1993, pp. 152-69.
http://www.sylviaplath.de/plath/freedman.html