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The Expectations Of Aging In Sylvia Plath's Mirror

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As can be seen during this performance, Sylvia Plath challenged the roles and values of her time through her decisions and her poems. Despite being raised in a unitarian family, she embraced the heathen and metaphysical. From the outside it looked like she met societies expectations of a woman but the double in her poems revealed what Sylvia really thought of these expectations. Plath’s poem Mirror is a notable example of this doubling. It combines all her opinions and displays them in full view while deceiving the reader through her use of diction and various forms of poetic devices such as personification and metaphorical language. Mirror demonstrates a unique outlook on the attitudes of aging. It is an objective perspective on time, humanity and most importantly on beauty. More specifically the temporary nature and superficiality of beauty. It emphasizes the loneliness, and insecurity that awaits us through mankind’s nonstop addiction with reflection and expresses the problems associated with aging through terse comparisons between reality and desire. How this purpose was achieved in the poem will now be analysed in terms of the speaker, structure, language and techniques incorporated by Plath. …show more content…

We as the readers learn that it is the inner person that one must cultivate on her own, defining oneself by one’s own values, not as a reflection of the values of others. Plath has achieved this purpose primarily through the speaker, structure, language and techniques integrated throughout the poem. I found that personally, the tonal shift brought upon by language, as well as structural elements was the most significant factor in attaining the intended

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