Sylvia Plath | Mirror previously belonging to Plath

Property of Frieda Hughes

Sylvia Plath--Mirror

Bevelled mirror owned by Sylvia Plath,

bronze coloured metal mount with embossed design of fruit and flowers, red corduroy over wood cushion frame surround, 270 x 190mm., some very light scratches on mirror, corduroy faded

"I have looked at it so long

I think it is part of my heart" (Plath, "Mirror", Crossing the Water, 1971)

Mirrors assume a powerful symbolic role throughout Plath's work. Plath's 1955 undergraduate thesis at Smith College was entitled "The Magic Mirror: A Study of the Double in Two of Dostoevsky's Novels", and "explores literary doubles made up of a character's repressed traits" (Kelly Coyne). The symbolic power of the mirror resurfaces in The Bell Jar (1963), when Esther is abandoned, reaches for the "side mirror" in her pocketbook, and catches a troubling glimpse of her face which "seemed to be peering from the grating of a prison cell". Moreover, a posthumously published 1961 lyric is written from the point of view of a personified mirror, and reflects Plath's fears about ageing and death: in the poem the mirror's reflection - truthful, not cruel - is the eye of a little god.