Previous Next

The reflective surface of the lake in Plath’s poem pitilessly registers the changing appearance of an aging woman, and hence mirrors the damaging standards of beauty facing women in the mid-twentieth century. For this reason, “Mirror” must be situated within the feminist movement. By the time Plath’s poem was first written, in 1961, the feminist movement was entering its so-called “second wave.” Second-wave feminism got its impetus in part from Betty Friedan’s bestselling 1963 book, The Feminine Mystique.

Freidan’s book challenged the idea, dominant at the time, that women derived fulfilment primarily from domestic life as wives and mothers. By contrast, Friedan argued, women were unhappy with the limitations that prevented them from pursuing their own self-fulfillment. Feminist thinkers have articulated many kinds of social, cultural, and political limitations placed on women. However, a key barrier was the expectation that women attend primarily to their domestic responsibilities, one of which was to boost their attractiveness to men through clothing, cosmetics, and weight management. This expectation established unreasonable beauty standards that unfairly privileged women who were young and thin. Plath’s poem registers this unreasonable standard, primarily in the aging woman whose face resembles that of “a terrible fish” (line 18).

Previous section About Sylvia Plath Next section Related Works on SparkNotes

Take a Study Break