실비어 플라스: 거울의 이미지와 여성의 정체성

Abstract

Sylvia Plath’s poetry has been divided into two periods―one centering on her first volume of poetry, The Colossus, the other on the Posthumous volume, Ariel. Most of Plath criticism, however, whether psychoanalytic, feminist, or mythical, have been concerned with her suicide. They tend to emphasize that her poetry is an impulsive death wish. Such criticism ignores the fact that most of Plath’s mirror imagery have already appeared in her poetry. This paper aims to analyze the images of mirror in Sylvia Plath’s poetry with the intention of showing the continuous development of her poetry. Images of mirror such as ices, window panes, surfaces of water, pervade throughout her poems. They in one way distort feminine selves by reflecting them in grim weather, desolate surroundings, and sometimes on mirror itself. While the trauma, lose, and anger work staged in her poems can never be entirely disentangled from the narrative of her life and death, it nonetheless exceeds the personalization of biography. In this case, we can infer that mirrors are, the poet, sites of self-making, feminine identity, though they are also, at the same time sources of self-division.Therefore if her poetry is analyzed with the recognition that mirror imagery was one of Plath’s major concerns from the beginning of her poetic career and it evolved from the early poetry, some prejudices against her imagery will be modified, leading to a fuller understanding of her poetry.