The Mirror and the Shadow: Plath's Poetics of Self-Doubt

Abstract

In much of her later poetry, Sylvia Plath sought to give birth to a creative or self hidden within her' a Wordsworthian imaginative power or Whitmanian real Me. By unpeeling an outer self of hands, dead stringencies, she sought to unveil give voice to an inner queen or White Godiva, a spirit of rebellious expressiveness.2 Although she may at least partially have achieved this goal in such celebrated poems as Daddy, Lady Lazarus, Ariel, she more characteristically dwelt on her fears that she would failthat she would be unable to reveal her deep self, or that she did not in fact possess such a self at all. Plath's figures for these fears were the the shadow. While a number of critics-for example, Judith Kroll, Jon Rosenblatt, Susan Van Dynehave ably analyzed Plath's imagery of rebirth,3 none has focused attention on these images of incapacity. In theory, the should have provided Plath with access to an abstract Platonic realm of pure imagination: and so to the twin, Muse (J, pp. 117, 194). But in fact, it functioned merely as an agent of anxious narcissism. It was an egoistic mirror reflect-