A Disturbance in Mirrors: The Poetry of Sylvia Plath

This new, uncluttered study of Sylvia Plath’s poetry offers a calculated balance between feminist theory and the old heritage of the New Criticism. The apparent thematic peg here is Plath’s fascination with mirrors in her life and in her work… . This is a very solid work; it is the most readable of the recent books on Plath, and, among the recent works this reviewer knows of, none is comparable. Choice

Much of Sylvia Plath’s poetry springs from her attempts to recognize and reconcile her own paradoxes: the ones she found inside herself and the ones she faced in the world in which she lived. Like the work of a number of twentieth-century women poets, her poetry can be characterized as a search not so much for definition of self as for redefinition of self. This penetrating study traces, through the internal dialectics that structure poems, the evolution of Plath’s imagery, and examines the way the poems embody the tension between images of self and images of world. A developmental study of Plath’s poetry, A Disturbance in Mirrors considers various aspects of her work: the social implications of mythic imagery in her early poems; the relationship between language, imagery, and sexual/social context in the poems of the middle period; the connections between aesthetic and biological creativity in a bureaucratic, depersonalized world; the internalized conflict of self and society within the poet; and Plath’s attempts, metaphorically and within the poems, to narrate the possibilities for a transformed self reborn into a transformed world.