This paper concentrates on the significance and relevance of a recurrent pattern of mirror images used by Sylvia Plath in her major poems to lay bare the troubled female self (especially woman artist) in search of an identity beyond the realm of traditional femininity, struggling to assert her true self as a terrible fish. At the initial stage, the mirror reflects the stereotypical images of woman, but gradually this solid four-cornered mirror turns out to be a lake—a semblance of her unconscious into which she takes a deep plunge and emerges out as a terrible fish (true woman artist) to threaten the traditional symbolic realm so that she may establish a new and innovative order of semiotic as an autonomous female self. The deep plunge is an interior journey, exploring her experiences by risking everyday sanity in search of healing truth that lies behind the accepted structure of belief. The interior journey includes three stages in the process of self-affirmation: the departure, the initiation, and the return. They involve struggle to free herself from the pressures exerted by patriarchy, the consequential alienation, and perhaps manic-depressive psychosis, insecurities, and tensions, culminating in a wholly credible and earned recognition akin to spiritual illumination. Now, she supersedes her earlier images as a passive and tortured victim as she kills the phantom of the angel—a self-linked taboo. This paper, thus, analyzes Plath's exploitation of reflective images that imply the process of arriving at a liberated and realistic definition of female self.

William Freedman (1993), in his article, "The Monster in Plath's `Mirror'," demonstrates that for Sylvia Plath, mirror holds great significance because "the search in the mirror is ultimately a search for the self, often for the self as artist," especially the female artist, who dissolves all self-linked taboos and given masks of regressive cocoon-shaped femininity in the cauldron of massive psychic energies emanating from her creativity, in the light of which she sees herself as an autonomous female self. The mirror imagery, thus, signifies the consciousness of woman speaker who verbalizes the creative process of woman artist when she enters the inner world in search of her true self.

Since her childhood, Sylvia Plath was greatly impressed with the character of Alice in Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass, whom she refers to (as quoted by Annas, 1988), "My muse Alice," who "climbed through the mirror into another world" (p. 3). Preoccupied with the curiosity to know what lies within the mirror, like Alice, Sylvia Plath believes that the mirror not only stands for the rational and logical view of this linear world to be registered through the senses, but also what lies beyond this tangible world. Annas remarks about Plath's attraction for the mirror:

American Literature Journal, Traditional Femininity, Psychic Energies, Stereotypical Images, Symbolic Annihilation, Semiotic Realm, Psychic Drama, Glamorous Mannequin, Mirror Imagery, Traditional Symbolic Realm, Spiritual Illumination, Rational View, Conventional Glories, Recuperative Powers.