Depression In Sylvia Plath's Daddy

Sylvia Plath reflects her pain and suffering from depression in her life in the novel The Bell Jar, and Plath reveals her depression in her two poems, “Mirror” and “Daddy.” Plath had a weakness that was easy to spot but hard to control, “If Plath is to be faulted, this quality is perhaps her greatest weakness: she was not able to project her personae a great distance from herself. Plath was aware of this limitation. She once wrote: ‘I shall perish if I can write about no one but myself’”(Giles). She knew all of her literature was about her personal experiences, most of her writing is very dark and shows the world from a different point of view that not many people have. Plath commonly wrote about death, corpses, the moon, fetuses, and the sea. In “Mirror,” she wrote about hiding her inner self from the rest of the world, while in “Daddy,” she wrote about her selfish father, dying and leaving her to be alone. While critics such as Jeannine Johnson call her only novel, The Bell Jar an obvious “autobiography.” Sylvia Plath started writing at a very

This mirror symbolizes the good and the bad image that Plath did not want to see of herself, yet the bad image was the only picture of herself she could see(Freedman “Monster” 124). In “Mirror” Plath is explaining poetically that there is no good or happiness left in her by saying, “ In me she has drown a young girl, and in me an/ old woman/ Rises toward her day after day, like a terrible fish”(Plath “Mirror” 122). Critics such as Freedman, believe the root of her depression was losing her father at such a young age, this maxum shows that her happiness from when she was younger is gone, and swallowed up by the older black and white version of her. In fact, one of the last lines of the poem is, “I am not cruel, only truthful-”(Plath, “Mirror” 122), seeming like she was just naive to how dark the real world actually