Mise en Abyme. Reflecting Helene Cixous’s “The Laugh of the Medusa” in Sylvia Plath’s “Mirror”
Mise en Abyme. Reflecting Helene Cixous’s “The Laugh of the Medusa” in Sylvia Plath’s “Mirror”

Summary/Abstract: Through a semiotic approach, this paper analyzes Sylvia Plath’s “Mirror” (1971), with a particular focus on the poem’s conceptual resonances with Hélène Cixous’s “The Laugh of the Medusa” (1975). Although the poem’s denotations may evoke images related to the speaker’s memory and appearance, on aconnotative level it seems to raise theoretical issues related to women’s writing, voice, and identity. The ekphrastic scenes in Plath’s work depict mythological images, which Cixous figuratively illustrates in relation to women’s writing. In this essay, our focus will be on the semiotics of the ‘mirror’ not only as a reflection of the female persona but also by taking into account the arbitrary relations among the feminist voice, text, gaze, and the echoes of social conventions. The analysis also shows the text’s fictiveness and its relation to philosophical issues that are constructed and deconstructed through the act of reading.

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