Machine generated contents note: ch. 1 Mirroring in Mythology and Psychology -- "I am That!": Doubling in the Myth of Narcissus and Echo -- The Petrifying Look: The Myth of Medusa -- From Narcissus to Narcissism: Freud's Psychological Exegesis of the Myth -- The Subject as an Alienated Construct: Lacan's Theory of the Mirror Stage -- A Spatiotemporal Site of Psychological Interiority: Memory as a Mirror -- Mother-Daughter: The Mutual Mirroring -- Mirroring in Text -- ch. 2 Mirror Imagery in the Works of Forugh Farrokhzad -- A Herstory of a Subject-in-Process -- Captive to the Male Gaze -- The Mirror as an Eye -- The Mirror of the Heart -- The Otherness of the Self-image -- The Mirror of the Memory and of the Imagination -- The Grotesquery of the Mirror Image -- The Mirror and the Window -- Mother-Daughter Reciprocity in the Mirror -- The Emancipated and Emancipating Mirror -- Self-Mirroring in the Poetry of Forugh Farrokhzad -- ch. 3 Mirror Imagery in the Works of Sylvia Plath.

Note continued: The Mirror as the Intersection of Academic and Artistic Talent -- The Mirror as a Weapon of the Femme Fatale -- The Childless Woman: A Narcissist -- The Gigolo: Male Narcissism -- Woman as a Mirror of Male Ego -- Mother in the Mirror -- The Monstrous Degeneration Lurking in the Mirror -- The Promising Mirror -- Child as a Mirror -- The Mirror Image Being Identical with the Self -- The Appalling Otherness of the Specular Self.

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This study explores the rich diversity of the meanings associated with the mirror and reflection in literature by women. To illustrate some of these meanings, the author draws upon the mirror imagery and the psycho-emotional experience of specular reflection in the works of the Persian poet Forugh Farrokhzad (1935-1967) and the American poet Sylvia Plath (1932-1963). These two poets astutely employed mirror images for the realization as well as for communication of their turbulent psycho-emotional states to their readers, thereby capturing and conveying the essence of women desperately trapped among the antithetical images of the twentieth-century womanhood. The impossibility of reconciling these contradictory images is manifested at times in their failure to recognize their own mirror-images. For them, the mirror becomes a heterotopic site of entrapment or a utopian space of emancipation.

Includes parallel texts of poems in English and Persian.

Description based on print version record.