Plath’s preoccupation with the mirror as a metaphor in the struggle between the true and false self emerges also in her academic work. In her thesis, The Magic Mirror, which incorporates the image in its title, Plath also discusses the conflict between the true and false self, but she uses the terms “real” and “counterfeit”. She describes the conflict between the selves as an “inner duality [which] becomes a duel to the death”. This conflict is, in Plath’s critical evaluation, a fundamental search for identity in which the two selves must necessarily coexist in a balanced form in order for their host to survive; it is a “reconciliation of [man’s] various mirror images [which] involves a constant courageous acceptance of the eternal paradoxes within the universe and within ourselves”
—Mind Over Myth? The Divid Self In The Poetry of Sylvia Plath