The lady in the looking glass: a reflection

English

Looking Critically at "The Lady in the Looking-Glass"

Virginia Woolf is a prominent figure in feminist literature. She wrote many pieces, including poems, and short stories. One of her short stories, "The Lady in the Looking-Glass" is the subject of the paper. The story paints a vivid, conflicted, and alienated picture of the main character of the story, Isabella Tyson. Tyson is a single, wealthy woman, in her middle aged years, living alone in her own home. The looking-glass is a phrase that means mirror, so this is a story about reflections and about the self. Tyson, to the outside observer, has a life that is full of excitement, travel, and independence. She travels the world, risking her health in some cases, in order to bring home beautiful and wondrous cultural artifacts from the far reaches of the world that decorate her home. She is able to finance her trips and her purchases with no outside assistance. Her home is some kind of beautiful tomb, full of objects from around the world, yet there is no life to her house. Tyson has no friends. She has no human connections, no social networks. Tyson is truly alone. The narration alternates between third person and first person. Sometimes this technique makes the reader feel like the narrator is the lead character and is trying to talk about herself from an outside or detached perspective, which would be a reflection of the modernist theme of many of Woolf's works. The looking-glass is the mirror and is the stark reflection of Tyson's superficially fully, but truly empty existence, which is traumatic and tragic to realize. This trauma, tragedy, and emptiness is likely why the opening and closing lines of the story "The Lady in the Looking-Glass" are the same: "People should not leave looking-glasses hanging in their rooms," for if they do, their plain truth of their lives will be revealed to them and any other person(s) who look at the reflection, too.

This story and the author are very much concerned with constructions and layers of the self. This is a theme in the story, a recurring theme in Woolf's overall body of work, and a theme of the modernist period in literature. The mirror and the reflections in the mirror are supposed to symbolize different parts of Tyson's self and her world. There is the public self and there is the private self. There is the self that the rest of the world knows and there is the self that only the self knows. Furthermore, the story considers the parts of the self that remain the same and the parts of the self that are in flux. These ideas are contemplated and explored in the nature of the reflections seen in the looking-glass. Howard contends

The looking-glass motif is a recurrent feature of Woolf's writing, and functions variously as a surface upon which the self -- or alternate selves -- might be reflected or envisioned, and as a metaphor for the processes of autobiographical writing. Similarly central to Woolf's aesthetic is the tension between the individual's public personae and his or her 'private' self. Through a range of biographical, autobiographical, and fictional strategies, Woolf explore the extent to which the private self can be conceptualised as a fixed, unitary, and bounded identity. ("Reflections on the Self," Page 44)

The looking-glass or mirror represents, in a way, the self, and it also is a device by which the self can be explored and articulated. The voice of the narrator is one that is blended. The narrator is both the narrator and the character that is being described. The narrator is also the voice of the author. The blending of these voices into one voice, not always necessarily coherent and smooth, is a technique that underscores the content and the themes of "The Lady in the Looking-Glass: A Reflection." Reflection upon one's life is not always positive, which might be the overall point of the story. Once the character/narrator/author reflects upon Tyson's life because of the looking-glass, the truth of her life is plain and inescapable. She is a lonely person with little or no meaningful human contact. The opening and closing line of the story is funny, but in a dark humor sort of way. People should not leave mirrors up in their rooms because they might see how empty and lonely their lives truly are, or how unstable and fluid their identities are, which can be a very unsettling moment for some people.