Book Review : Reflections on the Looking Glass

Herself Beheld. The Literature of the Looking Glass by Jenijoy LaBelle (Cornell University Press: $24.95; 202 pages.)

Women look into mirrors a great deal, both in life and in literature. That is a stereotype, of course, but it is also true.

As stated, though, there is something unsatisfactory about the truth. It comes from what is missing. What about men? Don’t they look in mirrors a lot too? Less perhaps than women? Differently? Quite a lot in life but conspicuously less in literature?

Addressing Questions

We do not necessarily require answers to these questions in order to accept the statement about feminine glass-gazing, nor to profit from Jenijoy LaBelle’s exploration of its significance. But we do need the questions to be addressed as seriously if not as conclusively.

You can, in other words, write a book about dogs without taking up cats. But you cannot write a book about the properties of even numbers, say, without placing them in a reasonably convincing relationship to those of odd numbers.

It is a pity to start out with a caveat, because LaBelle, a literature professor at Caltech, raises some very interesting questions in her thorough study of women and mirrors in fiction and life. But protesting buts keep rising to the surface, small bubbles of malaise, as she dismisses the male use of mirrors as something entirely different and unrelated.

LaBelle weaves a suggestive tapestry around the feigns of female identity, metaphysics, and roles in society, by citing the way that women have used and thought of mirrors. Her commentary works off a rich selection of quotes ranging from Plotinus to Ozma of Oz, and including George Eliot, D. H. Lawrence, Thomas Hardy, Gail Godwin, Doris Lessing, Sylvia Plath, Hilma Wolitzer and many others.

Women’s place in society has depended, for most of Western history, upon what men thought of them. Largely, this has meant what men thought of them as candidates for love and marriage. LaBelle cites Swift’s Couplet: “While he goes out to cheapen books / She at the glass consults her looks.” The man would improve his position by study; the woman, by looking good.

A Weapons-Check

So, at its crudest level, the mirror is a kind of weapons-check. This is not particularly interesting, and LaBelle barely touches on it. Far more provocative is her evocation, splendidly backed by quotes, of the mirror as identity.

Women go to mirrors, she writes, “seeking for what they really are.” And they do it most urgently at times of change or crisis: An adolescent trying to discover the woman she will be, a woman beginning to age, a woman facing death or separation from a loved one or some other upheaval.

In her discussion, LaBelle goes to Coleridge’s definition of self-awareness: “A subject becomes a subject by the act of constructing itself objectively to itself.” Coleridge was referring to a process of thought and conceptualization; LaBelle argues that he was thinking, as a man, of men.

As for women, she writes: “Historically, the mirror has been one of the few means always available to women where such objectivation which, as Coleridge points out, is necessary for developing a concept of ego.”

In chapter after chapter, and with some repetitiousness, LaBelle illustrates and discusses the various ways in which identity is sought, lost--in cases of breakdown or extreme trauma--and sometimes re-forged. She gives us examples of women looking at their mirror images as if a man were doing the looking; and trying to imagine how they will appear to him.

In a brilliant last chapter, the author triumphantly reverses the dependency stigma that the notion of the mirror has suggested up to this point. She makes an argument from newer currents of feminist thought that women are right to regard their bodies and instincts as a means to know and define the world in a way totally different than men do. And the mirror can be reclaimed, she writes--and some feminists have done it--if women use it as a means to know and accept their bodies.

A Long Tradition

LaBelle’s examples are virtually all from literature. The reader need not quarrel with this; a long tradition of social and psychological realism allows fiction to stand for life. But the author hardens the linkage through her use of semiological principles: Anything written about fiction, and anything written about life, is equally, and no more than, a text.

This gets her into trouble when she brings in men. Indeed, men have not generally been written about as looking into mirrors in times of crisis, or in order to establish their identity. Why this is so, I am not sure, I am sure that they do it, though.

It is one thing to suggest that men tend to be more abstract, and to rely for their identity very much upon words, ideas, success, power, money or transcendental philosophic categories more than women do. It is another to say that this is all.

Men who shave look in the mirror every morning and many of them renew their energies or deplete them by doing so. A man going through a crisis may well grow--or shave--a beard. I know a man who grew a beard just so that he wouldn’t have to confront a mirror each day; he knew it would tell him that he was growing old.

And I recall--speaking of appearance as identity--sharing a hospital room with an 80-year-old Italian who had just had his first operation. He was weeping and I asked him if he was in pain. “No,” he said, “it’s the scar. My stomach was as white and smooth as a baby’s all my life. Not a mark on it.”