In the Looking Glass: Mirrors and Identity in Early America by Rebecca K. Shrum (review)

Rebecca Shrum's book In the Looking Glass: Mirrors and Identity in Early America considers the ways in which mirrors became an integral part of early American lives among the three main cultural groups whose use of mirrors can be historically attested: Europeans, Native Americans, and African Americans. The study covers the period from the late sixteenth century to the end of the nineteenth century. As Shrum argues at the beginning of the book, "In attempting to understand the ways in which early American men and women interacted with reflective technologies," the historian faces the problem of recovering "something evanescent from the historical record" (11). And from her analysis of trade records and archeological and documentary materials, Shrum reconstructs a fragmentary story. The amount of evidence European Americans have left of their use of mirrors, the book shows, is disproportionately larger than that left by members of the other two groups. And even some of the records that Shrum is able to retrieve and that attest to the use of mirrors among Native Americans and African Americans are often filtered through the lens of European observers. It is by means of examining this filter that Shrum illustrates how European Americans described the inferiority of native people and people of African descent as connected to their use of mirrors. The historical analysis in Shrum's book gives useful insights into the ways in which European Americans forcefully tried to deny access to these other groups of people to what Europeans saw as their own cultural uniqueness and superiority.

Shrum begins her study by tracing the development of glass mirror technology in Europe from its origins in the twelfth century to the time when glass mirrors began to appear in the North American colonies. By this later time, they had become objects of common household use and markers of wealth and social status. In the second chapter, the focus narrows on the evidence that archeological findings, records from early trade and encounters, and other written materials provide. Shrum follows the routes that mirrors took when introduced in colonial North America and how their presence in less wealthy households steadily increased throughout the two following centuries. During the seventeenth century glass mirrors also became among the most used objects of exchange with Native Americans and soon a distinctive element of native culture. Shrum interestingly points out how reflective devices had preexisting meaning for both cultures and were respectively translated in the cultural environments surrounding them. Shrum's analysis here begins to compare the ways each culture translated its use of mirrors. As she presents how this translation took place, Shrum also begins to show how, from the beginning, European accounts of Native Americans' appropriation and use of mirrors reveal such incorporations to be markers of cultural inferiority.

Shrum begins the following chapter by pointing to the difficulty of gathering concrete evidence about ownership and trade of mirrors for people of African descent in the colonial world outside of trade records and archeological findings. The number of accounts that begin in the seventeenth century and extend throughout the nineteenth make it clear that Native Americans adopted the mirror and adjusted it to their reliance on facial painting and other forms of decorations marking their ranks and roles in society. For African Americans the evidence is based on the presence of mirrors in the household to which they were attached as property. Archeological findings show that mirrors were quite common on plantations, but they give us no evidence, Shrum notes, of how the mirrors were acquired or accessed by the slaves (51).

The focus of the following two chapters is primarily on Americans of European descent. They closely examine the variety of ways in which mirrors contributed to establishing a clear sense of self for both men and women based on the belief that a mirror provided an accurate representation of the world and helped individuals produce an adequate...