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Rereading the Mirror Image: Looking-Glasses, Gender, and Mimeticism in Virginia Woolf s Writing Hsiu-Chuang Deppman Looking-glasses are the most dangerous and intractable objects in Virginia Woolf 's stories about a room of one's own. They have remained a constant and integral part of the domestic landscape, and their very persistence reflects the deepest symbolic and technical crises in her writings. Symbolically , the looking-glass is the tool of a societal sexism reflecting, as we will see, what Woolf considers to be diminutive images of women. Technically , the image in the looking-glass represents an aesthetic rendering of realist reality, a brutal power which disrupts Woolf 's modernist and feminist perceptions of fertility, energy, and the imagination of "that extremely complex force of femininity" in domestic space (Room 91). In this paper I dispute two common analytical claims about Woolf's thematic and aesthetic treatment of the looking-glasses. 1) I call into question most critics' interpretations of how women have "amicable" and "truthful" relationships with their mirrors in Woolf's writing.1 Such interpretations ignore, I argue, the ways Woolf frames the looking-glasses as ambivalent and often hostile cultural devices which threaten a woman's psychological well-being. 2) I contest a common statement about Woolf's use of the mirror as a metaphor for art.2 Careful analysis of Woolf's theory JNT: Journal of Narrative Theory 31.1 (Winter 2001): 31-64. Copyright O 2001 by JNT: Journal of Narrative Theory. 32 JNT and fiction shows that her association of realism with the looking-glass conveys an important aesthetic critique of mimeticism. Who's Afraid of the Looking-Glass? Reading Woolf's work, one is often struck by how powerfully she writes about the horrors of a woman facing a mirror. In many memorable scenes her characters and autobiographical voice accuse the looking-glass of being a most dreadful device which induces a woman's infinite "reflections " of self-doubt, pain and humiliation. To understand the justification of this fear is to examine, first of all, the ways Woolf transforms her personal critique of the mirror's doubling oppressiveness into an exposition of a woman's confrontation with the tyranny of the patriarchy. In the collection of her autobiographical essays—The Moments of Being (1941)—she launches a famous attack on the unnamable threat of the looking-glass. I dreamt that I was looking in a glass when a horrible face—the face of an animal—suddenly showed over my shoulder. I cannot be sure if this was a dream, or if it happened . Was I looking in the glass one day when something in die background moved, and seemed to me alive? I cannot be sure. But I have always remembered the other face in the glass, whether it was a dream or a fact, and that it frightened me. (69) Is it a dream, a fiction, or an actual incident? Her narrative characteristically embraces many possibilities and registers a continuous tension between story and reality in her writing. This tension is intensified by the doubling power of the looking-glass, for it violently magnifies her dread of facing "the other." While the identity of the other face in the mirror remains uncertain, the root of this palpable fear is crucial to our understanding of Woolf 's critique of the mirror's symbolism and thus it merits further discussion. In the autobiographical context, the monster is a form of memory enlivened in the reflection of the looking-glass. This memory reveals a frightful uncontrollability of imaginative space. Two meanings of "reflection " apply: 1) the scene stages a reflection of the past as an inescapable Rereading the Mirror \mage 33 reality captured in the looking-glass, a reality which, as we will see, is full of guilt and humiliation; 2) the encounter is also a reflection of the historical menace of the mirror which fills a woman's mind with the horror of her body. Both forms of reflection make the memory of the looking-glass a complex space in which a woman's intimate interaction with her mirror is staged as a collective feminine experience confronting a historical past. In the vein...

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