The Mirror of Criticism

In the first chapter of Through the Looking Glass, Alice expresses concern that "if I don't make haste, I shall have to go back through the Looking-glass before I've seen what the rest of the house is like!" Her concern may well mirror the concern of many literary critics; critics often fear that if we do not look closely enough, we will not know what the rest of the literary house looks like. Indeed, the mirror functions as an interesting literary metaphor that ties together several of the essays that appear in this issue of the Quarterly.

In "Rebellious Voices: The Unofficial Discourse of Cross-dressing in d'Aulnoy, de Murat, and Perrault," Lisa Brocklebank argues that authors who rely on literary trans-vestism in seventeenth-century fairy tales hold up a mirror of cultural critique that allows us to better understand political issues of the day. Brocklebank explores how instances of transgendering in several French fairy tales serve as a form of both social and political criticism. Fairy tales provided authors with a mask to wear while criticizing their king, but the fairy tales, nonetheless, mirror a level of social unrest in the culture from which they arose. Contextualizing these fairy tales as the products of the intellectual salonières that arose in protest of Louis XIV's political excesses, Brocklebank takes specific note of the importance of cross-dressing as a venue for criticizing the Sun King's impotence.

While Brocklebank explores fairy tales as mirroring their culture, Fiona McCulloch defines a literary instance of narrative authority refusing to act as a straightforward mirror of cultural attitudes. She writes of R.M. Ballantyne's The Coral Island: the "text is not a mirror image of absolute authority, but is a shattered textual lens that self-consciously probes the verisimilitude of narrative within the realms of an escapist fiction layered with sailors' yarns." The narrative of The Coral Island, she writes, distorts contemporary ideologies rather than functioning mimetically.

Mike Cadden also investigates the relationship between mirrors and narrative authority. Cadden asks us to interrogate the responsibility of the narrator (and the author) in revealing the use of irony within a text. Since irony can mask an author's intention, Cadden makes a case for authors to help their readers learn how to read the irony they create: "This help, I believe, would remove the need for the author to make evident the larger narrative irony of stepping out from behind the mirror." Cadden's use of narrative theory problematizes how first-person narrators function in young adult novels.

Writing with an international focus, Louise Salstad explores the ideological implications of the Spanish Comisión Católica Española de la Infancia Prize for children's literature, which is an approximate parallel of the American Library Association's Newbery and Caldecott awards. The C.C.E.I. judges proclaim that "All that involves a worthy content in a rich literary form has its place" in their considerations. Salstad's article will serve as an introductory exploration into a part of the literary house—Spanish children's literature—that may be unfamiliar to many readers of the Quarterly.

Mirrors have a rich tradition in children's literature. Not only Alice's looking glass, but also magical mirrors from the one that Snow White's mother consults to those at Harry Potter's school serve important functions in children's and adolescent literature. Mirrors reflect children's images back to themselves, both reinforcing notions of self and confirming for the child that s/he is separate from the mother, as Lacan would have it. But for literary critics, mirrors provide a metaphor for our need to recognize more—more about other cultures, more about when texts distort reality, and more about reading honestly.