‘The Lady in the Looking-glass: some Reflections’

Abstract

The lady in the looking-glass and the web she weaves in a room of her own are recurring images of creativity in the essays, stories and novels of Virginia Woolf. In ‘A Sketch of the Past’ she locates her preoccupation with mirror-gazing in childhood guilt about her own body and her developing potentialities. In adolescence, the guilt is vivified by the dream of a fearful ‘other face’ appearing in the glass behind her own reflection. For the adult writer, this dream signifies the artist’s creative shock of recognition:

a token of some real thing behind appearances; and I make it real by putting it into words. It is only by putting it into words that I make it whole; this wholeness means that it has lost its power to hurt me; it gives me, perhaps because by doing so I take away the pain, a great delight to put the severed parts together.

Supposing the looking-glass smashes, the image disappears, and the romantic figure with the green of forest depths all about it is seen by other people—what an airless, shallow, bold, prominent world it becomes! A world not to be lived in. As we face each other in omnibuses and underground railways we are looking into the mirror; that accounts for the vagueness, the gleam of glassiness, in our eyes. And the novelists in future will realize more and more the importance of these reflections, for of course there is not one reflection but an almost infinite number; those are the depths they will explore, those the phantoms they will pursue, leaving the description of reality more and more out of their stories, taking a knowledge of it for granted, as the Greeks did and Shakespeare perhaps.

(Virginia Woolf, ‘A Mark on the Wall’, in A Haunted House and Other Stories, p. 43)