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

Abstract

Reviewed by: In the Looking Glass: Mirrors and Identity in Early America by Rebecca K. Shrum Christopher Allison In the Looking Glass: Mirrors and Identity in Early America. By Rebecca K. Shrum. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017. Pp. [x], 221. $54.95, ISBN 978-1-4214-2312-8.) How do material objects intervene in our identity? This (good) question animates Rebecca K. Shrum's thorough study of mirrors in early America, or, as they were better known in the period, looking glasses. The story is remarkable, a moment in the history of the world in which many people, across boundaries and geographies, were suddenly able to see themselves with increasing clarity. But, as Shrum argues, people also began—in their individual acts of seeing with mirrors—to imagine how others saw them as well. In other words, they had the privilege of seeing themselves and also the burden of living more consciously within the gaze of others, as they imagined it. In concert with a growing trend in early American scholarship, Shrum approaches early America in a "vast" way, in recognition that the time and place were deeply interconnected with other parts of the world. This approach is evident in her use of sources: she considers the encounters of missionaries in the American West in the nineteenth century, BaKongo culture in West Africa, Venetian workshops of the sixteenth century, and the North American fur trade. In this respect, she demonstrates the promise of crossing borders to help us understand how mirrors and culture were formed in tandem in this period. Her source base is materially diverse, including museum objects, personal diaries, probate records, ethnographic writing, visual culture (especially photography), newspapers, and the Works Progress Administration ex-slave narratives, to name a few. The six chapters follow a roughly chronological trajectory from North American contact to the nineteenth century. The first chapter concerns the technology of the looking glass and its place in the trade of the Atlantic world. The second focuses on New England in the seventeenth century, and chapter 3 focuses specifically on ownership patterns among European, Indian, and African populations in North America. A standout of this section is Shrum's attention to the mirror in the dress of Indian peoples and how it functioned alongside the acquisition of other goods in trade networks (this theme is taken up again in the final chapter). The fifth chapter focuses on the constructions of whiteness that the mirror prompted, differentiated between men and women. Shrum makes clear that the construction of whiteness, with the aid of the mirror, had a role in the hardening racial divisions of American society. The argument of the book is that the looking glass was a means through which white men built a racial and gendered hierarchy across the vast Atlantic world, by demonstrating a certain mastery over the vision that inhered in the mirror and that marked the visions of others as inferior. But white men were unable to completely control the mirror, of course. So the meanings and uses of mirrors, while structured by this hierarchy, were never confined by it. In fact, Shrum demonstrates the remarkable creativity and abundant transcendent meaning that pooled around the uses of the mirror among women and men, of all races and positions. [End Page 959] There were a few divisions that I thought were a tad too rigid—white, black, red. This structure is an advantage in Shrum's analysis, in that it allows for a focused look at populations and sources—so I do not doubt her arguments. Yet I often wondered if the next step for upcoming scholars is to consider how objects like looking glasses had uses and meanings that bled from one people to another. New research on wampum, early photography, souvenir objects, and more has proved to offer fruitful directions going forward. Shrum's work is required reading for upcoming scholars who are attempting to trace the social life of things in the formation of American identities. Christopher Allison University of Chicago Copyright © 2018 The Southern Historical Association