Woman in the Mirror: Reflections

Laura Fish

doi:10.12681/syn.16199

Abstract

In A Room of One’s Own (1929) Virginia Woolf asserts: “Women have served all these centuries as looking-glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size”. (34) The use of the mirror is key to Woolf’s arguments about the position of women in general and in particular that of women writers. Complicating Woolf’s view less than a century later, I examine how black women function as looking-glasses in a dual way: as blacks, we shared the past (and now share the current) fate of black people reflecting the “darker” side of white people, as many whites projected onto blacks the unacknowledgeable traits of their own nature. The mirror is also key then to the way in which racial oppression has been analysed in literature. My paper offers an account, by way of selected examples from the history of our literature, of indicating how the mirror has been essential to how black British women are viewed and reflected back. I suggest that the misshapen image in the looking glass created by white people and also black men, allows them to see an inflated reflection of themselves, to assume false feelings of superiority, and to perpetuate oppression against us. I focus on Mary Prince, Mary Seacole, Una Marson, Joan Riley and Helen Oeyemi–authors whose work either anticipates or relates to Woolf’s notion of mirroring, by seeking ways to addressor overcome the situation in which we are placed. The texts explored not only trace the development of the tradition of our writing - the shift from being represented to representing ourselves– but also present a range of cultural and political views and identify three recurring themes: firstly, the denigration in our portrayal; secondly, the assumed superiority white people and black men adopt over us; and thirdly our resistance in remonstrating against such treatment and exposure.

Highlights

I can look into the mirror and learn to love the stormy Black girl who once longed to be white or anything other than who she was, since all she was ever allowed to be was the sum of the color of her skin, and the textures of her hair, the shade of her knees and elbows, and those things were clearly not acceptable as human. (174)
Using the metaphor of the mirror, in A Room of One’s Own (1929) Virginia Woolf outlines the importance to men and to the act of literary creation, of feeling superior and making others feel inferior, and she demonstrates how men have employed mirrors to downplay women’s ability and to make themselves feel powerful: “Whatever may be their use in civilized societies, mirrors are essential to all violent and heroic action.”Woolf presents the mirror as a device to reflect back distorted realities, to prove that women’s writing is as good as or equal to men’s, to demonstrate aping or mimicking and as a tool to try to prove male superiority
There is a coming together of ideas about the mirror implying an experience of translation – someone looking at you, you looking at yourself, and the effect on both sides - in Woolf’s perceptions of literature and mirroring, Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalytical theory of the “mirror stage” in relation to human development and the concepts explored in relation to the formative function of the ‘I’ to Synthesis 7 (Spring 2015)