not only the madness that lies behind the walls of asylums, but also the madness that deafens the world with its sound and fury” (Écrits 7). The function of the mirror, for Lacan, thus was like a language structure or a representational system, which
exteriorized not just the subject’s misrecognized ego, but also the unconscious structure which constituted the méconnaissance.
For the modernist writer Virginia Woolf, who had had profound “encounters”
with mirrors in her own life, the psychological function, in both its unconscious and its linguistic structure, of the mirror was exactly the “truth of being” she was
attempting to capture in her fiction. From Woolf’s recollections of her early mirror encounters in her own memoirs, we know that she had been interested in exploring herself through the mediation of the mirror since she was a little girl.33 But in the course of her specular self-explorations, it seemed that she never gazed at her own mirror reflections without judging them from the perspective of the patriarchal or puritanical value system she had received during her upbringing. Hence what I shall call her “looking-glass phobia” is the result of the anxieties induced by this (limited) perspective, as well as of the above-mentioned anxieties of “subjective-objective perspective” that Lacan speaks of.
In fact, knowing that the fluid consciousness of the mirror encounter might
33 Virginia Woolf, “A Sketch of the Past,” Moments of Being. Woolf said, “There was a small
looking-glass in the hall at Talland House. It had I remember, a ledge with a brush on it. By standing on tiptoe I could see my face in the glass. When I was six or seven perhaps, I got into the habit of looking at my face in the glass” (67-68).
actually constitute one’s “truth of being,” Woolf had been knowingly pursuing such a consciousness or awareness in her own fictional writing, and even urged the writers of the future to do so. In “The Mark on the Wall,” she wrote:
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 the 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—.34
As she believed that one could never stare at an object without reflecting upon him or herself, Woolf held that our recurring acts of facing each other triggered the chain of infinite inter-reflections of one’s own consciousness with the consciousnesses of (all) the others, the consciousnesses “on all sides.” And since, for Woolf, “life is a
luminous halo, a semitransparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end,”35 the complex interchanges of/between/among the infinite reflections of consciousness constituted in some very precise way the truth of one’s own life. To convey “this varying, this unknown and uncircumscribed spirit,”36 Woolf thus took it as the novelists’ main concern to capture in novels the phantom-like reflections of one’s mind while leaving the description of the external reality more and more out of a writer’s concern. And mirrors for Woolf, accordingly, were something like the projection screen onto which the complete map of one’s life was
34 From The Complete Shorter Fiction of Virginia Woolf 82-83.
35 Virginia Woolf, “Modern Fiction,” The Essays of Virginia Woolf, vol. IV 1925-1928, ed. Andrew McNeillie (London: The Hogarth Press, 1944) 160.
36 Ibid.
displayed together with the traces of the mapping process.
Woolf’s Looking-glass Complex
On the other hand, however, Virginia Woolf suffered from looking-glass phobia or complex throughout her life. In “A Sketch of the Past” (1939),37 she recollected this lifelong fear and attributed it to three possible causes. Firstly, she was afraid that her excessive concern with her own corporeal image in the glass might violate the tomboy code she had shared with her sister Vanessa—which in itself suggested the possibility that she was, at least in part, assuming a male gender identity. Secondly, she felt guilty as her natural love of sensual beauty—when seeing her own reflection in the glass—seemed to clash, not only with (arguably) her male gender identity but also with the strict puritanical upbringing she had received, especially at the hands of her patriarchal, puritanical father who believed that women should serve men and have their babies, but not lure men by arousing their sexual desire. Thirdly, Woolf had been ashamed of, and thus afraid of confronting, her own body and face in the glass due to her early seduction by her half brother Gerald Duckworth (Moments 68-69), an event which—even if she might only imagine it—clearly had a powerful influence on her.
The neurotic symptoms of this looking-glass phobia can in any case be ascribed to the writer’s fear of confronting her self, a self that has in some way been debased by the male order or tarnished by male violence.38 One of my main assumptions here,
37 Composed between 1939 and 1940, when Virginia Woolf was in the last years of her life, “A Sketch of the Past” appeared to be the last memoir of her life (Moments of Being 61-159).
38 Woolf’s compliance with the tomboy code and her suppression of her excessive concern with her corporeal image reflected in the glass betrayed her privilege of the male order over femininity. The streak of the puritan she admitted she had inherited from her paternal ancestry also reflected her reception (or at least partial reception) of the patriarchal order. As to her shame or fear of her impure body she had associated with her early seduction, it paradoxically originated from her conforming to
then, is that while gazing at herself in the mirror, Woolf must have measured her image in the light of the male-centered value system. To escape being checked by this supervisory system, Woolf thus avoided looking at her own corporeal, fleshly image in the glass. Her looking-glass phobia, in short, is to a certain degree indicative of her anxiety about the male power and order.
The Other Face in the Glass
Paradoxically as it may seem, however, for all her anxiety about the
looking-glass, Woolf has created copious mirror images in her works ranging from short stories to long novels. In The Voyage Out (1915), for example, the looking-glass was a realistic mirror which chillingly reflected a loving couple’s images as “small and separate” rather than “vast and indivisible” as they had imagined (353). In “The New Dress” (1925), it became a psychological mirror which reflected a timid woman’s image in “the size of a three penny bit” (174).39 In “The Lady in the Looking-Glass: A Reflection” (1929), again, the glass ruthlessly displayed a demure lady’s naked body “in that pitiless light” (225). In Orlando (1929), however, the enchanting mirror became a fantastic lake of green water in which Orlando, the incarnation of beauty, was singing like a seductive siren (178). In The Waves (1931), the nursery looking-glass stretched Rhoda’s imaginary journey back to her childhood through the dark corridors of time (27-28). And finally, in Between the Acts (1941), the various mirrors presented on the stage were employed by a pageant director to convey the idea that what the audience saw in the play was nothing but
the Victorian value of purity and her accusation of the same system’s acquiescence to the male violence in family.
39 In this dissertation, all Virginia Woolf’s short stories are from The Complete Shorter Fiction of Virginia Woolf.
“themselves.”40 Indeed, judging from the abundant mirror images pervading her works, we find that Woolf was not so mirror-phobic as she herself had thought she was.
Moreover, while restraining herself from looking at herself in the glass in real life, Woolf had a mysterious “mirror encounter” in a dream. Recollecting the dream in her memoir, she said:
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 the 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. (Moments 69) But, whose face is “the other face in the glass”? And, what does this horrible vision mean to Woolf? In spite of her looking-glass phobia, Woolf’s obsession with the mirrors both in literature and in dreams apparently betrays her ambivalence toward the reflective mechanism. Since Woolf did not continue to explore the dream in her memoir, many critics have devoted themselves to decoding the mysterious face in the glass and discussing its significance in various ways on their own terms.
For Louise DeSalvo, for example, Woolf’s looking-glass complex is
“undoubtedly related to her feelings of shame about her early incest.”41 Based on Woolf’s memoirs and biographical materials on her early seduction, DeSalvo decidedly argued that the ghastly animal face looming in Woolf’s looking-glass was exactly the sexual seducer’s horrible reincarnation. For Virginia R. Hyman, however, Woolf’s uncanny encounter with the animal face in the glass should be interpreted
40 The name of the play created by the director Miss La Trobe in Between the Acts was “Ourselves.”
41 Louise DeSalvo, Virginia Woolf: The Impact of Childhood Sexual Abuse and Her Life and Work (New York: Ballantine Books, 1989) 13.
from the perspective of her Oedipus complex. In “Reflections in the Looking-Glass:
Leslie Stephen and Virginia Woolf” (1983), she argued that Woolf had expressed her ambivalence toward her father on many occasions. Drawing evidence of Woolf’s memory of her father’s “sinister, blind, animal savage” from her memoir (Hyman,
“Reflections” 213; Woolf, Moments 146), Hyman thus concluded that “the other face in the glass” was Leslie Stephen’s. On the other hand, for Susan Squier in “Mirroring and Mothering: Reflections on the Mirror Encounter Metaphor in Virginia Woolf’s Works” (1981), the horrid image showing over Woolf’s shoulder symbolized man’s insatiable demand for nourishment from woman. Unable to endure her subordinate status and her unlimited exploitation by men, in Squier’s words, the “young girl” (that is, Woolf) thus turned “transfixed, cornered by the horrid mirror image of a beast”
when she looked at herself in the glass (274).
Finally, for Stephen Howard, “the other face in the glass” represented the
multiple voices co-existing in Woolf’s inner world. Tracing the writer’s diverse mirror images from many of her works, Howard argued that Woolf had taken the subject’s identity to be fluid and changeable. To explore the various facets of her self, Howard further suggested, Woolf thus had been eager to capture her own multiplicity through her mirror literature:
[F]or Woolf, writing served as a mirror through which she could contemplate the subtlety and variability of identity; in accordance with her sense of the plural, fragmentary nature of the private self, Woolf refused to restrict her interpretation of selfhood to one, singular metanarrative. (53)
My reading of this perplexing riddle is closer to Howard’s. That is, based on her writings on the issue of mirror reflection in her works, I believed that “the other face in the glass” she encountered either in life or in dream reflected exactly the grotesque
amalgamation of the writer’s multiple selves. In fact, if we take this from the perspective of a subject’s mental process—and assume that all objects must have already been internalized into a subject’s inner world, becoming parts or fragments of its/her inner self—then Howard’s view of the writer’s multiple self/selves may seem to include the other critics’ interpretations. That is, Woolf’s early incestual seducers (her father in the spiritual sense and perhaps also her half brother either in imagination or in the physical sense) and “man’s insatiable demand for nourishment from
woman”—now condensed, as in a dream, into a single “figure”—can clearly be included among these multiple voices or multiple selves.
Yet Howard does not try to analyze how this mixture of alien identities could be interwoven into Woolf’s “self,” and/or how her multiple selves might (or might not) have been unified in(to) a single self. Also, Howard’s analysis fails to explain how Woolf’s fear of her own self-reflection in the mirror paradoxically incited her to pursue her real self in the glass in her “mirror literature.” More specifically, such an analysis does not attempt to explain why or how, while Woolf appeared to adopt the male-centered value system and to look down upon her reflected self on the one hand, she seems not to have “abandoned” her debased or tarnished self on the other. Finally, Howard like the other critics above is mainly concerned with Woolf’s employment of mirror images in her life-writing, and yet any more complete analysis of these issues obviously also has to take account of Woolf’s numerous mirror images in her fiction, and to discuss the similarities and differences between the functions of mirror
(self-)reflections in the life writing and the functions of such reflections in the fiction.
In my approach to this issue, I shall assume from the outset that the tension between the opposite “sides” of her self or mind, as dramatically manifested by the confrontation of the two faces (one inside and one outside the mirror) in Woolf’s dream, is the central pattern or form of her inner conflicts (or internal split) and of her
(perceived) multiplicity of her self, and that unable to achieve a sense of a unified self-identity in her daily life, she thus could only resort to both life-writing and fiction-writing to (attempt to) achieve this. To argue this point, I am taking Woolf’s desire to unify her multiple self as being an essential driving force in her literary (life and fictional) writing, and taking her recurring images of (her variations on) “the other face in the glass” as being her primary mode of expression of this desire or this force in the following discussion. Moreover, since Woolf’s looking-glass complex derives mainly from her ambivalence toward male power and order, I shall attempt to investigate her encounter with the mysterious face in the glass in terms of her
ambiguous relationship with the male-centered value system which dominated her Victorian upbringing.
As many biographers and critics have pointed out, Woolf’s intellectual
propensity for reading and writing was mainly inherited from her father.42 Early in her apprenticeship as a writer, the young girl thus had esteemed her father and mentor as if he were the only distributor of treasure and fame.43 Moreover, given the
patriarchal society in which she grew up, her father had a godlike standing in her family. Fascinated with his privileged position, the daughter thus had even attempted to emulate her father in every way. By twisting her hair in imitation of him, for example, the daughter seemed to acquire the privilege of transgressing the ordinary boundaries set for a child, especially a daughter (Woolf, Moments 111). In “The
42 For example, Katherine C. Hill in “Virginia Woolf and Leslie Stephen: History and Literary Revolution” (1981), Virginia R. Hyman in “Reflections in the Looking-Glass: Leslie Stephen and Virginia Woolf” (1983), Jane Elizabeth Fisher in “The Seduction of the Father: Virginia Woolf and Leslie Stephen” (1990), and Nigel Nicolson’s Virginia Woolf (2000).
43 Leslie Stephen had hoped Virginia would become his literary successor and intellectual heir since she could read and write and thus granted her uncensored access to his extensive library. If the bulk of books stored in the father’s study were the keys to the treasure and fame that the daughter had longed for, the father would be the only distributor of the treasure and fame. See Mitchell Alexander Leaska’s
“Introduction” to A Passionate Apprentice: The Early Journals 1897-1909 (San Diego, New York, London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1990), xvii, and Katherine C. Hill’s “Virginia Woolf and Leslie Stephen: History and Literary Revolution,” PMLA, 96.3 (1981) 351.
Seduction of the Father: Virginia Woolf and Leslie Stephen” (1990), Jane Elizabeth Fisher thus commented that “Woolf’s fascination with paternal power began with her own father, the eminent Victorian essayist Leslie Stephen” (32).
Yet, as Fisher also pointed out, for all the daughter’s admiration for the father, the homage and love was not without reservation or intermingled with contradictory enmity. In fact, as Fisher analyzed, the dual relationship between the father and the daughter was not only caused by the father’s occasional tyrannies44 and his