The Mirrored Room : gender identity and the postmodern body in Jennifer Egan

GENDER IDENTITY AND THE POSTMODERN BODY IN JENNIFER EGAN Sergio López Sande | Supervised by Dr Laura Mª Lojo Rodríguez | Grao en lingua e literatura inglesas Liña temática: Literatura en lingua inglesa 2016/2017 FACULTADE DE FILOLOXÍA DEPARTAMENTO DE FILOLOXÍA INGLESA E ALEMÁ CONTENTS 1. INTRODUCTION • i 2. CANONICAL UNCERTAINTY & THE DEATH OF POSTMODERNISM • 1 3. SELF MEETS REFLECTION: JUSTIFYING A NEED FOR THE TRANSDISCIPLINARY STUDY OF MIRRORS • 1 0 4. BUILDING LITERARY CHARACTERS THROUGH MIRRORS: THE CASES OF NARCISSUS, ALICE & ISABELLA TYSON • 1 6 4.1. ECHO & NARCISSUS • 1 7 4.2. THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS, & WHAT ALICE FOUND THERE • 2 1 4.3. THE LADY IN THE LOOKING-GLASS: A REFLECTION • 2 4 5. CHIMERAS IN THE MIRRORED ROOM: A CHARACTER-ORIENTED READING OF JENNIFER EGAN’S LOOK AT ME • 2 9 6. LOOK AT ME: GENDER THEORY & CONTEMPORARY READINGS OF THE BODY • 3 9 7. CONCLUSIONS • 5 0 8. WORKS CITED • 5 3 i INTRODUCTION In 2001, 9 years before the publication of the Pulitzer-winning novel A Visit from the Goon Squad, Jennifer Egan released the moderately acclaimed Look at Me, an unequivocally ambitious examination of several critical elements of the American society of the turn of the twenty-first century. As the author herself would later state, Look at Me aspired to convey the novelist’s attempt “to examine the impact of human culture on human identity” (Egan, “Imagining the Unimaginable”), a claim so onerous that neither Egan nor the academia appear to have achieved a definite answer to the debate regarding the relationship between the two. Nonetheless, I believe Egan’s novelistic examination of American society to be of remarkable interest to both my reading of “human culture” and approximation to “human identity,” particularly so in that it offers a harsh depiction of all the construction, representation, and destruction of selves, whilst evincing how these three processes are —to the postmodern era and the often problematised post-postmodern one more than to any prior period, as I will argue— fundamentally visual. In the first section of my paper I set out to analyse postmodernism as a cultural construction, as proposed and reassessed over the last decades. I also aim to evaluate more recent approaches to postmodernism, which aim to replace the label “postmodernism” with “post-postmodernism” in their approach to contemporary society and its cultural manifestations. Similarly, I introduce in this section some considerations on the literary canon —or, rather, challenges to the very concept of canonisation— which I believe to be particularly appropriate with regards to postmodernism. This section closes by offering my approach to Look at Me as a postmodernist novel, which is justified by the themes of the narrative, and draws on the mechanisms of fragmentation and reappropriation that I find to be present in it. ii In the second section, I move on to discussing the concept of the mirror as has been defined by several academics throughout the twentieth-century. Revisiting the literary mirror as a critical source for fictional identities is very much at the core of my reading of Egan, and, as such, its functioning as an element of transartistic usage will prove of vital importance to my analysis. By re-reading the mirror as a “validator of identities” in modern and postmodern times, it becomes apparent that the looking-glass is not just used in the arts as a way to give shape to the self, but exerts that very power in contemporary society. It has often been stated that the work of art is but a mirror, reflecting society in its attempt to help the human being learn something about its condition as “human.” This section’s main objective is to question that statement. If society truly takes after its artistic reflection, I regard it as essential that the initial claim is reformulated in order to acknowledge the ways in which society learns from —and thus mirrors— the artistic. Further, the literary mirror is often employed with the goal of introducing either a greatly reliable depiction of the self, or a representation of an eerie other —rather often one either toxic or direly alienating to the subject. The opposition between the self and the other seems to be problematised by the very existence of mirrors, and hence my interest in how processes such as these come into being, an idea which I develop in the case studies that follow. In order to frame my reading of the mirrored room in Egan’s novel, I resorted to some outstanding uses of the mirror in literary history. First, I proposed a reassessment of psychoanalytic readings of the tale of Echo and Narcissus, which is widely regarded as one of the most famous instances of the use of the mirror in literature. The story offers a very particular depiction of selflove, as it presents Narcissus’ disassociation between his self and the image of himself — misidentified as being a fully-fledged individual in an almost animalistic manner— offered by the reflector, over which he obsesses. I draw on the tale’s use of the mirror to illustrate its value as a iii catalyser of otherness, as well as to provide one of the numerous examples on which the theme of duplicity is reinforced or introduced by the appearance of a reflective surface. Conversely, Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There introduces the mirror as a gate to an alternative reality, and the idea of reflection is employed in it as a tool to shape and decontextualize the nonsensical. Carroll’s approach to the mirror in literature shows how the reflector need not serve a mimetic function within a given narrative, nor need it provide the individual with an other, nor introduce the idea of duplicity. In Carroll, the looking-glass functions as the door to a reality which challenges the subject’s by questioning its very governing forces. By exploring this particular case, I intend to demonstrate that the mirror may as well appear as something greater than both character and symbol, and allow for the advent of a haunting, uncanny presence or world whose rules may not be comprehensible to the reader. Lastly, I turn to Virginia Woolf’s “The Lady in the Looking-Glass: A Reflection,” a short story in which the mirror appears to act as though it were a drastically narrow focalising element, evincing the limitations of a realist approach to writing. By analysing Woolf’s use of the mirror, I offer an instance of an appearance of the reflector which is not strictly connected to the identity of a character, but to the inability of a certain mode of representation to convey that very identity. I view this selection of texts as particularly relevant to a study on Look at Me, where the mirrored room very much functions as a daunting presence tormenting one of the novel’s protagonists, as well as conveying a sense of urgency pertaining to the tension between narcissistic love and the way in which it is constructed as a consequence of the biased, opinionated other that —in all its limitations— beholds the subject. The third section focuses on the symbol of the mirror as it appears in Look at Me, drawing on recent theories of identity to attempt to show how the individuals of the novel are constructed in relation to the mirrored room, to how they see others, how they see themselves, and how they iv believe that others perceive them. The idea of the self that refuses to be univocally understood terms has been ever-present in both modernist and postmodernist literature, and, through my analysis of Egan’s novel, I offer what I believe to be a remarkably telling example of identities that are shaped not only within image culture, but as strictly dependent on both the physicality of the subject and the gaze of the Other. Finally, I close my analysis by relating the processes of construction and representation of identities at work within the character of Charlotte Swenson to contemporary readings of the body within the fields of gender, queer, and body studies. The body of a female model would be widely regarded as a clear representative of what image culture encompasses in the postmodern, western world, and, as such, I believe it of great importance to pay attention to how hierarchies of gender value intersect with those that serve to classify bodies as beautiful, thus turning the lives of the subjects within them —as Judith Butler’s contributions to the field of ethics would suggest— into both “unlivable” and “unintelligible” ones. How the self is seen could be safely labelled as a fundamentally public process, and yet the most private and intimate nuances of our identities appear to be greatly influenced by what others identify to be us. Being seen becomes, in all its passivity, one of the most essential processes in our developing an understanding of identity, and I am optimistic that this dissertation will fruitfully analyse Egan’s Look at Me so that my reading of the novel may enhance our ability to interrogate the vastness of fictional —and, thus, “real”— selves. 1 CANONICAL UNCERTAINTY & THE DEATH OF POSTMODERNISM Postmodernism, which proposed the end of history, has apparently become dated. Its style, its subversion, it seems, has petered out and lost its force sometime around the beginning of the last decade of the old century. (…) Its interest in the margins nowadays paradoxically occupies the centre. (…) Postmodernism, so one could surmise, has been too successful for its own agenda. Irmtraud Huber The defiant rhetoric of postmodernism has been at the centre of multidisciplinary discussion for decades on end. Many academics have accomplished the goals of their research by failing to provide a definition for postmodernism and its elusive nature, seemingly proving the widelyaccepted assumption that postmodernism poses an inherent refusal to its own delimitation. Irmtraud Huber, among others, stands in favour of the hypothesis that postmodernism was the dominant movement behind our understanding of society for a period of time in the past; in her view, those decades now seem to be peering over the edge of the century, standing on the verge of the contemporaneity they were unable to reach (1). In claiming that postmodernism has failed its purpose, Huber’s argument offers an invitation to reconsider the movement itself, its beginning and end lines, and its potentially-flawed logic. Rethinking postmodernism from a postpostmodernist perspective might lead us into more essential questions on the true nature of the movement and its meaning within the realm of the humanities. Perhaps postmodernism —as Huber seems to suggest— had been predesigned to fail to live up to its own main premise: shedding light on the endless periphery of a yet-to-be-discovered possibility. However, the greatest success of postmodernism relates to the one thing which Huber outlines as the perpetrator of its foreshadowed downfall: allowing the non-central to outshine the norm. This process has had outstanding 2 implications for various fields, pushing boundaries towards inclusivity and innovation, revisiting genres of all sorts in search of what had been —either willingly or unintentionally— left unexplored. In doing so, postmodernism defined itself by unfolding as a force against the eye which failed to see, the overly-exploited opportunity, unoriginality, and culturally-enforced normativity. It is only possible to grasp the fluctuant meaning of postmodernism through the analysis of the things it wished to oppose to, and hence the reason why we might speak of a postmodernist rhetoric: a rhetoric of “defiance” of everything which had yet to be questioned before its arrival. One of the main principles suggested by this defiant rhetoric of reconsideration is the postmodernist quest for innovation. When writing “its interest in the margins now paradoxically occupies the centre” (1), Huber questions the movement’s legitimate right to the metadiscursive claim that postmodernism has no end. The historical norm, understood as the premises supporting the conventions which this postmodernist rhetoric defies, is forced to occupy the perimeter so all that had been deemed unimportant may be relocated at the centre. The flux of peripheral elements towards the centre of this hierarchical, circular system of oppositions should thus continue into infinity, but what postmodernist discourse failed to predict was the appearance of what Huber wittily labels “a specific set of philosophical ideas, thematic foci and aesthetic devices” (1). In this sense, the praise of peripheral perspectives becomes a political statement. These themes, ideas, and reformulations “contaminate” the purity of “the alternative,” and the perpetuation of “the newest” is thus turned into a methodological attempt to remain unique whilst following the guidelines of what uniqueness has meant to others. The canonisation of techniques such as pastiche, universally regarded as one of the main features of postmodernism in the arts, has led postmodernism to deny its own coherency. 9 in between the conceptualisations of who she was and now is, as well as that of what she might become. It is within this context that I believe the label postmodernist should apply to Egan’s novel. For the purpose of this dissertation, I will focus on the relevance of the symbolic mirror in relation to the characterisation of identity, to later move on to study how gender performativity has found its way into contemporary literature through a case study of Look at Me, and hence conclude that there exist some peculiarities between identities in society and those we might demarcate in Jennifer Egan’s novel. 10 SELF MEETS REFLECTION: JUSTIFYING A NEED FOR THE TRANSDISCIPLINARY STUDY OF MIRRORS People need to put their mirrors down and begin examining the social psychological implications of being self-aware, in the sense of using one’s own experience as a means of employing sophisticated introspectively based social strategies for purposes of more effectively relating to others Gordon G. Gallup, Jr. The history of modern criticism (…) may in some part be told as the search for alternative parallels —a heterocosm or ‘second nature,’ the overflow from a fountain, the music of a windharp, a growing plant— which would avoid some of the troublesome implications of the mirror, and better comprehend those aspects and relations of an aesthetic object which this archetype leaves marginal or omits M. H. Abrams In 1996, Yayoi Kusama presented her “Infinity Mirrored Room - Love Forever” (Plate 1) to the eyes of New York. Her work, built upon the idea of infinity, carefully combined several sources of light and the eternal gaze of pairs of mirrors endlessly replicating the polygonal space they embraced. Far from being alone in envisioning a mirrored room, reinterpretations of the same concept have been relentless in postmodernist art since the mid-20th century. Kusama herself has exploited the idea of infinite reflection multiple times throughout her career, making of her attempts to reach the subjectivity of infinity a series of artistic rooms with mirrors as their major point in common. Kusama’s mirrored rooms seem to have merely an aesthetic purpose, but I believe her concerns with regards to mirrors to be of great significance to any collective reading of “the looking-glass” we might aspire to, particularly so if such a reading is to be connected with a 11 specific literary movement. Concerning the typical twentieth-century uses of mirrors in the arts, Sabine Melchior-Bonnet writes: Little by little the exploration of the subconscious, a structuralist game, led to its own dismemberment: both the inflation of images that referred only to themselves and the dislocation of a world deprived of meaning challenged the notion of the subject itself. There are no more autobiographies or self-portraits, but instead randomness, scattered pieces, the anonymity of the impersonal “one,” a shattered or cobbled together self. (264) The “randomness” and “scattered pieces” suggest that the exploration of the unconscious is, presently, no longer at the core of the artist’s desire to reach the remotely hidden nooks of the mind. As a consequence of this, modernist and postmodernist works have often allowed for the advent of characters which reflect —sometimes through the use of mirrors— on Melchior- Bonnet’s implied concept of the “divided self.” This understanding of the twentieth-century character as a deviant, broken figure —I intend to refer to those characters which are built around the desire to better understand the human mind, but which also evince, as Melchior-Bonnet states, their authors’ refusal to follow a “structuralist approach” to identity— can be related to the rise of Freudian psychoanalysis in the first half of the twentieth-century and to later reassessments, most notably those produced by Jacques Lacan. The modernist writers —who grew, to different extents, in a similar sociological context to that of the masters of psychoanalysis— developed a simultaneous awareness of the complicated nature of the human mind, but often approached these complications differently, as the postmodernist tradition after them would do too, to a certain extent. Whilst Freud and Lacan developed complementary models of the tripartite mind, the “divided self” of the artist was constructed in a much less “architectural” manner; thus, instead of aiming at providing a theory of the self, twentieth-century artists offered vivid and diverse 12 instances of the self’s infinite complications. “The divided self” is, in my view, a concept which aims at describing this series of phenomena, which ultimately led to the artist’s disenchantment with the self-contained subject. Achieving a seemingly perfect depiction of reality was no longer “meaningful enough,” and as a result, identity was shattered to pieces — or, more precisely, admitted to never have been unbroken in the first place. Melchior-Bonnet’s “divided self” seems to point towards the thematic centrality of the self in twentieth-century artistic production, relevantly so in that its exploration often goes hand in hand with the image of the mirror. Having been at the core of popular culture for centuries, mirrors and reflective surfaces shelter and validate our identities to the same extent to which they corrupt them, “offering parallels to dimly sensed aspects of new situations,” and hence allowing us “to use the better known to elucidate the less known, to discuss the intangible in terms of the tangible” (Abrams, 31-32). Abrams’ statement brilliantly conveys the idea that mirrors and other reflectors help us better understand our selves, along with a range of other concepts which would fall under the realm of the intangible. Through his reading of the mirror as a “metaphorical archetype,” Abrams draws on one of his previous ideas, which described mirrors as continuous similes which would help the conscious self understand the Other through comparison, often leading us to assume the unquestionability of that on which we are basing our comparative impulses. In relation to this, we may want to associate this assumption that the image that the mirror conveys is virtually “perfect” to Jacques Lacan’s discussion of the mirror stage. Lacan’s child, “still sunk in his motor incapacity and nursling dependence” (“The Mirror Stage” 72) succeeds at instituting the apperception of the imago of itself conveyed by the mirror, which is thus assumed to be an outward, perfect representation of the child’s physical self. This “Ideal-I”— as Lacan labels the child’s conceptualisation of its “double” (which is to watch over its ego)— is not to be questioned, for the 13 individual would be questioning their primary “source of secondary identifications” (“The Mirror Stage” 72). Going back to Abrams’ argument, it only makes sense that our comparative impulses appear to be “unquestionable,” assuming that, as Lacan suggests, the comparative urge to demarcate “self” from “other” is restructured upon (and dependent on) our first meaningful encounter with reflection. The artistic interest in the broken, sometimes absent self that we encounter in contemporary art is, in several ways, another reflection of twentieth and twenty-first century society. Within this context, that the validation of our identities nowadays appears to have more to do with Abrams’ idea of reflection than one might think: it is through the metaphor that lies beyond the nature of the looking-glass that we shed light on the intangible aspects of being ourselves, and it is also through such an illumination that we might see in literature the same flipped image of society the mirror conveys for us: “In the encounter with literature, seeing ourselves in the other may not be reduced to a mere appropriation of the other’s image nor to a narcissistic self-reflection. Instead, this encounter constitutes an experience that transforms the very boundaries between self and other” (Schwab, “Preface” 17). Gabriele Schwab’s statement draws a parallel between the function of the mirror and the role of literature as a cultural product, an association which will prove of vital importance to my analysis, as will be subsequently argued. Relating the function of the mirror — an aesthetic device which might serve different purposes within the realm of literature— to the function of the work of art in society poses the inevitable question of whether art reflects our understanding of the world, as if it were a polaroid picture related to a specific set of concerns within a time frame; or, on the contrary, the world is that which inspires the artist to develop an artistic product to enlarge the readers’ understanding of their surroundings. One might see this question as inherently paradoxical, for, if we understand our selves through the Other —which 14 would largely explain the cultural functionality of mirrors—, and the arts introduce an array of tales and images concerning such Otherness, where lies the transgressive power of including, nurturing, and validating new voices? I do not think it is the purpose of art to provide an idea of the Other which might define us through comparison. Drawing on Moi’s conceptualisation of the literary canon, I believe that the idea of a body of canonised literature serves the completely different purpose of providing privileged readers with a sufficiently similar Other to identify with. It is comfortable, safe, and, ultimately, ‘classically’ organised to define the self through a similar other —much like we do when seeing ourselves in the mirror— without gazing at the Other beyond our limited scope of reality. In my view, there lies the true transgressive power of representation, for it is through the inclusion of marginal identities and experiences that the writer may invite the beholder to abandon their zone of comfort, embarking in a journey towards a broader understanding of the differences between the self, the others, and the Other. This should explain both the modernist and postmodernist interest in the (broken) mirror, for it is only through thematically delimiting an abstract Otherness that it becomes possible for the reader to truly reflect on their own identity and experience. Hence, the mirror would not be but that same Other: the context within which we oppose our selves to other beings, to those who are different. Its presence across the artistic spectrum is well-justified by both the artist’s and the theorist’s inability to truly convey the intangible through anything other than the symbolic. 15 Plate 1. Yayoi Kusama, Infinity Mirrored Room – Love Forever (1996) It is certain that the many concerns surrounding the self have progressively taken a different route throughout the twentieth century —as can be seen across virtually all forms of human expression— but this has, oddly enough, only made the task of understanding identity more complex, perhaps revealing our identities’ true, dishevelled nature. In their study on face surgeries, Carla Bluhm and Nathan Clendenin stated that identity-related disorders were the most common threats for patients of face transplants. In their work, they argue that the nature of “the self” is — still today— “often explained in a drastically simplified manner” (18). This excessive simplicity is present in research across fields —for instance, in psychology, sociology or medicine—, and evinces a widespread lack of awareness in what concerns the issues of the self. Being the human self both our greatest artistic interest and the one idea whose entangled, complex nature we seem to deliberately ignore, it can only be through the exploration of these numerous cultural manifestations that we might face the challenge of better understanding our infinitely complicated identities. 16 BUILDING LITERARY CHARACTERS THROUGH MIRRORS: THE CASES OF NARCISSUS, ALICE & ISABELLA TYSON ‘Who in the world am I?’ Ah, that’s the great puzzle Lewis Carroll From mirror after mirror, No vanity’s displayed; I’m looking for the face I had Before the world was made W. B. Yeats Of all the literary images humans have resorted to with the ambition of capturing reality, mirrors are one of the most prolific in meaning. From self-assurance to self-loathing, self-importance to self-effacement, literary characters have been defined as being both full of themselves and selfless through the mirror. The looking-glass in literature has shaped the reality of the individual and served as an entrance to different, alternative realities, many of which have revolved around the very conflicts of the human mind. One might find in both the expansion and alteration of the characters’ understanding of the actuality of the plot they are involved in, be it introspectively or extrospectively, a persistent pattern reflecting the authorial desire to go beyond the ignorance preceding their encounter with the magic of reflection; a fervent urge to convey a form of superior knowledge to that which their readers have had access to, along with an unconventional, innovative reading of its nuances. In the three case studies below, I provide what I believe to be remarkably significant instances of the use of reflective surfaces in literature. Egan’s Look at Me shares critical ideas with 17 the three, as will become apparent by the end of my analysis. Much like Narcissus, the character of Charlotte Swenson in Look at Me is constructed upon the tension between narcissistic love and self-alienation, being these two forces the very product of the environments of the two protagonists, who are perceived as canonically beautiful, and, regardless some discrepancies in meaning, do not truly “know themselves.” As it happens in Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass, the mirrored room in Egan is depicted as other-worldly; as though its uncanny, governing presence could not possibly be understood by means of reasoning, but rather, may only be comprehended by not seeking to do so. The eyes of the mirrored room in Egan bear the weight of ideology, for they are those of society; thus, comprehending their functioning would deny the mirrored room its power, and hence why it must remain an eerie, ununderstood presence. Lastly, I set out to analyse the reflector in Virginia Woolf’s “The Lady in the Looking-Glass,” a short story in which the mirror appears to evince the contrast between the reflective depiction of a scene or action and the identity of the character performing it. In Egan as in Woolf, the inner self of a given character exists beyond the mirror’s reach, as there is a critical underappreciation of the self by the Other outside the individual’s mind, symbolised in Egan, as I will argue, by the mirror. “Echo and Narcissus” This story is one of the most renowned appearances of the image of reflection in literature. Narcissus provides a particularly significant instance of the use of reflective surfaces in the history of literature, 3 being the thematically-central pool common to the several versions of the myth which have lived on to the present. The climax of the story, identical in both Ovid’s and Parthenius’ 3 For the purpose of my analysis, I will be drawing on Stanley Lombardo’s translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. 18 interpretations, introduces the notion of the mirror as an item with the power to corrupt the human ego to the point of disrupting the workings of the mind and leading it towards insanity and death. Plate 2. John William Waterhouse, Echo and Narcissus (1903) A reading of Narcissus’ tale in relation to Jacques Lacan’s mirror stage is due, for both Narcissus and Lacan’s child reach a precise moment in their lives at which their self-awareness “matures.” This process is, in both cases, fundamentally visual. Lacan’s child, much like Narcissus, could not conceive a non-abstract image of itself before entering the so-called “mirror stage;” this enables it to establish the connection between its “self” and the image reflected by the mirror, an association which is, in Lacan’s terms, a process of identification by which it assumes an image provided by an external source to be representative of its own imago, thus turning its prior, abstract understanding of its ontological self (Innenwelt) into an outward “reality” (Umwelt) (71-72) — something which might occur, according to Lacan, as early as at the age of six months (71). 4 4 This particular aspect of Lacan’s theory has been challenged by other academics, and an agreement appears to have been reached with regards to the invalidity of Lacan’s statement (the age of six months seems to not be a stage of development at which the child might actually recognise itself in a mirror). 25 of interest to the narrative voice. Through the dismissal of the inner workings of the mind, everything that is of interest to the modernist writer is deemed to stay beyond the mirror’s reach, and it can thus be construed that this short story deals with the theme of reflection in a very different way to the two previous narratives. Woolf does not “empower” or mystify the mirror, but, instead, relates it to the state of “wilful disempowerment” of the artist, who appears not to see what truly should be, in Woolf’s view, relevant to the arts: the identity of the human being, and what each one filters through their individual perception of reality. In Woolf’s story, the looking-glass is able to provide an alarmingly accurate depiction of the situation before it in the fashion of realist novelists —or, as Woolf suggests to call them, materialists. These writers “[were] concerned not with the spirit but with the body,” (Woolf, “Modern Fiction” 158) and, consequently, aspired to approach the art of writing in a drastically different manner than that which sparked the interest of Woolf and other modernists. In this short story, the mirror appears to function as a focaliser of sorts, an “inanimate body” which frames the reach of the narrator’s eager consciousness. The impersonal thinker gazing at Isabella’s possessions aims for some truth pertaining to the character’s personality, but cannot quite grasp who she essentially is, for the narrator’s scope is incapable of reaching the content of her letters —which would be pointedly relevant in this regard, for they are “invested with a new reality and significance and with a greater heaviness, too” (Woolf, “The Lady in the Looking-Glass”)— nor the workings of her mind. In Laura María Lojo Rodríguez’s account, she maintains that “[the narrator’s] field of vision is limited, he is an intruder, an outsider detached from Isabella’s mind. He is only a voyeur that must adhere to what can be seen from the dark angle where he is hiding” (293). Significantly, the presence of the mirror frames the narrative from a spatial point of view: “Isabella Tyson […] had vanished, sliced off by the gilt rim of the looking-glass. She had gone 26 presumably into the lower garden to pick flowers” (Woolf, “The Lady in the Looking-Glass). The narrator’s point of view would thus coincide to that of the mirror, and so would do its limitations (he assumes her actions and motives), as well as the flaws inherent to its attempt “to transcend […] reflection, to do away with it in order to get to the person itself” (Lojo-Rodríguez, 290). In “The Lady in the Looking-Glass: A Reflection,” stillness is often opposed to movement, and change. In relation to this, Woolf elucidates that it is not just the narrator who perceives the stillness, but rather, both itself and the looking-glass, which evinces the latter’s function as the focaliser of the story. The reader is thus presented with a hollow description of the scene because of a mirror-like description of surfaces; had the mirror not been gazing at the room, a world of wonder would unfold: one which may only exist beyond the voyeuristic approach to the scene derived from the impersonal narrator’s obsession over capturing Isabella’s “truth.” Hence, one may oppose passages such as: “In the looking-glass things had ceased to breathe and lay still in the trance of immortality,” to: “[A] room […] full of shy creatures, lights and shadows, curtains blowing, petals falling – things that never happen, so it seems, if someone is looking” (Woolf, “The Lady in the Looking-Glass”). This dichotomy introduced by Woolf, which opposes the ignorance inherent to the narrator’s approach to the room (resulting in an illusion; a fake) to the truth which actually dwells in it, is introduced relatively early in the story, when Woolf writes: “It was a strange contrast — all changing here, all stillness there” (“The Lady in the Looking-Glass”) conflicting the narrator’s unkempt consciousness to the stillness of the world beyond its mind, being the latter not even remotely as complex as the former. The narrator’s consciousness, much like Isabella’s, encompasses the “truth” which the narrator seeks, but its approach to it is incapable of reaching such truth —or, even, of spotting its presence—, an idea at the core of the figurative function of the looking-glass in the short story. 27 Quite remarkably, Isabella does not face the mirror in the narrative. Instead, both the narrator and the mirror stand before the room, missing out the true nature of things, as well as Isabella’s most authentic version. The idea of imperfect reflection is the central axis allowing the story to unfold; the narrative voice laments that the looking-glass, much like us, cannot even grasp the true essence of the living being inhabiting the house it captures. Thus, this short story appears to embody one of the statements posed by Woolf herself in “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown:” “We must reflect that where so much strength is spent on finding a way of telling the truth, the truth itself is bound to reach us in rather an exhausted and chaotic condition” (32). Isabella Tyson’s truth is utterly inaccessible for us. The realist, classically mimetic writing style of many of Woolf’s contemporaries could potentially prove to be incapable of shedding light on anything truthful, as this short story seems to suggest. Hence, we may conclude that the looking-glass in Woolf’s short story offers a dramatically different instance of the uses of the reflector in literature than those explored earlier in this section. Woolf’s mirror is not characterised by a distorting feature, nor is it enhanced by a magnifying power of any sort. Instead, the looking-glass stares at the world as the realist author would do, and, after failing to achieve an understanding of the human mind, its task “becomes unfulfilled, unsatisfactory” (Lojo-Rodríguez, 295). As such, and drawing on Woolf’s own understanding of these writers’ work, I argue that her mirror’s reflection is imperfect and incomplete to a much greater extent than those I have previously studied, for this one intends to evince the imperfection and incompleteness which are, in her view, inherent to the way in which the realist tradition had characterised its individuals. The looking-glass is merely the frame to the impressionist canvas where Woolf depicted Isabella’s room. Oddly enough, the literary mirror, which is very often intertwined with different understandings of the characters’ identities, can be here opposed to 28 Woolf’s looking-glass. It is precisely what is most central to characterising identity (the inner workings of the mind and the individual’s thoughts) that Woolf’s looking-glass cannot aspire to see or comprehend. } The three brief case studies that I have provided in this section offer significantly diverse instances of the many different uses which have been associated with the mirror throughout literary history. Their functioning will frame my reading of characterisation in Egan’s Look at Me, whose development I will be exploring in strict relation to the symbol of the mirror in the following section. I believe Egan’s novel to be representative of most of the concerns outlined above, particularly so to the extent to which they relate to issues regarding identity, fragmentary selves/narratives, and the human dependence on the realm of the visual. I am optimistic that a diachronic contextualisation of the image of the looking-glass in literature, limited as it may be, will contribute to a more enlightening approach to Egan’s “mirrored room,” whose abstract nature I will discuss in the pages that follow. 29 CHIMERAS IN THE MIRRORED ROOM: A CHARACTER-ORIENTED READING OF JENNIFER EGAN’S LOOK AT ME When the range of discourses in the therapy room is too limited and ignores the points of view of those subordinated by race, gender, class, age, sexual preference, ability, and the like, therapy becomes the pursuit of self-replicating images. These images provide the illusory glitter of truth in the mirrored room Rachel T. Hare-Mustin There is no need for arms, physical violence, material constraints. Just a gaze. An inspecting gaze, a gaze which each individual under its weight will end by interiorising to the point that he (sic) is his own overseer, each individual thus exercising this surveillance over, and against himself Michel Foucault Postmodern character is, in the most general sense, caught up in power relations. (…) The novels may testify to a deteriorating situation, resulting in madness or in the increasing power of a public identity. Often, however, there is no real change in the forces that constitute power. The struggle to dominate oneself and others is infinite Aleid Fokkema Postmodernist characters often challenge the literary theorist to reconsider the assumptions upon which “character” and “characterisation” have been read. In the lines of social constructivism, one might question how basic concepts pertaining to our critical understanding of “character” might be flawed universals, both central to our rationalisation of the cultural experiencing of art as well as reified models for reading the character, the validity of which is seldom examined. By doing so, one adventures into approaches to character that not only pay attention to the fictional individual’s roundedness, but rather, undertake the great challenge of confronting the entwined associations which are established between human beings and their “fictional” counterparts. Aleid Fokkema elaborates on this idea, and claims that “for a long time, nothing seemed more natural than to take 30 it for granted that characters represented human beings, that novels were about people, and that psychological motives sustained plots” (“The Tradition” 18). Fokkema questions whether statements like these have ever been truly pertinent to the study of any form of fiction, and concludes that, even though modernism, postmodernism and other more recent approaches to story-telling have made it evident that there is more to characterisation than one is often led to believe, assuming these moulds to be completely valid would ultimately lead to the simplification of a much more complex, universal process to be found in literary works across periods. By questioning these statements’ applicability, the infinite complications pertaining to the bond between a character that is “human” and a “real” human being are, to the interest of a wide range of disciplines, made obvious. In this vein, Fokkema states that “characters do not only represent humanity but are seen to be derived from actual human beings” (“The Tradition” 19). In her account, this understanding of character is imperfect inasmuch as it reads character as a mimetic unit whose purpose within a given narrative is merely that of mirroring “the human.” As a response to this, Fokkema goes on to offer a different reading of “character,” and argues that “character does not only represent human beings. It gets out of hand, leads a wilful life of its own, is created as an autonomous being and seems a friend rather than a textual entity” (“The Tradition” 20). Her claim drifts away from the character who “re-presents” the human being —be it the author herself, a person whom she knows, the Other, or the result of hybridising two or more of the author’s understandings of these categories— and, instead, understands character as a living entity filtered through the eyes of the artist, but not as strictly conditioned by the artist’s vision as more structuralist readings appear to assume. Upon surpassing the author in one measure or other, characters reject the possibility of 31 being read as mere fictions, and thus “come alive” and begin to truly exist as relatively selfsufficient beings. In Bernard J. Paris’ approach to characterisation, he draws on the work of Karen Horney to establish a set of rules, directly related to her theories of psychoanalysis, through which he believes that the study of character should be approached. Horney’s model supports the idea that “inconsistencies are as definite an indication of the presence of conflicts as a rise in body temperature is of physical disturbance” (“The Basic Conflict” 35), which Paris applies to the text. This line of thought appears to echo some foundational claims behind Derrida’s later theory of deconstructive criticism and his ambition to “reverse dichotomies” —binary oppositions which undergird our dominant ways of thinking— whilst “attempting to corrupt the dichotomies themselves” (Reynolds, “Jacques Derrida”). Hence, the endless complications and contradictions at the core of any literary text become both the cause and the effect of the conflictive nature supporting the writing of fiction, and, subsequently, its characters. In later works, Horney herself introduces a dichotomy through which we may understand human/character development, and discusses how self-realisation and self-alienation function as opposing forces which determine whether we will be successful in achieving a healthy adherence to society (“The Search for Glory” 17). Thus, her claim would lead to the conclusion that the interest of the artist in the alienated individual is but a natural process, by which our internalised understanding of Horney’s validating and alienating forces leads us to develop a sense of “fascination” in the Other, irrespective of how it might be expressed. To this respect, Paris argues that artists “must choose between allowing their characters to come alive and kick the book to pieces or killing their characters by subordinating them to the main scheme of the work” (10), maintaining that a fictional individual that is fully round can never 32 be entirely submitted to the author’s idea of either character or work. This is, in my view, the idea at the core of the literary character. The literary individual gains the autonomy that she needs to come alive by shattering the glass frame in which the author had devised to imprison her. Regardless how extensive the author’s knowledge concerning this fictional human being might be, it can hardly be comprehensive enough for any writer to develop an epistemology of character. I consider this to be so because, to fully understand character, one would first be required to understand the ideas surrounding human nature and society upon which such a character might be based, and many of these often escape the author’s awareness, given the inevitability of their internalisation. If such a premise were correct, one would face a second problem: provided that the study of character cannot be approached as if fictional individuals were capable of explicitly embodying the entirety of human complexity, it would be essential to develop a theory of character that would pay attention to the systematic relations between “fictional” and “real” human beings. These relations have been repeatedly proven to be deciduous across literary history (see, for instance, how characterisation was approached in drastically different manners in the realist and modernist traditions, being the two not overly distant in time), as well as being deeply influenced by our synchronic understanding of the human condition in society. Hence, I do not believe that any theory of character could possibly be regarded as a universally valid model on which to base our approach to the literary individual. Every round character has come to exist beyond the author’s, the reader’s, and the critic’s appreciation of it, and, as such, cannot be fully understood by either of the three. To believe so would also imply claiming to possess the ability to tackle the two problems I have outlined above, which, as of now, appears to be too ambitious a claim. Notwithstanding the foregoing, I intend to introduce a reading of some of Egan’s characters in 33 Look at Me which draws on these individuals’ “plural” depiction of their fictional identities, particularly so with regards to the novel’s protagonist: Charlotte Swenson. Charlotte’s attempt to build an identity after the loss of her older self is reflected in the cyclical nature of the novel, in terms of how it portrays her struggle. At the beginning of the narrative, she is about to be exposed to the new situation from which the events unfold: her physical appearance after the facial surgery. Because of this drastic change, she is rendered incapable of fulfilling her timeworn desire to reach “the mirrored room,” which still haunts her. At the end of the novel, she is again someone different, but has been successful in leaving the entirety of her older self behind. Therefore, we may speak of three different “Charlotte Swensons,” in the sense that they all struggle with their identity in a different manner, and are successful in becoming who they think they are to different extents. First, we encounter the Charlotte of the past, the one to whom the second Charlotte will look up and envy; this Charlotte is not only an accomplice to her own reification (a “product” devised by the media which she embraces and aspires to mimic), but also finds herself integrated in the fashion, social circles, of which she will have a drastically different opinion by the end of Look at Me. The second Charlotte, on the other hand, is a ghost of her older self, full of obsessions and unsatisfied desires. She does not conceive any positive form of existence after the loss of the image which she had previously learnt to embrace. Her never-to- return physical appearance was vital to both her understanding of her identity and the establishment of the one aspiration which she confesses to have had: entering the mirrored room. The symbol of such a room and the ideas which Charlotte may associate with it are never made explicit in the novel, but, as Irene Maitlock —one of the characters— maintains: “We get it without getting it” (Egan, “Look at Me” 315). 34 To the eyes of society —the mirrored room’s—, Charlotte’s facial surgery turned her into a different person, and, in so doing, rendered her unable to still remain herself in a broad, social sense. Her struggle with superficiality and identity is also provided with a gender dimension, for her character as a “woman” is questioned to its very core in a drastically different manner than it would have been had the same thing happened to a “man,” 6 as I will explore in the last section. Charlotte herself exhibits some degree of awareness in what concerns these issues, as can be seen in several passages throughout the novel. In page 194, for instance, we may read: “I was fascinated by the way he spoke to me: genderless, respectful, as if I were a man. So this was power, I thought. This was what it felt like” (Egan, “Look at Me”). Charlotte’s claim to have sold her second self for less money than it was worth (“I sold Charlotte Swenson for a sum that will keep myself and two or three others comfortable for the remainder of our lives, although not […] for nearly what she was worth” (Egan, “Look at Me” 513)) introduces a third Charlotte, and puts up further distance between the three as separate, seemingly independent identities. The third Charlotte is not constructed upon retrospection, unlike the second one, and gradually leaves her older selves behind even whilst still identifying with both of them —she repeatedly uses the first and third person pronouns to refer to her past selves throughout chapter 20. The reader does not get to know for certain whether she has managed to move away from the dire need for the mirrored room and the power fantasy that it conveys. The second Charlotte, in spite of having been left behind, is said to be a chimera filling the mirrored room; a shell of what the third Charlotte used to be. Having been sold to a project which will turn her existence into a public matter, it only makes sense for her to finally believe that she has fulfilled 6 The challenges pertaining to the definition of these two concepts greatly surpass my purposes here, but they need not be read as absolutes neither here nor in the pages that follow. 41 itself the solace of being classified in terms of sex, sexual difference, and gender 9 may never be substantial, for it is, ultimately, one which may not be thought. Thus, it may be surmised that it is through performatively gendering the body that the subject to which it is ascribed truly begins to matter. 10 In Gender Trouble, Butler maintains that “[…] [I]t becomes impossible to separate out “gender” from the political and cultural intersections in which it is invariably produced and maintained” (“Subjects of Sex/Gender/Desire” 4). Could the body be one such intersection? Would the body not be, precisely, the intersection to which any other intersectional power struggle is subordinated to? In her discussion on the possible subject of feminism, she suggests that “gender is not always constituted coherently or consistently in different historical contexts, and […] [it] intersects with racial, class, ethnic, sexual, and regional modalities of discursively constituted identities” (“Subjects of Sex/Gender Desire” 4-5). In this same vein, her work in Bodies That Matter offers a discussion on Foucault’s reading of power relations which might lead us to consider the body as the materialisation of that intersection; or, rather, the very reason why an intersection of this nature comes into “being:” “The prison is materialized to the extent that it is invested with power; or, to be grammatically accurate, there is no prison prior to its materialization” (“Bodies That Matter” 9). The body’s matter is only material to the extent to which it is subordinated to power; substantialised through power: it may only be read within the power schemes which frame its very existence. These power schemes exist in both their effects and in the imposing discourses which allow for those effects to exist. Thus, the body, brought to existence as the fighting pit where power relations become material, exists —as in, is conceived; thought— merely as an effect to the 9 I speak of gender here to refer to the gendered ideas which are illegitimately attributed to the sexed body, as if they pertained to the physiological instead of the social. 10 Here “[…] “to matter” means at once “to materialize” and “to mean”” (Butler, “Bodies That Matter” 7). 42 cause that is power itself. As suggested by Foucault, “its [the body’s] very materiality […] [is] an instrument and vector of power” (“Torture” 30). In what appears to me an odd choice of words, DeMello categorises the bodies that constitute the norm in terms of beauty and size as “privileged,” but labels gender, race, colonial history, sexuality, and class as sources of “difference,” and attempts to map those differences onto the body. This is so, presumably, because she intends to circumscribe the latter privilege hierarchies to the body without directly subordinating them to materiality. To this respect, “body privilege” would only pertain to the bodies which are societally considered as beautiful. However, and drawing once more on Butler’s work, I believe it of the utmost importance to acknowledge how the power struggles to which DeMello denies the word “privilege” in their intersection with body studies not only are circumscribed to the body, but need be studied as directly mediated by it. All race, gender, colonial history, sexuality, class, neurotypicality and ability are inscribed in the body —they might be mapped onto the body, as DeMello suggests—, but they also originate from the very body to which they are subordinated: they may only exist, as Butler argued with regards to gender and sexuality, if articulated through bodily acts and embodied by the physicality of a given subject, be such subject individual or social. Thus, the nature of power struggles need be read as ultimately material, and hence why I believe DeMello’s classification to ask for further inquiry. I consider it more reasonable to speak of “body privilege” within all the above fields of study, and to do so via the exploration of both the ways in which hierarchical systems of opposition function through the body, and the ways in which the body makes it possible for privilege to be 43 embodied by the one Other who may truly exist, 11 irrespective of whether it does so as beautiful, male, white, coloniser, heterosexual, middle-to-upper class, neurotypical, and/or able-bodied. Butler writes on the feminine: “She will be neither the one nor the other, but the permanent and unchangeable condition of both” (“Bodies That Matter” 16). Charlotte Swenson, in this very regard, may neither be one nor other, not only due to her being female —“embodying” the feminine—, as Butler maintains, but also because of the ways in which the reconstructive surgery had politicised her body to the point of having lost its readability on several other levels. In this vein, Charlotte is turned into an unintelligible body within society; one which had once been privileged in terms of beauty and age but is gradually stopping to be so. The unintelligibility of her body is fundamentally intersectional: 12 on the one hand, her identity as a woman dooms her to be thought within society as the “nonthematizable matrix” to which the masculine may be opposed to; a catalyser of intelligibility; the Lacanian grand Autre. On the other, however, Charlotte has to be understood in relation to her facing the shock of having once inhabited a “canonical” body-type which is no longer believed to be so. Her experience in this regard is fundamentally alienating. Unlike the privilege pertaining to gender identity or race, that to do with her being beautiful can be very easily gone, as she comes to understand in the novel. However, in spite of being denied the possibility of being either “one” or “other,” Charlotte Swenson functions as the necessary condition allowing for the advent of the two. Butler labels the function of the feminine in this regard as a “formative principle:” by not being socially conceivable to the extent to which the 11 In doing so, the subject ceases to be an/the Other. I speak of “to exist” as Butler does, meaning, roughly, “to be socially thinkable/conceivable.” 12 I speak of unintelligibility following Butler’s own discussion on the worthiness of life and the less-than-human subject(s), for I believe Charlotte to turn into one such entity as Look at Me unfolds, primarily so by being deprived of recognition, approval, and —in quite a remarkable manner— visibility. 44 privileged subject is, his unprivileged opposite becomes the matrix that makes possible for a spectrum to appear, and for privilege to be ascribed to a specific “area” within that very spectrum. A study on a character such as Charlotte Swenson, as a fictional, female model, will necessarily have to pay attention to the centrality of the ideas of body and beauty in her depiction, and to how they play a particularly relevant role in how both women in society and the character in the novel are exposed to compulsory ideals related to the intersection of the two. Irene believes Charlotte’s experience as “a model whose appearance has changed drastically” to be the “perfect vehicle […] for examining the relationship among image, perception and identity,” and judges it so “because a model’s position as a purely physical object –a media object, if you will, […] is in a sense just a more exaggerated version of everyone’s position in a visually based, media-driven culture, and so watching a model renegotiate a drastic change in her image could provide a perfect lens for looking at some of these larger—” (Egan, “Look at Me” 92). Her enthusiastic explanation is cut off by Charlotte, who confesses to have found it bewildering, perhaps because of Irene’s insightful understanding of what she had considered to be an autonomous existence. In this regard, we may surmise that Charlotte had embraced the beauty standards of her society to the point of becoming numb to their constraining nature, hoping to find validation and power in reaching “perfection” (entering the mirrored room), and never realising that even the beauty ideal which she had hoped to attain would ultimately not be her own, but for her to give away so that others would keep on validating it as a social institution. Thus, “beauty privilege” need be understood as one which may only be embodied as a concession, hence no longer instituting a purely privileged position inasmuch as the subject to which it is “conceded” is female: a point that I will develop in the pages that follow. Perhaps an ideal such as the one symbolised by the mirrored room is never to be attained in contemporary society. To this respect, DeMello writes: 45 Standards of beauty today are so unrealistic that even supermodels cannot achieve them. It’s well known that even the most beautiful and highly paid models’ photos are heavily photoshopped before the public sees them […]. Sometimes the photoshopping is so overdone that the results no longer look realistically human. (177) In the same vein, Andrea Dworkin maintains that In our culture, not one part of a woman’s body is left untouched, unaltered. No feature or extremity is spared the art, or pain, of improvement. […] [F]rom head to toe, every feature of a woman’s face, every section of her body, is subject to modification, alteration. This alteration is an ongoing, repetitive process. It is vital to the economy, the major substance of male-female role differentiation, the most immediate physical and psychological reality of being a woman. From the age of 11 or 12 until she dies, a woman will spend a large part of her time, money, and energy on binding, plucking, painting, and deodorizing herself. (113-114) As Charlotte herself admits: “[of her life as a model] I enjoyed […] [its] inconsequence even as I scorned it for being nothing; I enjoyed it because it was nothing” (Egan, “Look at Me” 165). As her thoughts unfold, she reflects on how being observed felt like an action, the central action – the only one worth taking. Anything else I might attempt seemed passive, futile by comparison. […] I was aiming for the mirrored room. There was nothing more essential in the world; nothing that failed, when placed beside it, to disappear completely. (Egan, “Look at Me” 165) The vanishing of her aspirations in favour of the mirrored room parallels her own disappearance after the surgery, which had left her in the midst of a world where she would no longer pass for the woman whom she had believed to be. Her urge to be seen is present throughout 46 the novel, but so is her dire questioning of it: from the moment when she is proposed that she should become a part of the project to which she ends up selling her identity, a gradual awakening begins to take place. Even though she refuses to do so at first, she eventually appears to realise that there is not too big a difference between her previous role as a model and her agreeing to the commercialisation of her entire existence. Furthermore, Charlotte does not seem certain that she has an identity which she may give away, being her one wish to be reified. Her inability to comprehend who she is originates from the realisation that, as I have previously argued, she cannot think herself as an active subject, and may no longer exist as the passive object of desire of the capitalised Other. The first process of Charlotte’s self-alienation had reached a stage at which she had begun to displace her agency onto other beings, gradually and inadvertently consenting to her own reification. As Susan Bordo states, “these are practices [the “feminine practices” pertaining to our social understanding of female beauty and the female body, which also induce in the female subject the want to embody these ideals] which train the female body in docility and obedience to cultural demands while at the same time being experienced in terms of “power” and “control”” (27). In spite of not being alienated from society, the Charlotte of the past had already ceased to fully exist — she had been deprived of power; forced into powerlessness, and yet she had felt as though “entering the mirrored room” would have made her more powerful, and, ultimately, allowed her to remain in control of a life which had never belonged to her. Thus, it can be gathered that Charlotte Swenson had ceased to fully exist as both female and beautiful. The autonomy which would be expected of her as a being with agency is absent because of her function as a “media object” (Egan, “Look at Me” 92), whose purpose is expected to be purely passive (“Stop talking. It’s harder to see you when your face is moving” (Egan, “Look at Me” 165)). After being denied 47 the chance to remain submissive by having her company decide to do without her, she progressively realises that she no longer knows how not to be so. Having lost the eyes of the mirrored room which enabled her to stay passive, she comes to understand that she had only existed in their gaze. In this vein, Egan writes: “I saw nothing strange in the fact that being discovered, rather than discovering something myself, should prove the decisive event of my life. Being discovered felt like a discovery” (“Look at Me” 165). Thus, the second Charlotte adventures outside, hoping that she will be “rediscovered,” only to find out that the mirrored room had closed its doors on her, and, consequently, that the validation that she seeks will not be found neither in the public eye nor in the evasion of reality through alcohol consumption or other means, but within. It is uncertain whether she learns this lesson as the plot unfolds, but it is likely that she does so, for, as the narrative closes, she reflects on how “life can’t be sustained under the pressure of so many eyes [the mirrored room’s]” (Egan, “Look at Me” 514). However, it is highly unlikely that she should find a source of validation other than ideology, for, much as she develops an awareness of her position —hence no longer wishing to satisfy the desires of the Other—, her existence remains circumscribed to the unseen system which she had once fervently sought to please, and which had caused for her unprivileged position to be so in the first place. What I have previously referred to as Charlotte’s second self stands in the midst of uncertainty, and she is consequently forced to question the very boundaries which had been constraining her as a woman, of which she had been unaware due to their allowing her to belong to the select few whose appearance is subject to “exclusivity” (as well as “exclusion;” “otherisation” 13 ) and “canonisation” —much like it occurs with literary works— to the detriment 13 My use of “otherisation” mirrors that of Kathleen Eleanor Taylor in her 2009 study on human cruelty. In her book, Cruelty: Human Evil and the Human Brain, she draws on the renowned work of Edward Said to conceptualise “otherisation” as the series of mechanisms which, resulting from our experience in society, determine whether 48 of a diverse range of Others. To this respect, Judith Butler draws on Julia Kristeva’s and Iris Young’s works to argue that “the operation of repulsion can consolidate “identities” founded on the instituting of the “Other” or a set of Others through exclusion and domination” (“Subversive Bodily Acts” 376). In this same vein, one could read in the process of dehumanising and canonising the body the critical purpose of “expulsing” —be it introspectively or socially— the incarnation of the idea of bodily perfection, displacing it to a newly-conceived “Other” who understands their condition as an able-bodied, beautiful individual as inevitably alluring. As previously stated, the work of art has been historically canonised by privileged male critics to convey a sense of agreement as to what they found the most representative, aesthetically pleasing writings. In my view, this phenomenon shares a common core with what male-dominated industries such as modelling —as depicted in Look at Me— do to the female body, creating the illusion which Charlotte’s first self had associated with the image of the mirrored room. I would synthesise her illusion as follows: there is power in embodying the norm, for the normative is authoritative enough to infiltrate the mind, and can thus force the individual to conceive it as the most desirable (“the mirrored room:” also conveying an epitome of superficial, canonical beauty). However, the idea which the novel seems to convey is rather different to that which Charlotte had embraced at first, scilicet: the only true power lies with those who build/t the hierarchy, irrespective of how highly their hierarchy might regard a specific non-selector. 14 This is illustrated by the somewhat superior position which Charlotte seems to embrace in the novel, claiming to have the other individuals are to be treated as if they were “like us,” and, if so, to what extent they are to be treated like so. This allows for the advent of both “the other” and “the Other,” which originate from the comparative contrast of our surroundings with our own conceptualisation of our “selves” (See Taylor, “Cruelty: Human Evil and the Human Brain”). 14 In this regard, DeMello argues that “Standards of beauty, at least in a contemporary society that is dominated by advertising, were largely created by men, but men are not defined by them” (177). 49 ability to gaze into other people’s “shadow selves,” which would represent their innermost truths. In this way, Charlotte would be seeing the “true reflection” of those around her. This ability fails her repeatedly throughout the narrative, and, to an extent, leads to the protagonist’s selling her identity, thus leaving the first Charlotte’s fantasy of canonised beauty in the mirrored room. By doing this, the character is suggested to have moved away from her idealised understanding of “perfection,” which, as she appears to finally understand, would have never played in her favour. 50 CONCLUSIONS The mirror as has been transculturally used in diverse artistic and non-artistic manifestations is frequently employed in so wide a range of ways that it becomes a difficult task to accurately describe its function. Nonetheless, and as I hope to have proved through my brief analysis of the looking-glass in literature, its uses are most notably connected to characterisation, and, quite remarkably, to how the identities of characters are depicted, altered, or shattered. By exploring how drastically different instances of the literary mirror have conveyed diverse ideas throughout history, both the vast array of symbolic uses of the looking-glass and the inexorability of the identities which are often given shape before it were made obvious. As has been pointed out by several academics, literary characters are relatively alive within fiction. They surpass categorisation as round or flat; transcend the author’s conceptualisation of them and become living beings upon being read time and time again. Their complexity is beyond our comprehension in that they embody internalised beliefs and assumptions whose totality necessarily remains unknown to any writer. As evinced by Paris’ application of a Horneyan approach to literature, alienating and integrating forces can be understood as opposites leading characters to their destinies as they venture through societies, regardless how similar these might be to our own. However, if by “character” we understand self, Egan —as other postmodernist authors have done— necessarily complicates the idea of the wandering character who seeks a place in their world by breaking her own down into several, different disposable identities, evincing how our human attempts at defining and redefining our selves are critically performative. In Egan, the eyes of the mirrored room are ever-present, functioning as though they were a form of inner knowledge conveying the “wishes” of society. And yet, much as they overpower 57 Žižek, Slavoj. “Schelling-for-Hegel: The ‘Vanishing Mediator’.” The Indivisible Remainder: An Essay on Schelling and Related Matters, Verso, 1996, pp. 92-186.