The Lady in the Looking Glass

“The Lady in the Looking glass” focuses on the outside and inside of Isabella, examining notions of femininity and the female experience. This intersects with the story’s interest in the distinction between the public and private self, challenging traditional expectations of female behavior and conventional views of older women. This theme is also expressive of Woolf’s interest in writing about the female experience in innovative ways that escape from the predominance of the male view and objectification of women in earlier English literature.

The looking glass is linked to the dangers of personal revelation in both the opening and the ending, juxtaposing the meanings of the repeated phrase once the interposed story has altered the meaning and type of revelation suggested. At first, the warning “people should not leave looking glasses hanging in their rooms” reads as a dryly humorous opening line, expressive of the fact that they may reveal more to others than intended, like a “hideous crime” (1). This line sets up the expectation that the narrator will view the “Lady in the Looking glass” doing something compromising to her reputation. The story leans in to this with the sensual imagery of paragraphs 1-3, the still, breathy dimness of the room, the exotic luxury of the furnishings, and the lyrical descriptions of flowers. Contrary to this, however, nothing in fact happens in the story in terms of plot and its subject is overtly innocent and philosophical. The sense of illicit behavior is instead generated by the narrator of the story, who impertinently conjectures about Isabella’s private life, whose imaginings mirror the “audacity” of reading her letters. The language becomes suggestive of sexual as well as emotional boundary-crossing: The narrator asserts that she will “no longer escape” and that they wish to “prize her open,” to “penetrate a little further” and “fasten her down” (4). Rather than revealing private misconduct on Isabella’s part, the story is expressive of a prurience on the part of the narrator that, framed as the thoughts of someone sitting on her sofa, disturb expectations around the niceties of polite behavior as a guest in someone’s home. The narrative seems to ask what right anyone has in seeking to view, define, or describe a woman.

Instead of revealing a shocking inner truth, the mirror finally reveals a shocking outer truth: Isabella is an old and vulnerable mortal woman. The story has earlier revealed that she is in later middle age, but her physical appearance is not described. Instead, the narrative relies on the richness of her inner life, and the infinite possibilities of that life, in experience, perception, or recollection, by herself or others. The fact that she is outside the mirror’s view enables the narrative to see her as freed from her physical appearance. When she comes into view, it “made one start” (8), in a readjustment from the inner world of thoughts, feelings and imaginings to the outer world of her physical reality. The description of Isabella in the mirror, “naked,” “old and angular,” “wrinkled,” echoes the “cruelty” of the earlier hypothesized comparison between her as a “woman of flesh-and-blood of fifty-five or sixty” to a flower, in that the comparisons “come like the convolvulus itself trembling between one’s eyes and the truth” (4). The story itself has “come between,” and in doing so has set up a shocking juxtaposition of the Isabella of the first eight paragraphs and the Isabella of the ninth. The shock of this challenges conventional perceptions of women as physical objects and older women as ugly or redundant. A traditional narrative or society, the text suggests, might see Isabella as a lonely, old, wrinkled woman, but the narrative has described her life and possessions with vibrancy and sensuality and shown her to be remarkable and full of life. It is this juxtaposition that highlights the reductive and judgmental view of older women in society.

The “Lady in the Looking glass” also challenges literary conventions around the male gaze and objectification by creating a narrative of Isabella’s inner identity that is so much greater than her external appearance. By repeatedly asking how Isabella can be known, the narrative explodes the notion that women in literature—or life—are superficial and valuable only to the extent that they are seen by, support, or are useful to men. Indeed, as a “spinster,” Isabella’s rich and interesting life has been independent of this traditional supportive role. Her identity is viewed more clearly when outside the looking glass than when captured in it, and the story’s focus on the inner self belies the potentially sexist premise of the title: “The Lady in the Looking glass” might well suggest a focus on physicality, expressive of women’s supposed vanity and superficiality. Instead of vanity, the mirror reveals age and regret, but dignified by the story’s exploration of a real and rounded woman and a well-lived life.