Reflections in Contemporary Feminist Literature

BY THEODORA HERMES

“Mirror, Mirror, on the wall, who in this land is fairest of them all?” asked the Queen from the German fairy-tale Snow White. The mirror’s continuous affirmation—“You are, Your

Majesty,” might best illustrate the frivolous relationship that a woman is often said to have with her reflection. In many texts, a female character’s gaze into the glass is attributed entirely to vanity or the extreme pre-occupation with her physical self. Rather than acknowledging any deeper parts of her subjectivity, the mirror’s sole purpose is to aid a woman in validating her own physical beauty. While mirrors in both culture and literature have long been associated with restrictive conceptions of female identity, mirrors in contemporary literature seem to have taken on an entirely different role. Through the examination of Margaret Atwood’s The

Handmaid’s Tale and Toni Morrison’s Sula, this analysis posits that mirrors in these texts destabilize the notion of an integral self, and in the process also interrogate the most typical representations of mirror imagery. A closer “gaze” into the mirrors of contemporary feminist literature then, might pull the mirror out of its historically oppressive past and re-establish it as a motif that only further strengthens the notion of a fragmented female self.

Mirrors and reflections have long been associated with the fundamental concepts of selfhood and identity. The French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan was the first to draw our attention to the realization of self-consciousness that occurs upon a very early encounter with one’s reflection. In the mirror stage, an infant of about eighteen months recognizes his or her

Valley Humanities Review Spring 2012 1

own reflection, and the external image of the body produces a psychological response of the

formation of the illusionary “self” or Ego. The mirror stage constructs part of the permanent

structure of one’s subjectivity and allows the self to establish a relation to its world. While for

Lacan this significant interaction with the mirror was literally a moment in one’s life—a single, distinct experience of identification occurring at a definite point in time—for women in literature, it unfolds as a markedly different event. Rather than a solitary incident in her life, a woman’s interaction with her reflection far more resembles a process or journey—a forever

unfolding and emerging experience of self-identification and consciousness. We find that

women do not encounter their mirrors only once at a specific point in time; rather, they confront

the glass over and over again, and each interaction proves to be no more or less significant than

the last.

In his book Ways of Seeing, John Berger explains that this need to “see” one’s self has

always been a central part of the female experience: “[A woman] is continually accompanied by

her own image…from earliest childhood she has been taught and persuaded to survey herself

continually”.1 He argues, however, that this strong desire to “look” cannot simply be dismissed as female vanity or narcissism; rather, it is inherently connected to the complicated relationship between men and women. Berger explains, “Men act and women appear. Men look at women.

Women watch themselves being looked at. This determines not only most relations between men and women, but also the relation of women to themselves”.2 It is here that Berger is

drawing on the psychoanalytic conception of the “gaze”—the state of looking at oneself being

1 Berger, John. Ways of Seeing. (London: Penguin, 2008.) 47. 2 Berger, Ways of Seeing, 48. Valley Humanities Review Spring 2012 2

looked at. Feminist theorists such as Laura Mulvey have argued that “in a world ordered by

sexual imbalance, pleasure of looking is split between active male/passive female.”3 It is this

“right” to visibility that creates an unequal relationship, for it places the man in the role of the subject and the woman as the object; she loses autonomy as she is always surveyed, yet she herself is never the surveyor. What sociologist Charles Horton Cooley once speculated about mirrors then—that they reflect not merely our own external image, but also “what we perceive in another’s mind”4 —is even more so true for women. Culturally, the way a woman sees her own self is forged through how she perceives others—particularly men—see her. In a patriarchal culture where a woman’s sole value is commonly reduced to that of physical beauty, what the glass reveals is far more than an image; rather, it both predicts and reinforces her very place in the world.

The immense importance of a woman’s physical appearance might contribute to the shallow representations of mirrors that we see in earlier literature. In John Milton’s Paradise Lost, for instance, Eve’s very first act on earth was to bend over the water and stare at her reflection.

Completely mesmerized by the beauty of her own image, Eve would have “pined there in vain desire”5 if God had not called her away. In her book, Herself Beheld: The Literature of the Looking

Glass, Jeni Joy La Belle explains that in literature through the eighteenth century, “a woman looking in a mirror only rarely escapes its traditional emblematic meaning—vanity”.6 La Belle

notes, however, that in the nineteenth century, “we do find writers investigating more than the

3 Mulvey, Laura. "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings. (New York: Oxford, 1999.) 833. 4 Cooley, Charles Horton. On Self and Social Organization. (University of Chicago Press, 1998). 3. 5 Milton, John. Paradise Lost. (Oxford University Press, 2005), 240. 6 La Belle, Jenijoy. Herself Beheld: The Literature of the Looking Glass. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990). 14. Valley Humanities Review Spring 2012 3

Vanitas motif: we begin to see the personal, psychological processes that come into play when a

woman looks in the glass”.7 Rather than simply seeking one’s beauty in a visual image, the representation of the mirror is complicated and the reflection revealed serves as a significant psychological experience in the lives of the female protagonists.

It is in the cornerstone of feminist literature, Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, that we clearly see the mirror adopt this more profound role. In the renowned red-room scene, Jane glimpses herself in the “great looking glass” and is shocked by the “strange little figure gazing at [her]”.8

Later as an adult when she looks into a mirror while wearing her wedding gown, she is alarmed

to discover “a robed and veiled figure so unlike [her] usual self that it seemed almost the image

of a stranger”.9 As explained in Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s seminal text The Mad Woman

In The Attic, both of Jane’s experiences with her reflection—her time in the red-room as a

frightened child and alongside her “dark double” Bertha the night before her wedding—are

moments where she meditates on the injustices of her life and is driven almost to the point of

madness.10 Jane’s “broken reflections” ultimately “reflect” her own broken sense of selfhood as she is torn between the forever conflicting identities of the “angel in the house” and the

“potential monster beneath her angelic exterior”.11 On one hand, Jane’s struggle with identity

challenges the Victorian era’s rigid construction of femininity; however, despite the subversive

nature of Bronte’s narrative, Jane’s fractured self does undergo significant unification by the

close of the text. Her tumultuous experiences with abuse and abandonment and her final

7 La Belle, Herself Beheld, 14. 8 Bronte, Charlotte. Jane Eyre. (New York: Random House, 1943.), 6. 9 Bronte, Jane Eyre, 220. 10 Gilbert, Sandra and Susan, Gubar. The Mad Woman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. (Yale University Press, 1979), 340. 11 Gilbert and Gubar, The Mad Woman in the Attic, 345. Valley Humanities Review Spring 2012 4

marriage to Mr. Rochester all eventually form what Gilbert and Gilbert later refer to as “an

essential epilogue to that pilgrimage toward selfhood”. Her words then, “Reader, I married him”12 suggest a close to Jane’s quest; her search for a whole identity is concluded.

In Brontë’s text, the mirror is used to reveal Jane’s broken, conflicting identities that are

then reconciled and unified by the end of the narrative. The mirrors signify the need for a

cohesive self and the fragmentation of the female identity that seeks unification. In this sense,

just as La Belle notes that the mirror has the ability to “show the female character what she

might not otherwise see herself,”13 so does it also have the ability to show us what we might not

otherwise see ourselves. The mirrors of literature do not only grant us profound insight into the

actual female characters looking into them, but also into an entire conception of contemporary

female identity and consciousness.

Over a hundred years later, as this understanding of female identity is notably different,

so is a woman’s experience with the glass. Mirrors in these present-day texts now “reflect” a

significant trend in contemporary literature to move away from the notion of a cohesive self,

and towards an identity that is almost always already fragmented. What many contemporary

feminist theorists have been so dedicated to undermining—the cohesive self, the stable

identity—the mirrors, too, are disclosing. While the images revealed in the glass once upheld an

integral identity, in these contemporary novels we find that the mirror’s role has been

completely reversed, as it is now used to deconstruct the very notion of a whole female self. A

closer gaze into contemporary texts then might reveal that the mirror’s role is even more

12 Bronte, Jane Eyre, 428. 13 La Belle, Herself Beheld, 48. Valley Humanities Review Spring 2012 5

complicated, for it now serves a dual purpose: it not only posits a less restrictive notion of

selfhood for these female protagonists, but in that very process, also revises the conventional

meaning of the mirror motif.

Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale follows Offred who lives in the futuristic, totalitarian and theocratic state that has replaced the United States of America. In this new dystopian society, women and girls possess few rights—their identities are reduced to their reproductive capabilities and even their names are patronymic as they all refer to the men they serve. Knowing that mirrors are strongly associated with vanity, we might immediately sense the importance of their presence in the Republic of Gilead, a society that is ruled by modesty and the oppression of female sexuality. Offred continually draws our attention to the mirror; hand mirrors, revolving balls of mirrors, oval mirrors, mirrors in hallways, bathrooms and elevators are scattered throughout the text. Paradoxically, although mirrors appear often in the narrative they are notably scarce in Offred’s society. She tells us that, “like a nunnery, few mirrors are [in Gilead]”14. The rarity of mirrors might explain why Offred is so quick to reflect

on their presence in a room. Such a moment occurs early in the text when Offred notices a

mirror that hangs in the Commander’s house:

There remains a mirror, on the hall wall. If I turn my head so that the white

wings framing my face direct my vision towards it, I can see as I go down the

stairs, round, convex, a pier glass, like the eye of a fish, and myself in it like a

14 Atwood, Margaret. The Handmaid’s Tale. (Pasadena, California: Salem Press, 2010), Valley Humanities Review Spring 2012 6

distorted shadow, a parody of something, some fairy-tale figure in a red cloak,

descending towards a moment of carelessness.15

When Offred looks into the mirror she experiences a significant sense of alienation from her own reflection. She feels that the image in the glass is somehow not disclosing her real self, but rather, is a mirage or parody. This sensation of unfamiliarity in the mirror is not exclusive to

Atwood’s character. As we recall, Jane Eyre too confronted this “stranger” in the glass. Female protagonists are often startled when upon looking in the mirror the image in the glass does not reaffirm who they believe they are. The difference between the mental self-image and the external mirror image is often a frightening experience, for the mirror has done more than simply reflect an undesirable image; it has questioned their entire state of selfhood.

In Atwood’s world, however, to see at all is to possess power. Michael Foucault’s conception of power relations can be easily applied to the society of Gilead, which is ruled by surveillance and “invisible” police. Foucault’s metaphorical use of Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon, in its “permanent, exhaustive, omnipresent surveillance capable of making all visible, as long as it could itself remain invisible”16 reveals much about the inner-workings of power in Offred’s society. Similar to the prisoners in the panoptic model who dwell in a permanent state of visibility, so are the citizens of Gilead also trapped in the possibility of a constant gaze. Surveillance by the Angels, Guardians, and forever-lurking Eyes, creates a system where obedience is maintained merely by the possibility of being seen. This dichotomy between seeing and being seen certainly contributes to Offred’s acute awareness of mirrors and

15 Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale, 48. 16 Foucault, Michael. Disciple and Punish: The Birth of a Prison. (New York: Pantheon Books, 1977), 213. Valley Humanities Review Spring 2012 7

her desire to see herself, as the feeling of always being the spectacle creates an even greater

longing to seek one’s own image. For instance, the night the Commander dresses Offred for

their trip to Jezebel’s, she comments, “I feel stupid. I want to see myself in a mirror”17 and later expresses, “What I want is a mirror, to see if my lipstick is alright, whether the feathers are too ridiculous”.18 The gravity of Offred’s longing—“I want to see”—unfolds in her frequent interactions with mirrors and the important, personal revelations revealed through them. Such a moment occurs later, when Offred looks into a bathroom mirror at Jezebel’s:

Now, in this ample mirror under the white light, I take a look at myself. It’s a

good look, slow and level. I’m a wreck. The mascara has smudged again, despite

Moira’s repairs, the purplish lipstick has bled, hair trails aimlessly. The molting

pink feathers are tawdry as carnival dolls and some of the starry sequins have

come off. Probably they were off to begin with and I didn’t notice. I’m a travesty,

in bad make-up and someone else’s clothes, used glitz.19

Once again, our protagonist is confronted with the odd sensation of simultaneously

seeing herself yet feeling unrecognizable. While Offred could not identify with her reflection

earlier as a handmaid—she was, in fact, a “fairy tale figure,” here at Jezebel’s, freed of the

oppressive signifiers of her handmaid uniform, she still feels unidentifiable. Both of the images

in the glass—the pious handmaid, the prostitute—are ultimately performances imposed upon

her. This raises some interesting questions: since the mirror supposedly displays Offred as fake,

17 Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale, 263. 18 Ibid, 278. 19 Ibid, 330. Valley Humanities Review Spring 2012 8

has the real Offred simply been sabotaged by the Gilead regime? Or, is the parody in the mirror not the false replacement of the true Offred, but rather, simply a reflection that is masking yet another version of her always already fragmented self? It seems reasonable to assert that

Offred’s fragmented identity is ultimately a consequence of the horrors of the Gilead society;

however, this would also imply that she once possessed a complete self to begin with. Although

on the surface this assertion seems sensible, a closer examination of the text might reveal that such a conclusion is far from satisfying.

When we look at Offred’s life prior to her time at the Red Center, there does not seem to be anything that would resemble a fully developed sense of self. Instead, Offred’s self prior to

Gilead seems significantly splintered and conflicted. She is caught between multiple identities and ideologies and never seems to claim any as her own. Her mother is a radical liberal who frequently lectures her on the “dues” she must pay to her feminist foremothers. Meanwhile, her husband Luke is conventional in his understanding of gender roles and frequently reminds

Offred of the “differences between men and women”.20 On one hand, Offred is a traditional wife adhering to her conventional role in marriage; on the other, she is a successful woman with a college degree. She is a clever academic with an obvious love for language, yet she also seems to lack any solid opinion. While the entire narrative is ultimately what we believe to be Offred’s courageous act of storytelling, she at the same time remains obviously silent in the midst of all the other voices in her life.

Offred’s relationship with Luke is particularly interesting in that it is also strangely similar to her relationships with men once a handmaid. One might assume that Offred’s

20 Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale, 75. Valley Humanities Review Spring 2012 9

romances prior to her life in Gilead would stand in harsh contrast to those of her relationships with the Commander and Nick. Oddly enough, however, all significantly resemble one another.

While the men of Gilead are obviously painfully sexist, Luke too seems chauvinistic, as he often makes sexist comments to Offred and her mother—“he’d tell her women were incapable of abstract thought”.21 When contemporary America begins to break down and roles of men and women are shifting, Offred even admits that Luke seems unbothered by the new gender hierarchy: “He doesn’t mind this, I thought. He doesn’t mind at all. Maybe he even likes it”.22

Although Offred keeps a secret and private relationship with the Commander and Nick, her

relationship with Luke began in a similar way, as she had a secret affair with him and would

spend afternoons leafing through magazines in hotel rooms waiting for him to arrive. Later, the

Commander takes her to the very same hotel, and she immediately draws connections between

the two romances: “Everything is the same, the very same way it was once upon a time”.23

In Madonne Miner’s article on the romance plot of The Handmaid’s Tale, she asserts that the novel “provides us with two male characters who mirror one another; structurally, these two are twins. Offred does not draw attention to parallels between the two men, and she might protest against such connections, but the text insists upon them”.24 This notion of Offred’s past

and present relationships “mirroring” each other—almost being the same image, reflected back

and forth upon one another, subverts the natural assumption that Offred’s loving, stable

marriage in contemporary America was drastically different than the cheap, forbidden affairs

21 Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale, 139. 22 Ibid, 209. 23 Ibid, 286. 24 Miner, Madonne. “Trust Me: Rereading the Romance Plot in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. “(Twentieth-Century Literature 37: 1991), 48. Valley Humanities Review Spring 2012 10

she has while in the Gilead society. When Offred looks into her own mirror, then, and sees what

she perceives to be a “parody,” we might realize that her reflection is not revealing a fake image

of a woman destroyed by her oppressive society, but rather the gaze reflects what was always

already there: a fragmented self and multiple, conflicting identities constantly in tension.

It is also tempting to argue that Offred’s true sense of self is revealed and maintained through the telling of her story, for not only do her recordings allow her to preserve a

significant part of her identity—her love for language—but they also reflect a great resistance to

the Gilead regime. In this dystopian world where language is manipulated and guarded and

women are not permitted to read or write, Offred’s ability to relay her story seems like a

significant victory in her effort to resist the Gilead society and maintain her own personal

identity. However, this notion is challenged when one considers the “Historical Notes”

included at the end of the novel. Through these notes we learn that after the fall of Gilead,

Offred’s story was discovered as a recording on audiotapes. Found at the bottom of a locker and

lacking any particular order, a group of male researchers construct Offred’s story for us. Dr.

Pieixoto explains that the arrangement of her narrative is ultimately “guesswork and [is] to be

regarded as approximate, pending further research”.25 Even more alarming is that Pieixoto’s speech is littered with sexist innuendo and disrespect for Offred’s story. It is difficult not to question then if we can trust these male professors as reliable, honest transcribers when they don’t seem to value Offred’s narrative nearly as much as we do.

The Historical Notes might lead us to the alarming realization that “Offred’s story” is perhaps not an accurate description of this narrative. While throughout the novel we believe

25 Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale, 338. Valley Humanities Review Spring 2012 11

that what we hear is entirely Offred’s voice and that it is being recorded as the events are unfolding, both of these assumptions are put under question when one considers the Historical

Notes. If Offred’s story is found on cassette tapes, this only logically implies that the story was spoken after the events took place. Pieixoto admits to the audience: “It could not have been recorded during the time it recounts, since, if the author is telling the truth, no machine or tapes would have been available to her, nor would she have had a place of concealment for them”.26 It

is not only the order of the events that are in flux now, but also when they were even told in the

first place. This provokes yet more doubts about the validity of the narrative. If this was spoken

weeks—perhaps even years, after the event, it is difficult not to question how honest the

account truly is.

Offred is regarded as a crafter of words and the reader is encouraged that despite the

oppression of Gilead, her voice is still heard and her self still preserved through the narrative.

While we believe that we can know Offred through her story, the Historical Notes reveal to us

the fragmentation of the narrative; it is full of mysteries and partial truths, constructed by a

group of male academics that relied on their own intuition when transcribing the story. Sadly,

these academics have imposed their own opinions, words and ideas upon her narrative—

leaving us to wonder who Offred ever was to begin with. In the same way that Offred looks

into mirrors throughout the text and sees the falseness of her identity and the self that has been

imposed upon her by others, so does her “limping and mutilated story”27 do this as well, for it

mirrors the fragmentation of her identity through language and narrative. We believe that

Offred’s story is a true reflection of herself; however, like the many other false images—the

26 Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale, 303. 27 Ibid, 301. Valley Humanities Review Spring 2012 12

“parody” or “fairy tale figure” in the mirror—her story too is ultimately only a construction, lacking authenticity and truthfulness.

On the most basic level, Atwood’s text reveals—whether consciously or not—the continued significance of the mirror in contemporary feminist literature. Even while purposefully forbidden and scarce in the world of Gilead, the glass still initiates fundamental questions about contemporary conceptions of selfhood. What’s even more important than the questions, however, are the profound conclusions about female identity revealed through these mirrors. Rather than disclosing a fragmentation that is directly caused by the oppression from a patriarchal and dystopian world, the mirror instead reveals a fragmentation far more complicated: one that was always already there. In this sense, it is not only the notion of the cohesive self that is undermined, but also the most conventional uses of mirror imagery. When

Offred states, “I’m sorry it’s in fragments, like a body caught in crossfire or pulled apart by

force”28, we might realize that this applies to far more than her fractured narrative. This

“pulling apart” instead illustrates the multiple layers of deconstruction occurring

simultaneously, as the glass is used to destabilize the notion of a whole female self and in the

process also deconstructs itself.

Although not mentioned nearly as frequently as in Atwood’s work, the presence of the

mirror in Toni Morrison’s second novel, Sula, remains just as significant. Rather than multiple scenes with mirrors, Morrison instead offers us a single moment early in the novel that primes the reader for the (inevitably futile) search for a self that will continue to unfold through the rest

28 Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale, 301. Valley Humanities Review Spring 2012 13

of the text. As Jacques Lacan has emphasized the importance of a child’s early encounter with

his or her reflection, we might immediately sense the significance of the mirror scene in Sula, for

it not only occurs in the beginning of the narrative itself, but also very early in the life of the

novel’s protagonist. It is as a young girl that Nel Wright has her first interaction with the glass:

She got out of bed and lit the lamp to look in the mirror. There was her face,

plain brown eyes, three braids and the nose her mother hated. She looked for a

long time and suddenly a shiver ran through her. `I’m me,’ she whispered. `Me.’

Nel didn’t know quite what she meant, but on the other hand she knew exactly

what she meant. ‘I’m me. I’m not their daughter. I’m not Nel. I’m me. Me.’ Each

time she said the word me there was a gathering in her like power, like joy, like

fear. Back in bed with her discovery, she stared out the window at the dark

leaves of the horse chestnut. `Me,’ she murmured. 29

Although Nel will walk away from the mirror and never again in the text return to her reflection, it is essentially this single gaze into the glass that sets the rest of the text into motion.

Her experience with the mirror not only sparks important personal reflection, but also functions as a catalyst for the central relationship in the text, for it is what “gives her strength to cultivate a friend in spite of her mother”.30 This is monumental, knowing the immense weight that

Morrison often places on female community. As explained by Barbara Rigney in her article

“Hagar’s Mirror: Self and identity in Morrison’s Fiction,” in Morrison’s world, “identity is

always provisional; there can be no isolated ego striving to define itself as separate from

29 Morrison, Toni. Sula. (New York: Random House, 2011), 29. 30 Morrison, Sula, 28. Valley Humanities Review Spring 2012 14

community, no matter how tragic or futile the operations of that community might be”.31 This can certainly be seen in Sula, as Nel’s act of self-definition does not lead her to an individual experience, but rather, female community. It is within only half a page of Nel’s declaration of

“me” in front of the mirror that she forms an intimate relationship with Sula Peace.

As adolescents, both Sula and Nel long for personal growth and adventure, and their

methods of embarking on this journey of self-discovery are very different. For Nel, independent

selfhood is something that she never seems to actively strive for, nor fully arrive at. This is

interesting, considering that early in the text we might be tempted to believe that Nel’s moment

of new-found “me-ness” is a significant step towards a whole identity. While for other women

in literature such a gaze into the glass sparks much confusion as the glass does not disclose the

self they hope to see, Nel’s experience appears to be the very opposite. Rather than a feeling of

unfamiliarity, there is, as Lacan would state, immediate “identification.” Unlike Jane Eyre, Nel

is not frightened by a stranger, but rather is even momentarily empowered and fulfilled by her

image in the glass. She delights in this individuality and instantly differentiates herself from her

own heritage and community. When she crawls into bed that night, she sees herself as an

entirely separate being—she is, “not their daughter…not Nel”, but rather a “me.”

On the surface it seems that Nel’s confrontation with the mirror is a reflection of the

whole self that she will later achieve in the remainder of the text. Interestingly, however, we are

not led to this conclusion at all; on the contrary, Nel’s proclamation of “me-ness” ultimately

proves to be a singular moment of perceived wholeness that she never again experiences. Her

life soon after her interaction with the mirror is nothing close to the state of individuality that

31 Rigney, Barbara. “Hagar’s Mirror: Self and Identity in Morrison’s Fiction.” (Columbus Ohio State UP, 1991). 55. Valley Humanities Review Spring 2012 15

she claims upon first looking in the glass. Rather, her conventional marriage stifles her

individuality—“the two of them would make one Jude”32—and she embodies the very values of the community that she once so passionately denounced. Described as a spider in its web, Nel’s existence becomes nothing more than a boring routine where she is safe and secure, yet uninvolved and purposeless. While Nel’s experience with her mirror at first produced many new thoughts, her life soon after would reflect the very opposite of this extreme state of autonomy. One might question then, just how authentic this moment of “me-ness” really was.

Where is the Nel whose interaction with the glass felt, “like power, like joy, like fear”? What happened to the being she identified as “Me”?

In understanding this perceived wholeness, it is essential to acknowledge that just prior to Nel’s experience with the mirror she had embarked on a life-changing journey to New

Orleans. For the first time, Nel is forced into the role of the “Other” as she is exposed to severe

discrimination. She and her mother are humiliated by the white conductor and forced to urinate

outside in the fields because blacks are not permitted to use the bathroom on the train. On the

segregated train, Nel watches soldiers “bubbling with hatred”33 refuse to help her mother with

their suitcase. She is later shocked to see her respectable mother—“the woman who was very particular about her friends, who slipped into church with unequaled elegance”34, so

shamelessly obey the orders of the white men around her. We might clearly see the female

experience of W.E.B. Du Bois’ idea of “double consciousness,” as Nel is for the first time sensing

the notion of two-ness—“this looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring

32 Morrison, Sula, 83. 33 Ibid, 44. 34 Ibid, 23. Valley Humanities Review Spring 2012 16

one’s tape by a soul of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity”.35 Lying in bed the night following the trip, Nel vividly remembers the traumatic details of her journey: “…the urine running down and into her stockings until she learned how to squat properly…the soldier’s eyes on the train, the black wreath on the door, the feel of unknown streets and unknown people”.36 It is only immediately after recalling these memories that she got out of bed

and looked into the mirror.

At this moment, whether fully mindful or not, Nel is already sensing her own

fragmentation; in fact, it is that very awareness which prompts her to confront her reflection.

Like many of our female protagonists before, Nel senses her lack of an integral self and has a

strong desire for the mirror to disclose the external image of what she already philosophically

perceives that she is not. She approaches the mirror already well aware of her fragmentation

and is ready to construct the image of what she longs for the reflection to affirm she is—in this

case, a “me.” The reason then why Nel is never able to return to this radical state of unification

and wholeness might be because it never truly existed in the first place. The “me” revealed in

her mirror that night was not an entity in itself, but rather, a self-constructed illusion.

Knowing that this moment of wholeness was ultimately something fabricated, a pressing question might be why it was included in the narrative at all. It is certainly significant that Morrison offers us a scene with so many different levels of importance (it occurs immediately after Nel’s life-changing trip, it “commences” her friendship with Sula) only to have it result in something far less climatic than we might have expected. It seems that

Morrison uses Nel’s reflection to lure us into this idea that she will achieve a whole self, only to

35 Dubois, W.E.B. The Souls of Black Folk. (Simon & Schuster, 2005), 7. 36 Morrison, Sula, 22. Valley Humanities Review Spring 2012 17

instead reveal the fragmentation that was always already there. In this sense, once again, a

woman’s gaze into the glass is not only used to destabilize the notion of a cohesive self, but also

to destabilize the motif itself. This mirror scene in Sula serves a dual-purpose as it both reveals

the fragmentation of Nel’s identity and at the same time also critiques the most conventional

uses of mirror imagery.

Although Nel never again returns to her reflection, it could be argued that her

experience with the physical mirror ultimately leads her to a new and different mirror that takes

the form of Sula. It is certainly not coincidental that Nel’s interaction with a mirror is what

initiates their friendship, for Nel and Sula continuously “mirror” one another throughout the

entire text. At moments the friends are so similar that they are described as the same person:

“their friendship was so close, they themselves had difficulty distinguishing one’s thought from

the others…a compliment to one was a compliment to the other, and cruelty to one was a

challenge to the other”.37 Morrison even writes that when Nel would talk to Sula, it “had always

been like having a conversation with herself”.38 Just as Nel’s interaction with the physical

mirror as a child birthed many new feelings and ideas inside her, so does Sula later embody the role of the mirror as she forces “[Nel] to see old things with new eyes”.39

While Nel’s pursuit for self-discovery seemed to begin and end with her

revelation of “me-ness” as a child, Sula most differs from Nel in that she unapologetically

searches for self-definition and personal fulfillment. Fiercely independent, rebellious and

sensual, Sula is experimental and questions all parts of the world. On the day of Nel’s wedding,

37 Morrison, Sula, 72. 38 Ibid, 44. 39 Ibid, 95. Valley Humanities Review Spring 2012 18

Sula leaves the Bottom and does not return for ten years. These years of her life are strangely

absent from the narrative, and while we know that she attended college and lived in a variety of

different cities, we are given very few other details. It seems that this silence from Morrison is

significant, as it alludes to the idea that although Sula dares to search for meaning beyond her

community (particularly Nel), she is unable to build a life for herself that could replace the one

she left. In fact, like much of the narrative, Sula’s adventurous journey is cyclical and only leads

her back to the very place she originally hoped to escape.

This idea of “building” an identity is extremely relevant to Sula, for she herself even remarks, “I don’t want to make somebody else. I want to make myself”.40 While on the surface

Sula seems to possess more of an independent self than Nel, upon close examination we might find that her identity is in fact something “made” rather than authentic and integral. Similar to

Nel who stands in front of a mirror as a child and constructs a “Me,” so does Sula—through different lovers, travels and experiences outside the Bottom—attempt to construct an individual self. Like Nel, however, this expedition for self-discovery proves futile, and it leads her to only deeper levels of bitterness and loneliness.

On her deathbed at the young age of thirty years old, Sula claims, “I sure did live in this world” and Nel accusingly responds, “Really, what have you got to show for it?”41 Sula’s poignant reply echoes the same words of Nel from very long ago. Sula answers, “I got me”.42

Yet again, we are confronted with this concept of a “me”— once claimed by Nel in front of her

40 Morrison, Sula, 90. 41 Ibid, 145. 42 Ibid, 143. Valley Humanities Review Spring 2012 19

physical mirror, and now declared again by Sula in front of Nel, her metaphorical mirror. We are all too aware, however, that Morrison often undermines these notions of a whole identity or unified self. In Morrison’s world, there doesn’t seem to be any such central place of “me-ness” to arrive at. In Sula, we are only led to the conclusion that while it may be able to construct a self, there is never truly “a center…a speck around which to grow”.43

In order to re-examine contemporary female identity, Atwood and Morrison's texts demand that we also re-examine an unlikely motif: the mirror. When one truly “reflects” on the mirror’s history—its long association with vanity, self-consciousness and exclusionary constructions of the female self—its role in these contemporary novels becomes even more meaningful. The glass in these texts not only destabilizes historically restrictive conceptions of female identity, but in the process also critiques itself. Feminist theorists might be encouraged then, for contemporary literature has the potential to pull the mirror out of its oppressive past and restore it as something far more complicated. Now more than ever, what we learn from gazing into the mirrors of contemporary literature is that the glass does far more than simply reflect the image of the woman looking into it; rather, it serves as a gateway into a theoretical realm where we might continue to grapple with these ever-evolving conceptions of contemporary female identity. Just as our female protagonists often gaze into their mirrors with the hope of finding answers, we too might be wise to do the same.

43 Morrison, Sula, 119. Valley Humanities Review Spring 2012 20