Through the Looking Glass

Throughout the semester, we have seen authors use mirrors to represent a character’s sense of self, or to provide additional insight into their personality. Clarissa Dalloway ponders the various aspects of her identity and draws them together into a coherent self in front of a mirror. Jake reflects on his injury while standing in front of a looking glass. When Meursault looks into a mirror, he sees his surroundings but not his reflection. The image of a looking glass is repeated many times throughout Wide Sargasso Sea, and is often used to show tensions within a character.

Antoinette mentions twice that at Coulibri, her mother still “planned and hoped--perhaps she had to hope every time she passed a looking glass”. This portrait of Annette as someone with hopes and plans is not one that we see anywhere else. In the other descriptions of her, she is withdrawn from the world, walking along the glacis talking to herself and rejecting all attempts by Antoinette to reach out to her. Perhaps this line is meant to show that Annette’s mental state was not inevitable or caused by something innate to her personality, but rather brought on by external factors, and that her inner self is still very much human and capable of human emotions. This theme is one that continues to be important throughout the novel.

We also catch a glimpse of the conflict in Rochester’s personality through how he sees himself in a mirror directly after Antoinette gives him the love potion. “I got out of bed without looking at her, staggered into my dressing-room and saw myself in the glass. I turned away at once. I could not vomit. I only retched painfully.” Rochester had been trying to distance himself from Antoinette, having seen her as repulsive and destined for insanity since hearing from Daniel Cosway. However, when she explained her childhood and feelings to him, he started to relent, regretting how he had been treating her and even saying in retrospect that she would not have needed to use the love potion on him. Perhaps his inability to look for long in the mirror symbolizes the conflict between his actions and morals, and how although he had briefly felt more sympathetic towards Antoinette, he is not prepared for the soul-searching and inner strength it would take to reverse his course of action.

Of course, the character that Rhys reveals the most about through this device is Antoinette. Looking glasses are mentioned in connection to her six times over the course of the novel. The first is during the burning of Coulibri when Antoinette runs from her family to Tia, who throws a rock at her. “We stared at each other, blood on my face, tears on hers. It was as if I saw myself. Like in a looking-glass.” Antoinette is rejecting her Cosway identity and running into the mob, but they too do not accept her. Antoinette and Tia see each other as if the other was their own reflection, but there is at the same time a solid and impenetrable barrier between them.

The second time Antoinette talks about seeing herself in a looking glass is when she tells Rochester a story of a previous night at Granbois. Antoinette awoke in the middle of the night to see two gigantic rats in her room. “I could see myself in the looking-glass on the other side of the room, in my white chemise with a frill round the neck, staring at those rats and the rats quite still, staring at me”. This might be a little bit of a stretch, but I think Antoinette catches a glimpse of the future when she looks into the looking glass here. Her white chemise that she sees in the mirror symbolizes her current state of innocence, but the two rats that she is also watching represent her future self and Rochester. Rats are often symbols of betrayal and untrustworthiness, and this could be foreshadowing how their betrayals of each other will destroy Antoinette’s innocence and sense of self.

Twice in Part II, Rochester mentions Antoinette “smiling at herself in her looking-glass”. The first is shortly after they arrive at Granbois, and the second is as they are leaving, when he says that she will never “smile at herself in that damnable looking-glass” again. I think for Rochester, Antoinette’s reflection, like her name, is very much tied to her sense of self. At first when he accepts Antoinette, he finds these things charming. Later, however, he becomes determined to strip her personality and these representations of it away from her. Maybe he even sees her smile as another version of how everyone he encounters seems to be laughing at him. His use of the word “damnable” to describe the mirror at the end of Part II reflects this new violence towards Antoinette, and there is no mirror in the attic room in England where she goes by Bertha Mason.

For Antoinette as well, her reflection in a looking-glass is closely tied to sense of self. At the end of the novel, when she is considered mad by all those around her, she says “names matter, like when he wouldn’t call me Antoinette, and I saw Antoinette drifting out the window with her scents, her pretty clothes and her looking-glass. There is no looking-glass here and I don’t know what I am like now.” In class today we discussed whether or not Antoinette lost her soul at the end of the novel. Whether or not this is the case, she does seem to have lost a key part of her self. But the loss does not seem to be inevitable, nor her madness innate part of who she is. She is not like Meursault who looks in the mirror and sees nothing. Rochester has simply taken away her ability to look.