Book as Mirror, Mirror as Book: The Significance of the Looking-Glass in Contemporary Revisions of Fairy Tales

Content Provider	Semantic Scholar
Author	Schanoes, Veronica L.
Copyright Year	2009
Abstract	THE TRADITIONAL TALE OF SNOW WHITE AND HANS CHRISTIAN ANDERSEN'S "The Snow Queen" both revolve around a wicked queen who uses an enchanted looking-glass; Madame Leprince de Beaumont's Beast gives Beauty a magic mirror in which she can see what is happening at her father's home while she is in the Beast's castle. As important as they are in older tales, mirrors are even more integral to contemporary revisions of those tales by such writers as Angela Carter, Tanith Lee, and Terry Pratchett. Here, I examine the relationship between mirrors and the element of fantasy in revisions of fairy tales, using a few key fairy-tale revisions to argue that mirrors represent a form of fantastic tale closely identified with female power and creativity. Scholars such as Luce Irigaray and Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar have detailed the ways in which mirrors in literature can stand for entities hostile to women in general and to the female protagonist in particular, but I will be arguing here that in feminist revisions of fairy tales, the mirror reflects women's fantasies, experiences, and desires under conditions often hostile to their expression. In this way, mirrors not only represent fantasy stories in general, but also, according to my formulation, specifically stories of female fantasy, desire, and transformation. The historical association between femininity and the trope of the mirror is so strong that in her comprehensive and fascinating history of the mirror, Sabine Melchior-Bonnet asserts that "[f]emininity is a creation of the mirror" (214). Melchior-Bonnet is referring not merely to the artifice contemporary women are expected to employ in creating a socially acceptable "feminine" appearance, but to the ways in which a misogynist culture identifies the evils of womankind with the evils of the looking-glass: "From the thirteenth century on, Eve is depicted brandishing a mirror" (187, 200). Eve's connection with mirrors suggests the medieval emblem of vanitas, always depicted as a woman gazing at herself in a mirror. (1) This long association, however, tends to be one of derision and scorn for both women and their mirrors. As is so often the case, women are made scapegoats for failings common to both sexes as well as bearing the blame for living up to patriarchal views of their worth, by valuing their own beauty. In turn, then, many feminist critics have justifiably developed analyses that focus on the mirror's role in subjugating women. Writers representing two different schools of feminist criticism find in mirrors a perfect metaphor for patriarchal subordination of women. Gilbert and Gubar use the mirror as a figure for patriarchy, for women's oppression by men's ideals and fears. In their analysis of Snow White, they describe the mirror as "the patriarchal ... judgment that rules the Queen's--and every woman's-self-evaluation.... [H]aving assimilated the meaning of her own sexuality ... the woman has internalized the King's rules: his voice resides now in her own mirror, her own mind" (38). The mirror is "the male-inscribed literary text" in which she finds only "those eternal lineaments fixed on her like a mask to conceal her dreadful and bloody link to nature" (15). (2) Irigaray likewise invokes the mirror throughout her work for a number of purposes, but it is often negative: in "The Looking Glass, from the Other Side," a woman on the other side of the mirror describes herself as stuck, paralyzed, and frozen; in Speculum of the Other Woman, Irigaray argues that men have used women as mirrors in order to validate their own worth, each man making "her into a reflection of himself, thereby denying her a subjectivity of her own ... [Women] must liberate themselves from negative definitions and mirror functions and start to assign a positive subjectivity to themselves" (54). (3) But the mirror has the potential to fulfill far more positive functions for women as well. Just as fairy tales, dismissed by readers of "serious literature" because of their association with female tellers and women's concerns are being reclaimed and retold by contemporary feminist writers, so too is the mirror, associated with sinful women, being reclaimed by those same writers as a potential source of power, self-creation, and magic. …
Starting Page	5
Ending Page	5
Page Count	1
File Format	PDF HTM / HTML
Volume Number	20
Alternate Webpage(s)	http://www.gproxx.com/http://blogxd.info/dspace/uk/p_xaw_muwev.pdf
Alternate Webpage(s)	http://blogttn.info/dspace/rh/vogym.pdf
Language	English
Access Restriction	Open
Content Type	Text
Resource Type	Article