And still she sits, young while the earth is old,
And, subtly of her self contemplative,
Draws men to watch the bright web she can weave,
Till heart and body and life are in its hold.¹

If Rossetti's Lilith looks only, speculatively, at her own image in the mirror, she also looks self-consciously aware of the looks of all those men whom she draws by her indifference into her fatal net. Rossetti's source here is that text from Goethe which he translated:

Hold thou thy heart against her shining hair,
If, by thy fate, she spread it once for thee;
For, when she nets a young man in that snare,
So twines she him he never may be free.
("Lilith—from Göthe," W, p. 541)

Lilith's mirroring of herself and our fatal mirroring of ourselves in the painting are doubled by the mirror imaged on the canvas. Moreover, the painting mirrors a Victorian Pre-Raphaelite boudoir, and also Rossetti's feelings about Fanny Cornforth. The painting, in addition, mirrors the poem, "Body's Beauty," Sonnet 78 of The House of Life, of which it is an "illustration." Or is it the other way around, the poem a "caption" for the painting? Ultimately, both poem and painting are mirrors of, mirrored by, other works, echoing before and after, works in painting and in poetry by Rossetti himself, and multitudinous works in a complex tradition—graphic, literary, and philosophical—going back to the Bible and to the Greeks, in one direction, and forward, to our day, for example to John Hollander's admirable The Head of the Bed. In this tangled network of relations, "Mirror on mirror mirrored is all the show."²

These mirrorings are all, however, in one way or another odd, ambiguous, subversive, irrational. The mirrored image undoes what seeks its image there. Each mirrored image is somehow different from the exact reflection which tells the truth unequivocally, as when I look at my face in the mirror in the morning. There I am, as I am. "I am that I am." The mirror tells me so. I suffice to myself, like God. Or do I?

Far from producing an emblem of such fullness and completion, image matching image, Lilith's subtle contemplation of herself weaves a net, and behind the net there is a gulf. Into this abyss the men she fascinates will fall. This gulf is that "orchard pit" which was Rossetti's constant dream, that ugly ditch beside the apple tree with the Lilith or Siren figure in the crotch of its branches, offering a fatal apple and a fatal kiss. Why is it that when we men contemplate not ourselves in the mirror but our incongruous other self, a desirable woman contemplating herself, our own integrity is mutilated, destroyed?

Men tell me that sleep has many dreams; but all my life I have dreamt one dream alone.

I see a glen whose sides slope upward from the deep bed of a dried-up stream, and either slope is covered with wild apple-trees. In the largest tree, within the fork whence the limbs divide, a fair, golden-haired woman stands and sings, with one white arm stretched along a branch of the tree, and with the other holding forth a bright red apple, as if to some one coming down the slope. Below her feet the trees grow more and more tangled, and stretch from both sides across the deep pit below: and the pit is full of the bodies of men.

They lie in heaps beneath the screen of boughs, with her apples bitten in their hands; and some are no more than ancient bones now, and some seem dead but yesterday. She stands over them in the glen, and sings for ever, and offers her apple still. ("The Orchard Pit," W, pp. 607-608)

If Lady Lilith mirrors Fanny Cornforth and a certain kind of Victorian decor (its furniture, costume, and psychosocial structures, its domestic economy), this mimetism is peculiar, since this Victorian boudoir, with its mirror, double candlestick, cosmetic bottle, chest, and settee, seems to be out of doors. What is mirrored in the mirror on the wall is not an interior but an exterior woodland scene, a scene of branches going from left to right matching in reverse Lilith's tresses, which spread from right to left. The branches duplicate themselves in smaller and smaller repetitions out to invisibility in a mise en abîme. The scene in the mirror is in fact the orchard pit. Or is the mirror a window? No, it cannot be so, since the roses and the candles are reflected there. How odd, however, that the Lady Lilith should be combing her hair outdoors, surrounded by all those bedroom appurtenances and by roses and poppies which might be either inside or out. In Eden there was no inside or out, but this scene is the diabolical mirror image of Eden, as Lilith is of Eve.

The confusion of interior and exterior, mirror and window, is characteristic of all that art Walter Pater called "aesthetic." In such art, nature has been made over into the images of art, and those images made over once more, at a double remove. As Pater puts it in a splendid formulation:

Greek poetry, medieval or modern poetry, projects, above the realities of its time, a world in which the forms of things are transfigured. Of that transfigured world this new poetry takes possession, and sublimates beyond it another still fainter and more spectral, which is literally an artificial or "earthly paradise." It is a finer ideal, extracted from what in relation to any actual world is already an ideal. Like some strange second flowering after date, it renews on a more delicate type the poetry of a past age, but must not be confounded with it. The secret of the enjoyment of it is that inversion of home-sickness known to some, that incurable thirst for the sense of escape, which no actual form of life satisfies, no poetry even, if it be merely simple and spontaneous.³

In "aesthetic" poetry and painting even the most meticulously naturalistic scene, in what Pater calls, apropos of Rossetti, an "insanity of realism" (p. 209), is emblematic. Such a scene is absorbed into a spiritualized human interior, inside and outside at once, since the distinction, uneasily, no longer exists, just as the distinction between the spiritual and material no longer exists. To go outside is not to be outside but to remain claustrophobically enclosed, and the interior is no safe enclosure. It is exposed to the dangers of a fatal encounter. The orchard pit is within and without at once, just as the window in Sir John Everett Millais' Mariana (an illustration of Tennyson's "Mariana") is also a mirror of her state, and just as the same ambiguity functions in the mirror of Tennyson's "The Lady of Shalott," in this case illustrated by Holman Hunt. Pater, with his characteristic genius as a critic, has once more provided a definitive formulation of this aspect of Rossetti's work:

With him indeed, as in some revival of the old mythopoeic age, common things—dawn, noon, night—are full of human or personal expression, full of sentiment. The lovely little sceneries scattered up and down his poems, glimpses of a landscape, not indeed of broad open-air effects, but rather that of a painter concentrated upon the picturesque effect of one or two selected objects at a time—the "hollow brimmed with mist," or the "ruined weir," as he sees it from one of the windows, or reflected in one of the mirrors of his "house of life" (the vignettes for instance seen by Rose Mary in the magic beryl) attest, by their very freshness and simplicity, to a pictorial or descriptive power in dealing with the inanimate world, which is certainly also one half of the charm, in that other, more remote and mystic, use of it. For with Rossetti this sense of lifeless nature, after all, is translated to a higher service, in which it does but incorporate itself with some phase of strong emotion. Every one understands how this may happen at critical moments of life; what a weirdly expressive soul may have crept, even in full noonday, into "the white-flower'd elder-thicket," when Godiva saw it "gleam through the Gothic archways in the wall," at the end of her terrible ride [Tennyson, "Godiva"]. To Rossetti it is so always, because to him life is a crisis at every moment (pp. 532-533).

What that "crisis" is, cutting off before from after, and dividing the moment too within itself, and what feeling every moment as a crisis has to do with this particular version of the pathetic fallacy, remains to be identified. Window or mirror, as Pater has seen, are means to the same vision. What is seen there is natural, human, and spiritual, all at once. The framed image is always, as Pater's brilliantly chosen quotations from Rossetti indicate, some version of the orchard pit, the "hollow brimmed with mist," the "ruined weir," or that maelstrom into which the lovers are swept in the poetic fragment of "The Orchard-Pit":

My love I call her, and she loves me well:
But I love her as in the maelstrom's cup
The whirled stone loves the leaf inseparable
That clings to it round all the circling swell,
And that the same last eddy swallows up.
(W, p. 240)

In "Lady Lilith" the mirroring of a boudoir which turns out to be an abyssal wood of storm-tossed branches also mirrors the reflection of Lilith in her hand-held mirror. Though the back of that mirror is turned toward the spectator, the image in the mirror on the wall tells him what chasm is no doubt pictured there behind the screen of reflected hair. This chasm is imaged over and over throughout Rossetti's work by way of displaced figures in the "outside" framed in a window or in a mirror.

The other mirrorings are equally alogical. The relation between Rossetti's painting and his poetry is asymmetrical, skewed. This is true not in the sense that one overtly contradicts the other, but in the sense that each exceeds the other, however deliberately they may be matched, as in the case of Lady Lilith and "Body's Beauty." Each says more or less than the other, and says it differently, in ways which have only in part to do with the differences of medium. Either may be taken as the "original" of which the other is the "illustration" or the explanatory poetic "superscription," writing on top of another graphic form. This relation does not depend, of course, on the chronology of Rossetti's actual creation of the two works in question. In each case, however, the secondary version in the other medium is always in one way or another a travesty, a misinterpretation, a distorted image in the mirror of the other art.

The relation to "the tradition" of the double, self-subversive work of art is, once more, a false mirroring. Whether one takes the more immediate context of Rossetti's other work or, as does John Dixon Hunt in The Pre-Raphaelite Imagination, the wider context of Pre-Raphaelite work generally, or Rossetti's relation to his immediate predecessors, Shelley and Tennyson, or the relation of his work to the whole Western tradition, this relation of work to context, as the passage from Pater quoted above suggests, is not a straightforward copying, continuation, or reflection. It is a strange second flowering after date, a sublimation or rarefaction which is also a swerving, a distortion.

Nonetheless, this subversive mirroring is already part of the tradition, traditional even in Plato or Milton, however much that deconstructive mirroring may have been apparently suppressed. "Aesthetic" poetry was already a part, though sometimes a secret part, of "ancient" and "modern" poetry. Pater's chronology of the development of Western poetry in fact describes a synchronic tension within it among patterns which may not be reconciled in any synthesis, dialectic, or historical movement. Rossetti's false mirroring of the tradition does but tell a secret which is already there, everywhere within that "tradition," but often hidden.

What is the secret that the distorting mirror always tells and keeps? Loss. All Rossetti's work is haunted by an experience of devastating loss. That loss has always already occurred or is about to occur or is occurring, in memory or in anticipation within the divided moment. It occurs proleptically, antileptically, metaleptically, the feared future standing for the already irrevocable past, and vice versa, in a constant far-fetching reversal of late and early. The longed-for future may not be. The poet of "The Stream's Secret" knows or is told by the mirroring stream that it may not be. The past was disastrous, even if it held moments of joy. Those moments have passed, their joy turned into the desolation of their loss. "What whisper'st thou?" the poet asks that moving and murmuring, mirroring stream:

Nay, why
Name the dead hours? I mind them well:
Their ghosts in many darkened doorways dwell
With desolate eyes to know them by.
("The Stream's Secret," W, p. 114)

The loss in question is experienced perpetually in that everlasting moment of crisis (in the etymological sense of division) in which the mind dwells. Of that division the mind makes an emblem in those natural scenes glimpsed through a window or reflected in a mirror. These scenes in turn become human figures which then become those personified abstractions, Life, Death, Time, and so on, which populate, as Pater observed, Rossetti's work. These personifications constitute in their humanized particularity the "insanity of realism" in Rossetti. "And this delight in concrete definition," says Pater, "is allied with another of his conformities to Dante, the really imaginative vividness, namely, of his personifications—his hold upon them, or rather their hold upon him, with the force of a Frankenstein, when once they have taken life from him. Not Death only and Sleep, for instance, and the winged spirit of Love, but certain particular aspects of them, a whole 'populace' of special hours and places, 'the hour' even 'which might have been, yet might not be,' are living creatures, with hands and eyes and articulate voices" (Pater, "Dante Gabriel Rossetti," p. 531).

These personifications result from a process miming the progressive sublimation of aesthetic poetry. They are a further refinement of what is already a transfigured or humanized nature. Their meaning is always some aspect of that absolute loss which is exacerbated, always, by having almost been its opposite, like a swimmer who almost makes the shore and then is swept away:

Look in my face; my name is Might-have-been;
I am also called No-more, Too-late, Farewell;
Unto thine ear I hold the dead-sea shell
Cast up thy Life's foam-fretted feet between;
Unto thine eyes the glass where that is seen
Which had Life's form and Love's, but by my spell
Is now a shaken shadow intolerable,
Of ultimate things unuttered the frail screen.
("A Superscription," W, p. 107)

The figure in the glass, "Might-have-been," is one's own face, just as Pater's metonymic "mistake" in naming the monster with the name of its creator catches accurately the relation between Doctor Frankenstein and his creature, the made making and unmaking the maker. Rossetti's personifications keep their hold upon him because they are figures for himself. All those persons, personifications, and scenes—the orchard pit, the ruined weir, the stormy branches—are one's own face in the mirror, caught in the eternal moment of crisis as the confrontation of a perpetual loss.

Loss of what? Loss as such, total and irrevocable. Absence. To name this loss one's own death or (fear of) castration, or the confrontation with the woman who has (or who does not have) the phallus (Lilith as snake), or the death of the beloved, or that betrayal by the beloved which is always the story of love for Rossetti, is only to conjure one more shadow in the glass, one more frail screen, like all the other images in Rossetti, for "ultimate things unuttered," and, in any literal way. unutterable. It is as if I looked in the mirror and saw nothing there, or were to see an image which is not myself but a figure of my absence or of my incompletion.

Precisely this happens in a little poem, "The Mirror." Here the poet's failure to find a reciprocating feeling in the lady he loves is imaged as the unsettling experience of seeing what he thinks is his own image in a distant mirror and then finding it is not himself, so that he is for the moment imageless:

She knew it not:—most perfect pain
To learn: this too she knew not. Strife
For me, calm hers, as from the first.
'Twas but another bubble burst
Upon the curdling draught of life,—
My silent patience mine again.
As who, of forms that crowd unknown
Within a distant mirror's shade,
Deems such an one himself, and makes
Some sign; but when the image shakes
No whit, he finds his thought betray'd,
And must seek elsewhere for his own.
("The Mirror," W, p. 194)

"For his own": the phrase has a straightforward enough grammatical ellipsis and yet, dangling uncompleted in the open as it does at the end of the poem, possessive adjective without a noun, it shimmers with alternative possibilities. He must seek elsewhere for his own image, and the missing noun mimes the absence of what the speaker seeks. As the logic of the figurative relation between first and second stanzas affirms, however, his missing image is a trope for the female counterpart who would complete him. Her absence or indifference, her failure to match feeling with his feeling, is in turn a figure for something missing in himself. It is as if for Rossetti "the mirror stage" were not the discovery of one's self (the Ideal-Ich) in the mirror but the discovery of a vacancy there, an empty glass.

The structure of "The Mirror" is "the same" as that in "Body's Beauty." In fact, all Rossetti's work consists of two intersubjective patterns, a desired one "which might have been, yet might not be," and its asymmetrical mirror image, which always and irrevocably exists. This double intersubjective structure is, like all such models, with difficulty distinguished, if it may be distinguished at all, from a solipsistic relation of the self to itself. The Other, however totally other, is still experienced as part of myself or as something I wish were part of myself. In "Willowwood," the four-sonnet sequence within The House of Life, Love grants the Narcissus-like poet the privilege of kissing his beloved's lips. These rise to meet his lips at the surface of a "woodside well": "her own lips rising there / Bubbled with brimming kisses at my mouth" (W, p. 91). It is a phantom kiss, though, and of course he kisses his own imaged lips.

The desired side of this mismatched pair of patterns is expressed in "The Stream's Secret." It is a wish for future joy, the Might-still-be which stands as a future anterior for Might-have-been. This Might-still-be remains always Not-quite-yet. The mirror, which has been vacant of any images but hollow shadows of unful-filled desire, will (or will never) become suddenly full, the reflection of a double, completed image. The lovers, in this impossible imaginary encounter, will view their joint image in the stream's mirror and then, no longer needing the mediation of any mirror, will look only in one another's eyes:

So, in that hour of sighs
Assuaged, shall we beside this stone
Yield thanks for grace; while in thy mirror shown
The twofold image softly lies,
Until we kiss, and each in other's eyes
Is imaged all alone.

Still silent? Can no art
Of Love's then move thy pity?
("The Stream's Secret," W, p. 117)

The stream is still silent and does not tell Love's secret, since there is no secret to tell. The mirror's secret is that there is no secret. "Love's Hour," the hour when "she and I shall meet … stands … not by the door" (p. 117), however much the poet strains to believe that it does. The ultimate things unuttered are here and now, on the surface of the stream's mirror, not at the bottom of some abysmal depth. The stream will always remain vacant of any twofold image. Instead there is always, as the present without presence of crisis, the contrary image there. This image is the incongruous double of the desired one. It is the pattern, in fact, of "Willowwood," or, altered, of "Body's Beauty," or, in a different form, of "The Mirror," or, in a different form again, of "The Portrait," or, different still, of "Love's Nocturn." In this antithetical system, I look in the mirror and see not my own image but that of my female counterpart who looks not at me but at herself, subtly of herself contemplative, or, as in "The Portrait," I see her image still remaining after her death. This death is experienced, uncannily, as if my own image should remain in the mirror when I was no longer standing before it:

This is her picture as she was:
It seems a thing to wonder on,
As though mine image in the glass
Should tarry when myself am gone.
("The Portrait," W, p. 169)

In "Love's Nocturn," the counterstructure takes the form of the poet's imagining that he meets his own image "face to face," as he is "groping in the windy stair" leading down to the place where all dreams are.⁴ That image he would send to his lady's sleep, but he fears another image already usurps his place. His image must return then to the dream-fosse, having enjoyed one kiss not of the lady's lips but of their reflection in her mirror:

Like a vapour wan and mute,
Like a flame, so let it pass;
One low sigh across her lute,
One dull breath against her glass;
And to my sad soul, alas!
One salute
Cold as when Death's foot shall pass.
("Love's Nocturn," W, p. 72)

I have emphasized the differences among all these versions of the counter-pattern not only to confirm what I said earlier about the relation of incongruity between any work and the context it "mirrors," even the immediate context of other work by the same maker, but also to suggest that this counter-pattern always manifests itself differently. More precisely, each of its exemplars must be aberrant and none must be governed by an archetype. This pattern denies the existence of any archetype or model, the exact repetition of which might turn loss into completion. Ultimately, this structure may never be fixed in a definitive version, any more than Rossetti's personified beings, Love, Death, Sleep, and so on, may be systematized into a coherent counter-theology. Against this perpetually wandering structure is always set the primary structure of lover and beloved meeting face to face in a perfect match.

"Structure" here is a misleading term, not only because of its currently fashionable resonances, and not only because it does not cover all that is in question here, but because, like any possible term, it begs the questions it should keep open. It reinstates the metaphysical or "logocentric" assumptions that this "double triangle" dismantles. This "structure," "system," or "figure," this "emblem," "hieroglyph," "polygram," or "multigraph," is a complexity that cannot be unified. It remains incoherent or heterogeneous, always doubled and redoubled in repetitions that subvert rather than reinforce. Its heterogeneity lies not only in its resistance to conceptual unification or logical interpretation, but in its combining in an uneasy mélange: concept ("speculation"); figures of speech (the mirror image as image for image); figures, in the sense of persons in their relations (those reflected in the mirror); graphic or representational elements (the mirror itself, the Pre-Raphaelite woman, her landscape); and narrative material (the story of disastrous love Rossetti always tells). How can one name this except reductively, or in a figure that refigures the problem?

Perhaps Rossetti's own final figure for a sonnet, combining as it does graphic and verbal elements, might do best. Having called the sonnet a "moment's monument," carved "in ivory or in ebony," with "flowering crest impearled and orient," like some ornate coat of arms, picture and words combined, he defines the sonnet, in the sestet of his sonnet about the sonnet, as a coin. The obverse and converse of this coin combine a double, simultaneous orientation toward the experiences of the self or "soul" and toward that unnameable power, or absence of power, "Life," "Love," "Death," that governs the Soul. It is the coin itself, the double work of art—not the soul which one side of it reveals—which is, in all senses of the idiom, "due to" the Power. If the coin's face "reveals / The Soul," the "Power" is that unutterable thing of which the coin's converse is the revelation. At the same time, the converse acts as a frail screen protecting the Soul from that revelation. Or perhaps one might better say that it is the dumb silver of metal between which keeps obverse and converse, Soul and Power, apart, both for good and for ill:

A Sonnet is a coin: its face reveals
The Soul,—its converse, to what Power 'tis due:—
Whether for tribute to the august appeals
Of Life, or dower in Love's high retinue,
It serve; or, 'mid the dark wharf's cavernous breath,
In Charon's palm it pay the toll to Death.
("Introductory Sonnet," W, p. 74)

A final, concentrated "example" of this double-faced coin is "Memorial Thresholds." This poem substitutes doorway for window or mirror and proposes two possibilities: that the threshold remain permanently vacant, or that it be filled once more, in the memorial reduplication of a déjà vu, with the form of the beloved. Here, she is imagined as having once actually stood in the same doorway somewhere, of which the new threshold is a repetition:

City, of thine a single simple door,
By some new Power reduplicate, must be
Even yet my life-porch in eternity,

Even with one presence filled, as once of yore:
Òr mocking winds whirl round a chaff-strown floor
Thee and thy years and these my words and me.
("Memorial Thresholds," W, p. 101)

Why is it that the doorway, in Rossetti's numismatics of art, remains always empty? What is the meaning of the discovery that the mirror's secret is its vacancy? A placing of Rossetti's double-pattern of presence mirrored by absence in relation to the long tradition of such doublings may help to unriddle the secret of this secret. My discussion must be brief and incomplete because there would be no end to the labyrinthine wanderings of the critic who attempted the absurd task of a topographical mapping of all the "ways and days" intricately interwoven in this topos of the memorial threshold, window, or glass.

The places within this place would include: the glasses of the Apostle Paul in First and Second Corinthians, with their echo of Genesis, a passage in 1 James (1.21-25); the paradigm of the mirror in Book 10 of The Republic and the mirror in Sophist (239d); the speech of Aristophanes in The Symposium; the Narcissus story in Ovid's Metamorphoses; the great passage on "Speculation" in the interchange between Ulysses and Achilles in Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida; Eve's admiration of her own image in Book 4 of Paradise Lost; passages in Rossetti's more imediate predecessors, such as Shelley's "Alastor" and "Epipsychidion"; the Fuseli of so many nightmarish doors, windows, and mirrors; Tennyson's "Mariana" and "The Lady of Shalott." Finally, among Rossetti's contemporaries or successors, there would be: George Meredith, who recapitulates and reinterprets the interplay between Ovid and Milton, Narcissus and Adam, in The Egoist; Baudelaire's Dandy who "doit vivre et dormir devant un miroir";⁵ Whistler's The Little White Girl and Swinburne's poem on this painting, "Before the Mirror"; Mallarmé's Herodiade; a splendid passage at the beginning of Thomas Hardy's Far From the Madding Crowd; Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray; Yeats's "Ribh Denounces Patrick"; all those mirrors in Picasso; the eerily uncanny moment in Freud's "Das Unheimliche" when he sees his own image in a mirror but does not recognize it as his own, and detests it (the reverse of the pattern in Rossetti's "The Mirror," where the image is not his own); Benjamin's essay on the photograph and the loss of aura in Baudelaire;⁶ Beardsley's illustrations for Belinda's toilet in The Rape of the Lock; and lastly all those paradigmatic mirrors of our own day, in Jacques Lacan's "The Mirror Stage," or in Luce Irigaray's Speculum of the other woman, an investigation in part of the whole tradition of the mirror-structure from Plato to Freud as it bears on the question of the male interpretation of sexual difference.⁷

This seemingly diverse and miscellaneous set of references, discontinuous points in the sky of Western culture, are in fact rigorously organized into a repeated constellation, or rather a double constellation, a Gestaltist duck-rabbit, like that big dipper which is either Charles's wain or the great bear, depending on how one looks at it. In all these texts, a complex asymmetrical structure is present in one form or another, in one degree or another of completion of explicit expression. Indeed, this structure is "fundamental" in all Western "thought" and "literature," in the sense that it both affirms and endangers any fundament or ground. The structure involves a pair which becomes potentially subverted by a triangular relation among three persons or images, though it remains precariously balanced. This stable triangle is then incongruously mirrored in another triangle which parodies it and so undermines its stability.

This complex structure is the speculative as such, the reflective or the theoretical, the positing, hypothetically, as an image, of what may be seen and known, in a movement of thinking and seeing which is also a working or making. This movement goes out from itself in order to strive to return to itself in a confirmation of itself by way of an other which is or should be the perfect image of itself, not really other than itself. Even God, it seems, cannot know himself until he has gone outside himself and so can see himself outside himself.⁸ Speculation (from speculum, mirror), theory (theoria, seeing, as in "theatrical"), art or poetry (poesis, making), and imitation (mimesis, miming, as in the great mirror/doorway scene in the Marx brothers' Duck Soup)—all come together in the crisscross of reflections in the mirror of this double paradigm.

The pattern of completion within this paradigm is the perfect mirroring of one male figure by another, by its own image in the glass. To the speculative, the theoretical, the poetic, and the mimetic can be added the self-generating, self-sustaining, and constantly self-transcending relation of the dialectical as another name for this system of reflections. The image of the mirrored and mirroring pair, in the tradition of this motif, oscillates between being the mirroring of male by male, in perfect match, Narcissus completing his own image is the pool, and being the mirroring of male by female, in another form of perfect matching, concave matching convex, as in the androgynous couple in Aristophanes' speech in The Symposium.

My focus here will be on a version of this paradigm which in one way or another adds a third figure, Echo in the Narcissus story, the fascinated male watching the woman who is subtly of herself contemplative in Rossetti's poem, or, as in a novel by a male author with a female protagonist, the intimate relation of indirect discourse in which a male narrator follows the thoughts and feelings of the heroine as she thinks about herself, as in the chapter of "Clara's Meditations" in Meredith's The Egoist.

Such a triangle remains stable, a sure support for ontological ground, only so long as it is all male or only so long as the female is defined as the adequate "image" of the male, a case of good rather than bad mimesis. An example of the all-male triangle is the Trinity: Father, Son, and Holy Ghost; the One, his filial image, and the relation between them; or God, his perfect image, the Son, and that creation fabricated by God in the image of the Son, so that the world as a whole and every part of it separately has the countenance of God and is signed with his genuine signature. An example of the second would be the definition of Eve in Paradise Lost as created in the image of Adam, who is in turn created in the image of God: "He for God only. She for God in him."

The female as third, however, or, more dangerously yet, as the doubled pair watched by a male spectator, the woman as two out of three, always introduces the possibility of a mismatching, a deflection of the closed circuit of reflections. The female, according to a sexist tradition going back to Plato and Aristotle, is an imperfect male, missing one member. The female introduces the deconstructing absence, the perpetual too little or too much that makes it impossible for the balance to come right and so keeps the story going, whether it is the story of an unassuaged desire which Rossetti always tells, or whether it is the story of thought which that love story tropologically represents. Theoretically, the woman opens up the triangle beyond any hope of closing it again or of filling the gap. This gap is the echoing cavern where false images are, that place of shades and shadows, for example, in Rossetti's "Love's Nocturn" which doubles the real bodies of men, "as echoes of man's speech / Far in secret clefts are made" (W, p. 71).

It should be clear now, as clear as one's own face in the glass, what this double triangle of mirrored images in Rossetti "means." Or is it? The double triangle records the moment of confrontation with the loss of the Logos—head sense or patron of meaning, caption. Its meaning is the absence of meaning, decapitation, decollation. God in speculation looks at himself in the mirror of the world, having engendered his material counterpart, the creation, by way of his mirror image, the Son. Man, too, along with the rest of the world, is "in the image of God created," as Lilith says sardonically in Rossetti's "Eden Bower" (W, p. 110). Man, then, in imitation of God, as God's mimic or mime, looks in the mirror and sees a sister-image there that does not fit him. Or, in the version of this that has been my interest here, the male writer or artist takes an interest in the situation of the female who looks in the mirror and discovers her lack, the missing man, as when Tennyson's Mariana says, finally, "He will not come." This interest in what is more than or different from himself becomes, for such a male artist, fascination. It is fascination by a plus-value which in the end leads to the loss of all in spend-thrift speculation.

The prolonged instant of specular fascination, drawing the male spectator into the abyss, is a version of what I call "the linguistic moment." This is the moment when signs are cut off from any extralinguistic grounding and become fascinating in themselves, in their self-sustaining and self-annihilating interplay. The momentum of this moment may make it an eternal instant. It becomes the prolonged, persisting time of poise or lack in a present which is no present. It has no presence, since it engages the signs of something missing, that is, signs as such. The sign by definition is the presence of an absence. There is nothing beyond such a moment. It cannot be gone beyond in any dialectical or speculative Aufhebung. It remains balanced interminably in sterile repetition, in a horrible parody of the self-engendering and self-mirroring of God.

The specular encounter, when the male looks in the mirror and does not find his image there, does not even find the answering look of his female counterpart, but sees a woman seeing herself, is the linguistic moment. In this moment occurs the dismantling of that male speculative system which ought to lead to absolute knowledge of the self by itself. Possession becomes dispossession; appropriation, expropriation. The male is entangled in the web of Lady Lilith's hair, drawn by the Siren in the tree into the Orchard Pit, put into a perpetual state of Might-have-been or Might-yet-be. What he writes or paints thereafter is constructed over the abyss of his loss, as Rossetti rescued the manuscript of The House of Life from his self-slain wife's coffin. He had put the manuscript just between her cheek and her hair. Such writing is without ground, like the words whirled by the mocking wind round a chaff-strewn floor in "Memorial Thresholds," in a repetition of the failure of poetic language at the end of Shelley's "Epipsychidion." As in the case of the imagined long love embrace in "The Stream's Secret," the linguistic moment suspends things over the gulf of their absence, as a matter of Might-have-been and Might-yet-be but never Is-now. The Now is an empty mirror, a stream that tells no secrets.

The speculative moment of fullness and its subversive counterpart are necessary to one another. Each implies the other and is surreptitiously present in any of its expressions. Nevertheless, they may not be combined or reconciled in any way, dialectically or otherwise. Rather, they set up in their relation an ungovernable oscillation that inhibits thought from proceeding, short-circuiting it in a feedback phenomenon. One finds oneself in a double blind-alley of thinking and feeling in which one cannot decide which corridor to take, since each corridor leads, manifestly, to a blank wall. Aesthetic art, the art of Rossetti and the Pre-Raphaelites generally, is, as Pater says, an art which satisfies that strange inversion of homesickness known to some, the desire to get as far away from home, from the "real world," as possible. Home, for Rossetti, figures death, the Orchard Pit. Therefore anyone would wish to escape from it into a world of shadows or of signs referring to prior signs, for example, into that poetry about poetry or strange second flowering after date Pater describes. The world of shadows or of signs, however, lies in the pit. Lilith and her counterparts in Rossetti's work draw men, precisely, into a realm of shadows. Either way, you have had it. The Medusa face of Rossetti's woman, since she draws her power from the annihilating energy of signs, is equally fatal in face-to-face or in mirrored encounter.

To mention Medusa is to remember Freud's "Medusa's Head" and "The Taboo of Virginity."⁹ According to Freud, the male fears equally that the female will or will not possess the phallus. For Lacan, the phallus is not the penis, but what the penis stands for, the head or source of meaning, and therefore the grounding of the interplay among signs. The double horror of the phallic female makes up an essential part of the mirror structure I am discussing here. It is present, for example, in Herodias' image of herself as a reptile, in Mallarmé's poem, and in the terror that her own hair inspires in her. It is present as one moment in John Hollander's splendid version of the Lilith story in Canto 7 of The Head of the Bed:

He dared not move
Toward her one leg, toward her covered places
Lest he be lost at once, staring at where
Lay, bared in the hardened moonlight, a stump
Pearly and smooth, a tuft of forest grass.¹⁰

The emblem of the girl with the penis is present in Rossetti, too, in the Lilith of "Eden Bower," who whispers to the snake: "To thee I come when the rest is over; / A snake was I when thou wast my lover. / I was the fairest snake in Eden" (W, p. 109), or in the monumental figure of Mnemosyne. In Rossetti's painting, the shape and position of Mnemosyne's lamp mime an erect phallus. Rossetti's caption for the painting calls attention to the winged mobility of this oddly shaped lamp: "Thou fill'st from the winged chalice of the soul / Thy lamp, O Memory, fire-winged to its goal" (W, p. 229). The doubleness here is the double-ness of the two-faced coin: the soul, on the one hand, and the source of energy for the activity of memory on the other hand. The relation between soul and memory is that coming and going, toward the past, toward the future, in a perpetual interchange moving toward a "goal" it never reaches, by way of a recollection of the permanent "Might-have-been yet might not be."

In Rossetti's version of the game of "Phallus, Phallus, who's got the Phallus?," the balance among a set of alternating possibilities never comes right. There is always one too many or one too few, not enough to go around, or one left over. This always leaves an Old Maid, or a Wild Card that governs the game but remains outside it, always somewhere else, neither King nor Queen, but Jack of Displacement. If the woman does not have the phallus, there is no ground. If she has it, she must have it as phantasm, as shadow, as that which is never where it is, hence there is no ground. If she has none, then I do, or do I? If she has one, then I must, mustn't I? If she does, then I don't. She's got it. If she doesn't, then I don't, or fear I may not. Either way, I've had it, or haven't had it, in a constant oscillation of possession and dispossession which can never be stilled into a stable, motionless system.

The Medusa solidifies me, turns me to stone, and so, as Freud says, I have no loss to fear. On the other hand, as he also says, my petrifaction is my horror at my confrontation of an absence, and so I fall into the Orchard Pit. On the one hand, art may be the result of the Medusa's effect, a fixed thing in language or in graphic form of what can then safely be confronted in mirror images or in the shadows of art. This submission to the Medusa is both good and bad, both true and false art, undecidably. On the other hand, art may itself be the Medusa's head that petrifies and makes permanent the flowing and the soft, so that Mnemosyne stands there permanently for the beholder safely to see, as though she were reflected in a mirror. This in its turn is both good and bad, both submission to the Lilith figure and triumph over her.

The uncanniness of the double mirroring structure lies in this permanent undecidability. Does the art of poetry which presents this system induce a loss? Does it force me as spectator to submit to Lilith's snare? Or does it ward off this loss apotropaically? Does it serve as a frail screen keeping me from unutterable things? Does it save me by mirroring the Medusa or the Lilith figure, freezing her in the double mirror of an art which moves back and forth from painting to poetry in a play of reflections which does not stay still long enough to be caught? There is no way to tell. It is always both and neither. The mirror keeps its secret to the end.

Medusa, it happens, is present as such in Rossetti's work, present as a double work of art in which picture and verse give form once more to all that double system, the two-faced coin of the mirror motif in Rossetti. This double work of art expresses once more the double attitude toward that double system I have tried to catch. With the final ambiguous admonition of "Aspecta Medusa"—against seeing, against theory, and in praise of mirror images—I shall end:

Andromeda, by Perseus saved and wed,
Hankered each day to see the Gorgon's head:
Till o'er a fount he held it, bade her lean,
And mirrored in the wave was safely seen
That death she lived by.
Let not thine eyes know
Any forbidden thing itself, although
It once should save as well as kill: but be
Its shadow upon life enough for thee.
(W, p. 209)

Notes

¹ Dante Gabriel Rossetti, "Body's Beauty," ll. 5-8, Sonnet 78, The House of Life in Works, ed. William M. Rossetti (London, 1911), p. 100. Further citations will be from this edition, identified as W, followed by the page number.

² William Butler Yeats, "The Statues," l. 22, Collected Poems (London, 1950), p. 323.

³ Walter Pater, "Aesthetic Poetry," in Walter Pater: Three Major Texts, ed. William E. Buckler (New York, 1986), p. 520.

⁴ See A. Dwight Culler's excellent discussion of Rossetti's motifs of the windy and winding stair: "The Windy Stair: An Aspect of Rossetti's Poetic Symbolism," Ventures Magazine 9, no. 2 (1969): 65-75.

⁵ Charles Baudelaire, Oeuvres Complètes (Paris, 1961), p. 1273.

⁶ Walter Benjamin, "Über einige Motive bei Baudelaire, " in Illuminationem (Frankfurt am Main, 1969), pp. 201-245; trans. Harry Zohn, "On Some Motifs in Baudelaire," in Illuminations (New York, 1969), pp. 155-200.

⁷ See Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the other woman, trans. Gillian C. Gill (Ithaca, 1985); and Jacques Lacan, "The mirror stage as formative of the function of the 'I,'" in Écrits, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York, 1977), pp. 1-7.

⁸ For the Hegelian recapitulation of this movement of speculation and the word-play it involves, see Jean-Luc Nancy, La remarque spéculative (Paris, 1973).

⁹ Sigmund Freud, "Medusa's Head," trans. James Strachey, International Journal of psycho-Analysis 22 (1941): 69-70; and "The Taboo of Virginity," trans. James Strachey, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (London, 1957), 9:191-208.

¹⁰ John Hollander, The Head of the Bed (Boston, 1974), p. 11.