SOURCE: Kurtz, Marilyn. “Glass Breaking: Later Fiction.” In Virginia Woolf: Reflections and Reverberations, pp. 115-23. New York: Peter Lang, 1990.

Windows and mirrors play as compelling a part in the later fiction of Virginia Woolf as they do in the earlier works. Even the short stories are infused with images of glass, for here, as in the novels, Virginia Woolf makes explorations into personal identity and the human condition through vehicles of glass in a quest for meaning.

Because of their power to separate and divide (as the self split from its image in the mirror or the external and internal division at a window), mirrors and windows are often used by Virginia Woolf as barriers or distancing devices. On the other hand, they are, paradoxically, symbols of unification since revelations or epiphanic “moments of being” take place at these transparent vantage points. In this sense the frame of the mirror or window is used by Virginia Woolf to create a holding pattern—to capture, for a moment, that which otherwise becomes caught up in the transitoriness of life, in the fleeting condition of mortality.

Before looking at Virginia Woolf's final apocalyptic vision through broken glass in her last novel, Between the Acts, it will be interesting to view other revelations experienced through windows and mirrors in the other works.

In a story written in 1928, “Moments of Being: ‘Slater's Pins Have No Points,’” (in The Complete Shorter Fiction, ed. Susan Dick 209-214), glass represents the fragile connections between the past and the present, as well as the protective barriers between people. The first page of the story draws the reader into the “cool glassy world of Bach fugues” (209). This is the detached, remote, ineffable world where Miss Julia Craye lives and plays her music to herself and occasionally to special students like Fanny Wilmot. Julia inhabits a world which preserves the past in glass cases—Roman urns and glasses to be looked at and admired—in the house she had shared with her brother, Julius, before he died. Julius, her counterpart, had been an archaeologist, an “odd” man whose “driving look” through the frosty windowpane had seemed to say “I can't reach you—I can't get at you” (210). The existence of Julia and Julius is fragile, detached, remote, and frustrating because they cannot make contact with the world and people. They are different from others; there is “something queer in Julius Craye; it was the very same thing that was odd perhaps in Julia too” (210). But Julia wants to “break the spell that had fallen on the house; to break the pane of glass which separated them from other people” (210). She wants to come out of her protective shell (she has even dressed “like a beetle compactly in its sheath”) (209), and reach out to Fanny. Fanny, too, doesn't want protection, she says, when she and Julia talk about the protective value of men (211). Fanny, indeed, seems like a reflection or mirror-image of Julia; perhaps her youthful side.

The climax of the story occurs when Julia, holding a carnation (a flower representing incarnation—flesh) “seemed to emerge out of the London night” (214) as she is suddenly revealed to Fanny in relief against the “sharp square of the window, uncurtained” (214) behind her. The window is no longer covered with frost; it is “uncurtained” in order to reveal. And Fanny has a revelation:

All seemed transparent for a moment to the gaze of Fanny Wilmot, as if looking through Miss Craye, she saw the very fountain of her being … she saw back and back into the past behind her. She saw the Roman vases stood in their case … the pettiness of daily life; and slowly aging … she saw Julia—

(214)

Fanny sees through time and into essences of people and life, and then she sees Julia in the flesh when Julia kisses her. Suddenly with the kiss, the barriers of glass have been broken. Physical and metaphysical contacts have been made.

An amazing story, written in 1929, is “The Lady in the Looking-Glass: A Reflection” (Complete Shorter Fiction 215-219), in which the mirror plays an active part and comes alive: “the looking-glass began to pour over her a light that seemed to fix her; that seemed like some acid to bite off the unessential and superficial and to leave only the truth” (219).

Mirrors reveal secrets; they expose what is private and personal. The opening line of the story is cautionary: “People should not leave looking-glasses hanging in their rooms any more than they should leave open checque [sic] books or letters confessing some hideous crime” (215).

The mistress of the house, Isabella Tyson, is spied upon in the looking-glass by the anonymous narrator of the story who wants to solve the mystery of Isabella for “There must be truth … it was strange that after knowing her all these years one could not say what the truth about Isabella was …” (216). The narrator imagines intrigues and passionate assignations have taken place in Isabella's unmarried life. The looking-glass makes the mysterious, enigmatic woman become “larger and larger, more and more completely the person into whose mind one had been trying to penetrate” (219).

The life in the mirror becomes organic as Virginia Woolf beautifully adjusts the imagery:

She came so gradually that she did not seem to derange the pattern in the glass, but only to bring in some new element which gently moved and altered the other objects as if asking them, courteously, to make room for her. And the letters and the table and the grass walk and the sunflowers which had been waiting in the looking-glass separated and opened out so that she might be received among them.

(219)

There is life inside the looking-glass (the spiritual kind of life in which primitive peoples believed),¹ for something is captured there: “in the looking-glass things had ceased to breathe and lay still in the trance of immortality” (216).

The sense of an enduring spirit occurs elsewhere in Virginia Woolf's fiction: the spirit of Mrs. Ramsay lives on and is captured by Lily Briscoe in her artistic, hallucinatory vision of the dead woman through the medium of the window. In a similar vein, the spirit of Mrs. Wilcox, in E. M. Forster's Howards End, lives on in Margaret Schlegel and the house willed to her.

The notion of life taking place inside the mirror recalls a moment in William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury when the “idiot” Benjy thinks to himself: “Caddy and Jason were fighting in the mirror … Father … went into the mirror and fought too” (78-79). This is a pre-lingual, primitive mode of thinking and perception. There is no abstract conception of forms being reflected in the mirror; instead, there is the belief that the people are actually in the mirror. This kind of thinking leads to a magical-fantasy world in Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass and suggestions from it reverberate in Virginia Woolf's short story as well as elsewhere in her fiction.

When Alice enters the world within the looking-glass, everything becomes reversed. For example, to approach the Red Queen, Alice must walk backwards; the looking-glass cake is handed around first and then sliced. This mad logic of the looking-glass world is based on the mirror reflection motif: in a mirror all asymmetrical objects (objects not superposable on their mirror images) “go the other way” or are seen in reverse. Therefore, in a sense, nonsense itself is a sanity-insanity inversion. (Martin Gardner points this out in his Annotated Alice). The ordinary world is turned upside down and backward; it becomes a world in which things go every way except the way they are supposed to (Gardner, Note 181). Forward and backward are reversed by a mirror: walk toward a mirror and the image moves in the opposite direction. This fact is alluded to when Alice has to walk away from the Red Queen in order to approach her.

In Virginia Woolf's story, the observer of what is going on in the looking-glass forms definite ideas and conclusions. At the end of the story, however, she finds that she has been mistaken. Her expectations, therefore, have been reversed. The person observed in the looking-glass has turned out to be the opposite of what she appeared to be. There is, indeed, a topsy-turvy world of illusion/reality in Virginia Woolf's story as there is in Alice's world and, as implied in both literary works, in the world we all live in.

Echoes of Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking-Glass appear to be elsewhere in Virginia Woolf's fiction. Woolf uses nonsense verse in several places: the song of the old woman in Mrs. Dalloway, the children's indecipherable lines in The Years, as well as the enigmatic skywriting message in Mrs. Dalloway, for example. These bring to mind what Alice says of the nonsense Jabberwocky poem: “it seems to fill my head with ideas—only I don't know exactly what they are.” Although the strange words have no precise meaning, they chime with subtle overtones (Annotated Alice 191). Martin Gardner in his notes also points out the similarity between nonsense verse like Jabberwocky and abstract painting. The words Lewis Carroll uses suggest vague meanings, like an eye here and a foot there in a Picasso abstraction, or they may have no meaning at all—just the play of non-objective colors on a canvas (192). Virginia Woolf seems to be doing the same thing.

Of course, Virginia Woolf is very concerned with the concept of doubles which is a dominant theme of the looking-glass world as Tweedledum and Tweedledee are the mirror-image forms of each other.²

In Virginia Woolf's “looking-glass” story, the search for truth is paramount (reflecting the modern writer's quest for understanding). Because of the powers of the looking-glass, the narrator uses it to find truth: the inner reality of the mysterious woman reflected in it. She seems almost obsessed by the pursuit of solving the mystery: “surely one could penetrate a little farther into her being” (218). This relentless desire to expose the naked soul of another person is reminiscent of Conrad's Marlow trying to understand Jim in Lord Jim and again, to penetrate the secrets of Mr. Kurtz in Heart of Darkness. Nick Carraway, in The Great Gatsby, also tries to probe the mystique around Jay Gatsby. In Virginia Woolf's story, the mirror does reveal the truth—a harsh, empty one:

Here was the woman herself. She stood naked in that pitiless light. And there was nothing. Isabella was perfectly empty. She had no thoughts. She had no friends. She cared for nobody. As for her letters, they were all bills … she did not even trouble to open them.

(219)

The looking-glass becomes a dangerous, powerful weapon in that it does expose the woman. (This part brings to mind the Henry James story, “The Beast in the Jungle” in which John Marcher is revealed as a man to whom nothing has ever happened or ever will). The vision is a horrible one of nothingness and emptiness. Yet, in the Virginia Woolf tale, the suggestion is that there is some kind of life outside the person and the room—in the looking-glass—where there is a transcendent, other-world appeal. There is also order, form, and truth, within the looking-glass. This, in contrast to the woman's emptiness, is meaningful.

What appears in the mirror is artistically selected, arranged, and enclosed. C. Ruth Miller, in her dissertation, sees Virginia Woolf's frequent use of the frame as a consequence of her association with painters, particularly Roger Fry, and aestheticians (2). For Fry, the frame confers artistic significance, a “visionary quality.” In “The Lady in the Looking-Glass,” what is framed in the glass becomes important by the very fact that it is framed. However, C. Ruth Miller also recognizes that Virginia Woolf is more concerned with apprehending the true nature of reality than with achieving a unified artistic vision. Like G. E. Moore, Miller notes (50), Virginia Woolf disapproved of unified systems that are the products of wish-fulfillment pursued instead of what is real. In Principia Ethica, G. E. Moore wrote that “to search for ‘unity’ and ‘system’ at the expense of truth, is not, I take it, the proper business of philosophy, however universally it may have been the practice of philosophers” (G. E. Moore 222).

Naturally, with modern writers, there is no one truth to be apprehended wholly; truths are multiple and must be seen fragmented in time and perspective or, with Virginia Woolf, through the medium of glass. The “Looking-Glass” story reflects Virginia Woolf's vision of modern life as elusive, enigmatic, complex, and subjective.

Both reality and illusion are to be seen in the mirror; it all depends on the viewer, this story seems to be saying. The Lady of Shalott had to move away from her mirror to escape from illusion to the reality outside the window. In Virginia Woolf's story, the mirror represents the mind; all takes place within the mirror just as everything takes place within the mind, the mind which probes and penetrates to find a truth. There is no reality outside or separate from the mind's subjective perceptions, just as nothing is consequential in the story except that which appears in the mirror.

The focus on the mirror itself in “The Lady in the Looking-Glass” is comparable to the concentration on the mark on the wall in Virginia Woolf's sketch of that name: the mirror and mark become a jumping-off point for the play of the mind's speculations.

There is another reason for the importance of the mirror which stands at the center of this interesting looking-glass story: it serves as a distancing device. By peering only at the mirror, the narrator-viewer avoids direct confrontation with Isabella. Perhaps distancing is necessary because voyeuristic tendencies and sexual desires are involved. Surely the narrator's wish to “penetrate a little farther into her being” (218) suggests eroticism. This becomes depersonalized as it takes on larger meaning: an almost sexual union with the universe is suggested in the line already quoted which may be seen here in another light: “And the letters and the table and the grass walk and the sunflowers separated and opened out so that she might be received among them” (219). The descriptive language continues in a physically erotic manner: “Everything dropped from her—clouds, dress, basket, diamond … Here was the woman herself. She stood naked in that pitiless light” (219). Yet, “the enthralling spectacle” reveals an empty woman. She turns out to look old and ugly. The aroused expectations have been quelled. The looking-glass has revealed the truth of nothingness and decay. The sexual excitement is turned off.

The narrator-viewer seems ‘safe’—unrevealed—since Isabella does not know she has been observed. However, the reader gets a glimpse of the voyeuristic, sexual excitement as well as the quest for knowledge and meaning revealed in the spectator-narrator. Thus, the reader views the viewer in the act of viewing while reflections of the mind and the mirror reflect back to this outside secretsharer.

The mirror also has an alienating power in this story as the narrator is cut off and estranged from all the activity going on within the looking-glass. The image in the mirror may also be a projection of the self or the other side of a character's being. The narrator may feel the emptiness herself which she thinks she sees in Isabella.

The prevalence of mirrors in Virginia Woolf's work may indicate a modernist absorption with self-reflection. The modern novelist writes about himself writing: for example, Bernard in The Waves, Malone in Beckett's Malone Dies.

In the later novels of Virginia Woolf, the wholeness of mirrors and windows gives way to fragmentation. The glass loses its shape and structure just as the world seems to have done. Broken glass becomes a metaphor for the disintegration of modern life. The individual depicted in Woolf, as in much of modern literature, feels alien, isolated, and seeks communion with others and with something beyond the self. The self is in flux, mutable. Identity is questioned: at what point in time? from whose perception? at what place? in what circumstances?

The modern narrative is fragmented because there is no certainty of a unified meaning. The modern novel destroys the illusion of completeness by replacing the omniscient narrator with localized perspectives and by using unexpected and unexplained details. Discontinuities represent the fractured mode of human understanding, for we know ourselves, each other, and the world only in “scraps, orts and fragments” since there is no cohesive central body of knowledge which will reveal itself to us. Individual separateness and isolation—the breaking up of the group—is another aspect of disintegration. Fragmentation ultimately becomes a metaphor for a world torn apart by conflict and war—for minds and bodies blown asunder. And segmentation represents the pieces of art to be assembled by the artist in an attempt to create some unity of vision or, as in Virginia Woolf's last work, a final vision of fragmentation itself; a revelation of life as so disrupted that civilization itself is on the verge of coming apart.

Images of glass provide a backup for this departure from more traditional structures. The broken mirror which reflects an alien and fragmented universe is the necessary mirror for the modern writer. …

Notes

1. Frazer in The Golden Bough speaks of mirrors and souls:

   As some peoples believe a man's soul to be in his shadow, so other (or the same) peoples believe it to be in his reflection in water or a mirror. Thus “the Andamanese do not regard their shadows but their reflections (in any mirror) as their souls.” When the Motumotu of New Guinea first saw their likenesses in a looking-glass, they thought that their reflections were their souls. In New Caledonia the old men are of opinion that a person's reflection in water or a mirror is his soul; but the younger men, taught by the Catholic priests, maintain that it is a reflection and nothing more, just like the reflection of palm-trees in the water. The reflection-soul, being external to the man, is exposed to much the same dangers as the shadow-soul. The Zulus will not look into a dark pool because they think there is a beast in it which will take away their reflections, so that they die. The Basutos say that crocodiles have the power of thus killing a man by dragging his reflection under water. When one of them dies suddenly and from no apparent cause, his relatives will allege that a crocodile must have taken his shadow some time when he crossed a stream. In Saddle Island, Melanesia, there is a pool “into which if anyone looks he dies; the malignant spirit takes hold upon his life by means of his reflection on the water.”

   We can now understand why it was a maxim both in ancient India and ancient Greece not to look at one's reflection in water, and why the Greeks regarded it as an omen of death if a man dreamed of seeing himself so reflected. They feared that the water-spirits would drag the person's reflection or soul under water, leaving him soulless to perish. This was probably the origin of the classical story of the beautiful Narcissus, who languished and died through seeing his reflection in the water.

   Further, we can now explain the widespread custom of covering up mirrors or turning them to the wall after a death has taken place in the house. It is feared that the soul, projected out of the person in the shape of his reflections in the mirror, may be carried off by the ghost of the departed which is commonly supposed to linger about the house till the burial.

   (222-3)

2. Another connection between Virginia Woolf's work and Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass is with the White Knight. Of all the characters in the Looking-Glass world, only the White Knight is kind to Alice and seems genuinely fond of her. The White Knight, comically, keeps falling off his horse. Is it far-fetched to say that Percival in The Waves is like the White Knight? Only there is a reversal here: Percival, who provides the only real connection as a focal point for all the characters in The Waves, he, who is their ideal knight in shining armor, falls off his horse in India. He doesn't get back on his horse as does the White Knight; instead, Percival dies in this later novel of Virginia Woolf's where things fall apart. (James Joyce uses Through the Looking-Glass's Humpty-Dumpty as a dominant character whose fall echoes the fall of Lucifer and the fall of man, along with the fall of Finnegan and others). There is rise and fall in Virginia Woolf's The Waves also, but unlike Joyce, Woolf ends The Waves with fall. “Alis, alas, she broke the glass! Liddell lokker through the leafery, ours is mistery of pain” (Finnegans Wake 270).