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Summary
Themes
and Colors
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Lady in the Looking Glass, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Perception vs. Reality
Appearances and Materialism
Imagination vs. Realism
Summary
Analysis
An unnamed narrator advises that “people should not leave looking-glasses hanging in their rooms,” comparing this to leaving an open checkbook or a letter confessing to a crime. It’s a summer afternoon, and it’s impossible not to see into the looking-glass in the drawing room, which reflects a table, part of the garden beyond it, and an outdoor path that the mirror’s gold rim cuts off.
The narrator’s opening line is a somewhat mysterious warning, telling readers not to leave mirrors hanging in their homes. The comparison between a mirror and a checkbook or criminal confession seems to imply that mirrors might grant someone access to private truths about a person’s life, which is a confusing claim, since the function of a mirror is simply to reflect things exactly how they appear. In other words, if a secret is concealed, one wouldn’t expect it to be revealed in a mirror—although the narrator seems to believe that this is possible, or even inevitable. By pointing out that the mirror is impossible not to look into, the narrator implies that it is not their fault that they are looking in the mirror and—by extension—prying into the private details the mirror might reveal. Despite the narrator’s confidence that the mirror will reveal secrets, the end of this opening paragraph begins to cast doubt on the mirror’s reliability. After all, the mirror only reflects part of this home, so it seems limited in its ability to give a full picture of what goes on here, and it actively distorts the image of the garden path by cutting it off.
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The narrator, who is alone in the empty house, feels like a camouflaged naturalist who watches shy animals while remaining unseen. The room’s “shy creatures,” though, are “lights and shadows, curtains blowing, petals falling”—things that rarely happen “if someone is looking.” The room is old and cozy, full of rugs and bookcases, and the narrator feels the room’s emotions—“passions and rages” and “envies and sorrows”—ebbing and flowing as though the room were human.
This passage establishes an ambiguity about who (or what) the narrator is. While they seem to be a person who is alone in this house, they are described as “unseen” and as having access to phenomena that rarely happen with a person present. This implies that the narrator might not be a human presence—a possibility that is bolstered later on when the lady of the house comes home and seems not to notice the narrator at all, despite the way the narrator can see her plainly. Woolf never clarifies who or what the narrator is. In contrast to the inhuman qualities of the seemingly-human narrator, Woolf describes the drawing room (which is clearly inhuman) as being essentially alive, and even humanlike. The room’s natural phenomena (curtains swaying, shadows moving) are described as “creatures” and the room itself has “emotions”—all of this makes the room seem more alive and physically present than the narrator itself. Overall, this story critiques an Edwardian literary convention in which an author describes a character’s belongings in order to give insight into that character’s personality. Similarly, in this moment, Woolf is describing inanimate belongings from which the narrator will later draw inferences about the life of their owner. By giving these objects a life of their own, however, Woolf implicitly undermines the notion that these belongings exist to reflect the truth of their owner—these objects have their own truth, it seems, and that truth itself seems constantly in flux and impossible to pin down. Therefore, it seems absurd to draw any inference at all from this room.
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The way the looking-glass reflects the environment “so accurately and so fixedly” shows a world that is “all stillness,” unlike the constantly changing room. The doors and windows are open, which creates a sound like breathing in the room—but nothing breathes in the looking-glass, where everything is in a “trance of immortality.”
A half-hour before, Isabella Tyson—the owner of the house—had gone down the path to the garden. As she walked, she was reflected in the looking-glass until she “vanished, sliced off by the gilt rim.” The narrator presumes that Isabella went to pick flowers—perhaps an “elegant” convolvulus whose colorful blossoms are often found on ugly walls. To the narrator, Isabella seems more like the “fantastic and tremulous” convolvulus than more “upright” or “starched” flowers.
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This comparison, the narrator reflects, shows how little anyone knows about Isabella—after all, a “flesh and blood” woman is nothing like a flower. Such comparisons can even be cruel, as they (like the convolvulus) stand in the way of seeing the truth about Isabella. “There must be truth,” the narrator muses, “there must be a wall.” Despite this, even after years of knowing Isabella, nobody can say much about who she is. What is known is that Isabella is a “spinster,” she is rich, and she collected the objects in her house “at great risk” to herself while traveling the world.
The narrator notes that the furniture in Isabella’s house seems to know her better than the people in her life. The cabinets in her house have small drawers that “almost certainly” hold letters from her “many friends.” If one opened them, the narrator imagines, one would find records of these friendships: intimacy, jealousy, and other markers of the “passion and experience” Isabella has lived. The room becomes more “shadowy and symbolic” due to the “stress” of thinking about Isabella.
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Suddenly, the narrator’s musings are interrupted by a “large black form” that looms into the looking-glass, blocking the view of everything else. The form deposits a “packet of marble tablets” on the table and vanishes. For a moment, the image in the looking-glass is “unrecognisable and irrational,” but then the narrator realizes that the tablets are a stack of letters brought by the postman.
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The letters appear still and immortal in the looking-glass, and the narrator imagines that if one could read them, they would know everything about Isabella and even about life itself. The narrator imagines Isabella reading the letters and letting out “a profound sigh of comprehension” as if she, too “had seen to the bottom of everything.” Then, the narrator concludes, Isabella would lock the letters in a drawer to “conceal what she did not wish to be known.”
This thought is a “challenge” to the narrator, who believes that, even though Isabella does “not wish to be known,” she “should no longer escape.” Since Isabella conceals her life and knowledge, “one must prize her open” with the “first tool that came to hand: the imagination.” The narrator believes one should “fasten her down there” and refuse to accept mere polite conversation—instead, one should “put oneself in her shoes.”
The narrator describes the elegant shoes that Isabella is wearing down in the garden. At that moment, Isabella must be pruning with the sun in her eyes, but then “at the critical moment,” a cloud covers the sun, making it hard to see whether the look on Isabella’s face is “mocking or tender, brilliant or dull.” So the narrator muses about what Isabella might be thinking—that she needs to send flowers to a widow and visit some acquaintances at their new home, perhaps, which are the kinds of things she would say at dinner. But “one was tired of” these sorts of banalities, wanting access instead to Isabella’s “profounder state of being.”
The narrator believes that Isabella must be happy, given her many friends, her wealth, her extensive travels, and her exquisite belongings. As Isabella stands in the garden with the clouds masking her expression, there are many “avenues of pleasure” surrounding her.
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However, as Isabella snips a branch in the garden, the narrator imagines a little light falling on her face, allowing for more insight into her mind. Isabella feels a “tenderness” at cutting something living, given that life itself is “dear to her.” This act of cutting causes Isabella to reflect on her own mortality—both the “futility and evanescence of things” and the fact that her life has been good.
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The narrator compares Isabella’s mind to her room, with her thoughts moving through it like lights “pirouetting and stepping delicately” across the floor. Isabella’s “whole being” is—like the room—flooded with “some profound knowledge, some unspoken regret,” and—like her cabinets—Isabella is “full of locked drawers, stuffed with letters.” The narrator decides that the talk of “prizing her open” is “impious and absurd,” since one must use the “finest and subtlest” tools to access Isabella.
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Suddenly, Isabella herself is visible in the looking-glass. She is returning from the garden, walking slowly and becoming gradually larger and more visible in the frame. As she comes closer, she becomes more and more “the person into whose mind one had been trying to penetrate.” Since she approaches slowly, Isabella’s presence doesn’t disturb the “pattern” of objects in the looking-glass. Instead, the image seems to “make room for her,” and the objects in her home seem to move to “receive” her.
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Isabella stops in the hall and the looking-glass casts its light over her, a light that “seem[s] to fix her” the way an acid would strip what is “unessential and superficial,” leaving “only the truth.” To the narrator, this new view of Isabella is an “enthralling spectacle.” Everything has “dropped from her”: the “clouds, dress, basket, diamond” are gone. There is no more “convolvulus”—only the “hard wall beneath.”
The narrator sees “the woman herself.” In the “pitiless light” of the looking-glass, there is “nothing”: Isabella has no thoughts and no friends. The letters from friends are actually bills, and she doesn’t bother to open them as she stands there, “old and angular, veined and lined.”
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