Perception vs. Reality
In “The Lady in the Looking-glass: A Reflection,” Virginia Woolf describes an unnamed narrator viewing the home of a woman named Isabella Tyson, either through a looking-glass that hangs in the hall or through imagined scenes. The looking-glass reflects Isabella’s belongings and the home’s general ambiance, allowing the narrator to speculate about Isabella’s inner life. The looking-glass, however, is flawed and distorted, and the narrator’s own characterizations of Isabella seem rooted more in imagination…
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Appearances and Materialism
In “The Lady in the Looking-glass: A Reflection,” Woolf questions a literary convention of the Edwardian Era in which authors would describe a character by describing, at length, the physical objects they owned. In the process of questioning this convention, she also explores whether having beautiful things can actually make a person happy, and, more generally, the nature of the connection between a person’s material possessions and their inner emotional state. Though the narrator observes…
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Imagination vs. Realism
In this story, the narrator observes Isabella Tyson through her reflection in the looking-glass. Notably, looking-glasses are a common symbol for realist fiction, which seeks to accurately reflect the world back to its readers so they can see their own reality more clearly. In addition to seeing Isabella through the looking glass, the narrator spends a significant portion of the story using imagination to try to reveal Isabella’s inner life. By telling the story…
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