Reflecting on (Fictionalized) Reflected Space, Part II

Shall we inspect Virginia Woolf’s life to explore elements in her writings? Tracy Seeley does just this in her article “Virginia Woolf's Poetics of Space: ‘The Lady in the Looking-Glass: A Reflection’” when she compares “The Lady in the Looking Glass” with Woolf’s memoir “A Sketch of the Past” (99). For Seeley, Isabella is a projection of Woolf, who recalls when her step-brother “Gerald Duckworth lifted me onto this [slab], and as I sat there he began to explore my body. I can remember the feel of his hand going under my clothes; going firmly and steadily lower and lower” (Woolf, “Sketch” 69). Woolf recalls this incident as a way to “help to explain” the “feeling of shame” (“Sketch” 68) she felt when she looked into a mirror.

But Woolf herself asks her readers, in “How Should One Read a Book?”:

How far, we must ask ourselves, is a book influenced by its writer’s life — how far is it safe to let the man interpret the writer? How far shall we resist or give way to the sympathies and antipathies that the man himself rouses in us — so sensitive are words, so receptive of the character of the author? These are questions that press upon us when we read lives and letters, and we must answer them for ourselves, for nothing can be more fatal than to be guided by the preferences of others in a matter so personal. (3)

Instead of “shall we inspect a writer’s life to explore elements in her writings,” Woolf asks “should we inspect elements in a writer’s writings to explore her life?” I think that by using both techniques, we can glean new meanings from a text by taking into account both the writer’s writings and the writer’s life. For instance, we know from Woolf’s memoir about her shame of looking into mirrors, and we know her claim that this could be Gerald’s “inspection of her body,” but she also says “Though I have done my best to explain why I was ashamed of looking at my own face I have only been able to discover some possible reasons; there may be others” (“Sketch” 69). And if we take into account that “Sketch” was written almost ten years after “Lady,” we cannot assume that she was aware of a connection between the two. But it can make us more aware of the use of mirrors in Woolf’s other works, as well.

Following up from last week, and the examination of Foucault’s utopias and heterotopias, we can look at other instances of reflections in Woolf’s works. We have already looked at Queen Elizabeth’s breaking of her mirror in Orlando, but bringing Seeley’s idea that looking-glasses are a projection of a specific event in Woolf’s childhood, we can take a fresh look at it. If we look at Seeley’s interpretation of Louise deSalvo, and believe her argument that “Woolf probably watched her own violation in the mirror across the hall-which explains not only Woolf's dream, but the dynamics in her short story” (99), then we can assume that Woolf saw betrayal in this mirror, much like the Queen saw in her mirror. And pulling in Foucault, we have the idea that the reflection is a utopia, Woolf’s reflection is a “not-herself,” and that by turning her gaze back upon herself and Gerald, she is reconstructing her reality. The same could be said of “Sketch”, that the text is a utopia – place without a place – and the childhood Woolf is a “the person to whom things happen” (“Sketch” 69) – a “not-herself” – then the memoir is also a reconstituting of reality. We have only Woolf’s reflection on her past to (possibly) connect Gerald’s molestation to her shame of looking in a mirror, which leads to the connection of the looking-glass in her works.

This is an easy connection to make when we see that the first line of “The Lady in the Looking Glass” reads, “People should not leave looking-glasses hanging in their rooms any more than they should leave open cheque books or letters confessing some hideous crime (Woolf 1). Woolf equates a looking-glass with an open financial record or letter of confession, which carry with them a negative connotation, much like her shame of looking into a mirror. And we can connect the reflection with Foucault’s utopia with the first sentence of the third paragraph – “But, outside, the looking-glass reflected the hall table, the sun-flowers, the garden path so accurately and so fixedly that they seemed held there in their reality unescapably (Woolf 1, emphasis added). The hall table, sun-flowers, and garden path are held within a reality that is created by the looking-glass – a place that is not a place.

But if this all seems a little obvious, we can take things one step further. In “On Being Ill,” we can possibly replace the mirror with the body. The body becomes a reflective or creative surface; it is a mirror, with the mind residing in the utopia/heterotopia within the body. The mind becomes the viewer, the body is the instrument with which one views. The following quote illustrates this idea:

All day, all night the body intervenes; blunts or sharpens, colours or discolours, turns to wax in the warmth of June, hardens to tallow in the murk of February. The creature within can only gaze through the pane-smudged or rosy; it cannot separate off from the body like the sheath of a knife or the pod of a pea for a single instant. (Woolf, “Being Ill” 4) 

The “creature” (the mind) can only “gaze through the pane – smudged or rosy” (the body, which is related to a mirror through the use of “pane”). The body has created a utopia by blunting or sharpening reality, a “not-real” reality that the mind can only access through the body, like the place that is not a place that a viewer can only access through a mirror.

Woolf claims that in literature,

 People write always of the doings of the mind; the thoughts that come to it; its noble plans; how the mind has civilised the universe. They show it ignoring the body in the philosopher's turret; or kicking the body, like an old leather football, across leagues of snow and desert in the pursuit of conquest or discovery. (5)

In this case, it is the mind controlling the body. But when one is ill, the body takes control of the mind by creating a “not real” reality. But the two cannot be separated, “[the mind] cannot separate off from the body like the sheath of a knife” (Woolf, ”Being Ill” 4). The mind and the body are connected, a duality in the form of a singularity – the “I.” Much like Laura Doyle’s interpretation of Merleau-Ponty in “The Body Unbound: A Phenomenological Reading of the Political in A Room of One’s Own,” the mind and the body are similar to “‘when one of my hands touches the other, the world of each opens upon the other because the operation is reversible at will’ and this is so ‘because thev ... are the hands of the same body" and they belong to the same world (Visible 141 )” (Doyle 130). As one hand becomes the toucher, the other becomes the touched; as the mind becomes controller, the body becomes controlled (and the body is controlled when the mind is controller). We can equate all of this with the viewer and viewed in the mirror. As the “herself” is viewer, the “not-herself” is viewed in the utopia; as the “not herself is viewer, the “herself” is reconstituted as the viewed.

Reflecting on Reflected Space

In Michel Foucault’s essay “Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias,” he lays out the argument about utopias and heterotopias as space or location. I will let Foucault’s words explain these concepts with his example of the mirror:

Between these two [utopias and heterotopias], I would then set that sort of mixed experience which partakes of the qualities of both types of location, the mirror. It is, after all, a utopia, in that it is a place without a place. In it, I see myself where I am not, in an unreal space that opens up potentially beyond its surface; there I am down there where I am not, a sort of shadow that makes my appearance visible to myself, allowing me to look at myself where I do not exist: utopia of the mirror. At the same time, we are dealing with a heterotopia. The mirror really exists and has a kind of come-back effect on the place that I occupy: starting from it, in fact. I find myself absent from the place where I am, in that I see myself in there.

Starting from that gaze which to some extent is brought to bear on me, from the depths of that virtual space which is on the other side of the mirror, I turn back on myself, beginning to turn my eyes on myself and reconstitute myself where I am in reality. Hence the mirror functions as a heterotopia, since it makes the place that I occupy, whenever I look at myself in the glass, both absolutely real - it is in fact linked to all the surrounding space and absolutely unreal, for in order to be perceived it has of necessity to pass that virtual point that is situated down there. (Foucault 352).

For Foucault, the mirror is both utopia – because it is a place without a place—and heterotopia –because it forces the viewer to turn back on himself and reconstitute reality. (Perhaps we should refer to the mirror as a “you-topia” since—unlike Foucault’s claim that he sees himself where he is not—he is really seeing a “not himself,” for this reflection becomes an Other, a “you” instead of a “me.” The reflection is not “himself where he is not,” it is another self, a being without being.

 Within Orlando, Foucault’s mirror appears as Queen Elizabeth sees Orlando kissing a girl.

Meanwhile, the long winter months drew on. Every tree in the Park was lined with frost. The river ran sluggishly. One day when the snow was on the ground and the dark panelled rooms were full of shadows and the stags were barking in the Park, she saw in the mirror, which she kept for fear of spies always by her, through the door, which she kept for fear of murders always open, a boy—could it be Orlando?—kissing a girl—who in the Devil's name was the brazen hussy? Snatching at her golden-hilted sword she struck violently at the mirror. The glass crashed; people came running; she was lifted and set in her chair again; but she was stricken after that and groaned much, as her days wore to an end, of man's treachery (Woolf 20)

Does she break the mirror as a symbol of her broken heart? If we look through Foucault's lens, then we can see that the Queen is only seeing a utopia (or dystopia) through the mirror, for the reflection is a space that does not exist. The fact that she kept the mirror "for fear of spies" only adds to the utopia: she expects to use the mirror to find betrayal – its sole purpose – and she does. But instead of finding spies, she finds lies.

Perhaps the breaking of the mirror is an attempt to erase this betrayal--since she's only seen the betrayal in the mirror/utopia, the destruction of the mirror/utopia will end the betrayal. Or, perhaps, if we move on to Foucault's mirror functioning as a heterotopia, the Queen began to "turn back" on herself and "reconstitute" herself in reality. The non-Queen in the reflection has no being; likewise, Orlando’s and the girl’s reflections have no being. It is the reconstituted Queen in reality, Orlando’s kissing of the girl in reality, that causes the Queen to break the mirror.

Foucault then goes on to describe different types of heterotopia. For the purposes of Orlando, we will look at two of these, those that relate to time – “In the first place there are the heterotopias of time which accumulate ad infinitum, such as museums and libraries. These are heterotopias in which time does not cease to accumulate, perching, so to speak, on its own summit” (Foucualt 355), and

Along with this type, bound up with the accumulation of time, there are other heterotopias linked to time in its more futile, transitory and precarious aspects, a time viewed as celebration. These then are heterotopias without a bias toward the eternal. They are absolutely time-bound. To this class belong the fairs, those marvelous empty zones outside the city limits, that fill up twice a year with booths, showcases, miscellaneous objects, wrestlers, snake-women, optimistic fortune-tellers, etc. (Focault 355).

These heterotopias function as the form of the novel and within the novel. Following is “how the two types of heterotopia, that of the festival and that of the eternity of accumulating time, come together” (Foucault 355).

Orlando in and of itself is a “heterotopia of time which accumulate[s] ad infinitum.” The book spans over three centuries, with “the idea of accumulating everything,... of creating a sort of universal archive, the desire to enclose all times, all eras, forms and styles within a single place, the concept of making all times into one place, and yet a place that is outside time, inaccessible to the wear and tear of the years, according to a plan of almost perpetual and unlimited accumulation within an irremovable place,” (Foucault 355) The time changes, but the characters remain the same throughout the change. Granted, some have superficially changed: Nick Greene has become wealthy (Woolf 203); Sasha may or may not have become fat and lethargic (Woolf 222); and of course, Orlando has switched genders. But none of them age or become someone else. After all, “Orlando has become a woman—there is no denying it. But in every other respect, Orlando remained perfectly as he had been. The change of sex, though it altered their future, did nothing whatever to alter their identity” (Woolf 102). The only characters who seem to be linked to time are members of the Royalty: Queen Elizabeth I ruled from 1558-1603; Queen Victoria ruled from 1837-1901, and King Edward ruled from 1901-1910.

Within the book, the heterotopia of festival is seen with the carnival of the Great Frost (Woolf 26). It is “absolutely time bound” for it can only last as long as the freeze; it is a “marvelous empty zone” that takes place on the river; and it has “fill[ed] up…with booths, showcases,” etc. in the form of “arbours, mazes, alleys, drinking booths, etc.” (Woolf 26).

By holding Orlando up to Foucault’s mirror, and seeing the utopias (dystopias) and heterotopias the text creates, we can gain new insight into the novel.