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The Lady in the Looking Glass
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Symbols & Motifs
The Looking Glass
A looking glass is a mode of viewing a scene or a person and is an established metaphor in Western literature, representative of visions of the reflected or perceived self, both internally and externally. The English 1920s diction “looking glass,” as opposed to the US-usage/modern-usage “mirror,” speaks to its power as an image for seeing, and creates the conceit of the story.
The looking glass physically serves as a reflection and a vantage point from which the narrator can see part of a house, not only the room they are in but a glimpse of life outside that space. The narrator is irresistibly drawn to gazing into the mirror: “one could not help looking,” creating a suggestion of voyeurism. The looking glass is a springboard to negotiate the confines of the real and imagined: The story sets up as “real” those things that are viewed in the mirror and the room, and those things as conjectured that are outside its visible world. In the world of the narrative, however, the things encapsulated in the mirror are less revealing than the imagined world outside it, the rich possibilities of life’s experience that give the story its interest. The finale of the story suggests that the looking glass has been outstripped by the narrator’s imagination: Instead of being suggestive of hidden depths, it is shown to hold only a superficial and reductive perspective of Isabella’s person.
Letters
Both the letters that Isabella has locked away in her drawers and the ones that the postman delivers on her marble table are explicitly presented as possible methods through which to understand the inner life of Isabella. As they likely contain either correspondence between friends or lovers, they are a symbol of her private life, and of the complex web of emotion, experience, and memory that make up those relationships in her inner self. The narrator imagines the contents of her letters to be passionate admissions of love, jealousy, friendship, longing, and more. When the postman delivers more letters, they are described as being “tablets graven with eternal truth” (6), that they might grant some insight into Isabella’s inner life.
In “truth,” the contents of the letters are hidden from the narrator in the same way that her emotions and memories are. The letters and inner life are equally secret, and yet the freedom of the narrative form allows these to be a “way in” to imagining about Isabella herself. In experimenting with the idea that these letters could be a realistic way to learn about Isabella, the story exposes the inherent construct of a written narrative, expressive of Modernist concerns. The shift at the end of the story, when Isabella doesn’t “trouble to open” the letters and the narrator imagines that “they [a]re all bills,” highlights the infinite possibilities of the imagination (9). There is no right or wrong, true or false, only what the narrative presents.
Isabella’s Belongings
Isabella’s collective belongings are lavish, beautiful, and extravagant. The narrator personifies them with characteristics that give them life, exploring the idea that they may be expressive of her. The narrative posits that “sometimes it seemed as if they knew more about her than we do,” alluding to the private life that people live when unobserved. The language used to describe them deliberately combines the social, external nature of the house’s public rooms and furniture with a sense of secrecy, and of the secret invasion of privacy. Her pieces of furniture are “shyest of creatures” (2). The old country room is described as “quiet,” and the “sunken book-cases and red and gold lacquer cabinets” (2) are described as nocturnal creatures: “cabinet” is a word meaning “secret.”
The story engages with the “exquisite” nature of Isabella’s clothes and objects. They show that she is “rich” and well traveled, as she has “collected with her own hands” the beautiful and exotic furnishings of the house (4). When seeking to reveal Isabella’s “profounder state of being […] what one calls happiness or unhappiness,” the narrator plays with the idea that it is “obvious, surely, that she is happy. She was rich; she was distinguished; she had many friends; she travelled” (7). The “obviousness” of this statement is self-consciously simplistic and relies on the external evidence of her environment and material possessions. Instead, the story goes on to show how this assumption of her happiness is—or could be—incorrect and how Isabella’s inner life and “profounder state” cannot be encapsulated by her material possessions.
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