Gale Literature Resource Center

SEEING DOUBLE

A familiar Victorian superstition claims that a mirror's reflection captures a portion of the soul; breaking a mirror, therefore, injures the spirit of the person who broke it. For this reason, the use of a mirror entailed a set of safety guidelines and instructions: if a relative had recently died, mirrors in the home would be covered to prevent his or her soul from becoming trapped, and children under two years of age were to avoid them, as their souls were still developing and could be stolen entire. These days, we no longer shield our souls from the mirrors in our home, but the residue of old phobias lingers in the anxiety with which we approach our reflection. We seek the mirror's approval, we fear what it has to tell us. Living in a world full of reflections has helped us know ourselves better, in a skin-deep sense, but it has also bred dissociation, obsession. By transforming our faces into images for scrutiny, the mirror has made us more careful about ourselves as objects, at the expense of caring for ourselves as whole beings.

For much of mirrors' long history, they were luxury items, fragile and expensive to produce, owned mainly by the aristocratic and the wealthy. Who could have JOON MO KANG imagined, then, that they would one day be so cheap and so common that we'd use them to wallpaper our bathrooms and dance floors, line our skyscrapers with their smooth, shiny surfaces, and affix them to our cars? Like most people, I wake up each morning and look for my face in the bathroom mirror-but if I wanted to avoid this it would be nearly impossible to do. I open the doors of the medicine cabinet, and in the mirrored backs I see my face projected six or more times, from different angles, reflections of reflections receding into the far distance. In the elevator, I watch myself in the convex security mirror, my head ballooning. When you seek out-or seek to avoid-your own reflection, the modern city becomes a hall of mirrors: car windows, reflective walls, and plate glass are everywhere, transmitting a cacophony of different versions of you-this one too short, that one too wide, another one with a sickly color you've never seen before. Your own face runs rampant through the world and, like a word repeated too many times, begins to lose its reference.

In this way, what's whole becomes fractured: a series of variants is generated, some better than you had imagined, others worse, all converging in an impulse to control what we see reflected through a more effortful arrangement of the hair, body, and face. Rather than reveal us to ourselves "as we are," mirrors show the many different ways we might be, and press us to choose from among them the image that we want to project to the world. Does the fascination of glimpsing ourselves outweigh the psychological strain of continually caching, processing, and relating these different likenesses? Are we better off for knowing that we're having a bad hair day, or that there are wrinkles on our faces where there never used to be? Early mirrors lacked precision; made from bronze or obsidian, they revealed the viewer to himself hazily in their polished surfaces. Our crisp, shiny mirrors, which allow us to peer deeply into faults that we hardly ever notice in others, complicate more than they clarify.

In the modern imagination, the mirror has been placed at the center of what defines us as a species, and what defines us as individuals. While many other species can make tools or communicate in some form of language, only a select few-great apes, dolphins, orcas, elephants, and the Eurasian magpie-have demonstrated the self-awareness to recognize their own reflection in a mirror. But before there was any such thing as a mirror, human beings were still self-aware, possessed of an individualized sense of self; the only real difference, perhaps, was the degree to which we relied on others to view us. Because we could not witness ourselves, except with difficulty in pools of water, we needed others to see us, to make us visible. It seems hard, but not impossible, to imagine ourselves back into that earlier, more unencumbered state: knowing our bodies by how it feels to dwell in them, instead of by how they shift incrementally over the course of a day, or a lifetime.