30 pages • 1 hour read
The Lady in the Looking Glass
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Character Analysis
Narrator
The narrator’s voice in the story is so strong as to qualify as a character: In many ways the narrator is more knowable in the story than Isabella is. The narrator is a self-conscious observer in many ways drawn from the omniscient narrators of pre-Modernist writing. They feel like “one of those naturalists” observing the “shy creatures” of Isabella’s home (2). The story immediately sets up the realist premise that that narrator is seated in Isabella’s drawing room and can see that room, along with a slice of the house and garden captured in the mirror on the wall. The identity and role of the narrator is ambiguous, however, and Woolf sets up this traditional premise only to explode it as the story progresses.
At first the narrator is “one,” a more nebulous pronoun that can mean “I,” “we,” or “you.” The use of “one” as a narrative point of view in literature is highly unusual and deliberately ambiguous. It is (or was at the time) considered more correct than more personal pronouns and was standard use in upper-class spoken English. This is partly because it is simultaneously impersonal and inclusive—i.e., it distances the speaker from the self “I” and conflates the described experience with the hearer's assumed experience, or a hypothetical typical person’s. The effect is one of inclusiveness—albeit an upper-class clubbability—which assumes complicity and understanding, blurring the narrator’s identity from a distinct, personal voice to a more general, hypothesized voice. “One” encapsulates a polite, reserved mode of discourse in which the speaker hypothesizes that “one” may feel or do a certain thing, avoiding both the character of a personal disclosure and the suggestion of personal question. This inherent flexibility of persona, view, and voice is key to the story’s exploration of Reality Versus Perception and the Instability of Self. Woolf’s choice of “one” is particularly significant in a story that questions the boundaries between inside and outside as well as the nature of selfhood and that challenges traditional modes of thought and writing.
The narrator is deeply interested in Isabella, to an extent that would feel invasive if we imagined them as a real person in her home. They confess that “one could not help looking” in the mirror, suggesting from the outset a self-conscious invasion of privacy (1). When she is out of view, they assert that “Isabella did not wish to be known—but she should no longer escape” (7). The narrator falls into a deep reverie when imagining the possibilities of Isabella’s inner life, so much that “under the stress of thinking about Isabella, her room became more shadowy and symbolic” (4). The narrator is highly opinionated, strongly admonishing the reader against the dangers of leaving looking glasses hanging in rooms, having such certain beliefs about what Isabella is feeling and doing even outside of the looking glass’s reflection. They also characterize themselves in comparison to her belongings, believing that they know more about her than the belongings do, despite the fact that “we, who sat on them, wrote at them, and trod on them so carefully, were allowed to know” (4).
What complicates this, however, is that Isabella does not seem to notice the presence of any other person in the room when she returns. This asks whether the narrator is Isabella herself, viewing the scene of her home from a secondary perspective, imagining herself when away from the glass, before seeing that external “truth” of herself that it presents. The ambiguity and deconstruction of the narrator is expressive of Woolf’s Modernist experimentation, pushing and revealing the limitations of traditional literary forms.
Isabella Tyson
Isabella Tyson, the protagonist of “The Lady in the Looking Glass,” is an unmarried woman of late middle age. She is wealthy and socially a member of the British “upper class”: Her house and clothes are “exquisite” and she clearly lives in comfort. While the details of her lavish belongings are described throughout the story, there is little mentioned directly about Isabella herself. The mystery surrounding who she is, and to extent to which a story can “know” or “describe this, is the subject of the piece.
As a result, the story is spent in open speculation about Isabella’s inner life and true identity, based on what is visible of her home and garden through the reflection in the looking glass and the narrator’s imaginings about what is out of view. In the story, out of view encapsulates things that are unseen in the mirror but also things that are private to Isabella and “concealed” by her, her inner thoughts and feelings, things that are mysterious to her herself, and things that are in the past and future. As the story progresses, the perception of Isabella and her life changes depending on the object through which she is understood. Descriptions of her exotic home furnishings are presented as an indication of the “fact” that she is well traveled, and imagined drawers full of letters under lock and key lead to passage describing a life full of passionate relationships, jealousies, and friendships.
The story deliberately holds back and plays with descriptions of Isabella’s characteristics; the perception of her identity is complicated and multifaceted, precisely because the story engages with the impossibility of encapsulating her. The narrator reveal layers of personality hidden within her, and layers of possible personality: She could be anyone.
The treatment of Isabella’s person changes through the story. At first her appearance and physicality are hinted at. She is a “flesh-and-blood” woman, but only known from her belongings (3). Everything she wears is “exquisite” (7) and can be viewed in detail, but her physical self is initially only referred to as a means to describe the privacy of her experiences, the “mask-like indifference of her face,” indicative of a tumultuous private inner life, the sun and shade passing over her face in the garden which hides her expression—“was it mocking or tender, brilliant or dull?” (7). When Isabella moves into the view of the mirror, the tone of the story changes dramatically. Her physicality is in plain view and she is suddenly described in unflattering terms:
Here was the woman herself. She stood naked in that pitiless light. And there was nothing. Isabella was perfectly empty. She had no thoughts. She had no friends. She cared for nobody. As for her letters, they were all bills. Look, as she stood there, old and angular, veined and lined, with her high nose and her wrinkled neck, she did not even trouble to open them (9).
The story has shifted from conjecture about Isabella’s inner life to a description of her “factual” outer appearance, revealing her to be an old woman, vulnerable and exposed in the summer light. The passage explores the experience of aging, especially the continued sense of the inner self as young, and the shock of being reminded by the looking glass that one’s body is old. The shift highlights the story’s engagement with the themes of perception versus reality and the instability of self, as it demonstrates how multiple perceptions or the self or others can exist simultaneously. It asks which, if any, of the descriptions of Isabella may be true.
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By Virginia Woolf
