“The Lady in the Looking Glass”
Stream of consciousness
 Woolf considered a leading modernist.
 “Examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary day. The mind
receives a myriad impressions—trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved
with the sharpness of steel. . . . Let us record the atoms as they fall upon
the mind in the order in which they fall, let us trace the pattern, however
disconnected and incoherent in appearance, which each sight or incident
scores upon the consciousness,” - Virginia Woolf in “Modern Fiction” .
Stream of consciousness
 As a literary term, stream of consciousness appears in the early twentieth
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century.
Primarily associated with the modernist movement.
Fractured narrative and chronology.
Stream of consciousness is a method of narrative representation of
"random" thoughts which follow in a freely-flowing style.
Fragments of random, disconnected thoughts.
Sensory impression occurs as simple lists of a character’s sensations or
impressions.
The Lady in the Looking Glass
 “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.”
 The story uses a looking glass as a metaphor for the lady's character.
 Describes the images reflected in a mirror situated in a woman’s dressing
room, providing a glimpse of the furnishings of her life, but not allowing
us a glimpse into the more private aspects of her character.
 Woolf provides us with all the possessions of the woman, but the woman
herself remains absent.
The Lady in the Looking Glass
 The narrator, situated inside the house, watches an elderly lady, Isabella
Tyson, working in the garden through a reflection in the mirror.
 “how little, after all these years, one knew about her.”
 The sketch continues with a description of the letters that are imagined
within the cabinets and drawers of the room, which, along with the
furniture itself, seem to possess more knowledge of Isabella than the
narrator.
 When the mail is delivered, the letters are imagined as “tablets graven
with eternal truth; if one could read them, one would know everything
there was to be known about Isabella, yes, and about life, too”.
 The issue of selfhood, and the possibility of its narrative articulation.
 Questions whether or not the self can ever be formulated ‘accurately’ within the
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limited terms of language.
The looking-glass motif functions as a surface upon which the self might be
reflected.
Woolf questions whether the self is unitary, constant and finally knowable, or
fragmented and unstable.
Woolf explores the extent to which the private self can be conceptualized as a
fixed, unitary, and bounded identity.
Tension between the individual’s public personae and his or her ‘private’ self.
 ‘it was strange that after all these years one could not say what the truth
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about Isabella was’.
The ultimate unknowability of the self is an important theme for Woolf.
Question of the identity of the lady in the looking glass.
Theme of the split self.
Contrast between the interior of the house and its exterior as seen
through the looking glass.
The interior is a world of movement. It is portrayed as a dynamic
environment that is constantly in a state of flux from one state to another.
 A person's character is something which changes according to mood or
circumstance. It cannot be captured in one still image. It is in constant
motion.
 The external image of the house in the looking glass reflection is that part
of the self as seen by the world.
 Established facts about Isabella's life: that she is single, rich and travels, as
if these things embody the lady herself and tell the reader everything he
needs to know.
 But what is hiding deep within Isabella's mind?
 As Isabella makes her way back to the house and finds her letters, the
narrator feels that she sees the true woman.
 And in her the narrator finds nothing.
 This beautiful woman with the lovely house and exciting life is nothing
but empty.
 As Isabella makes her way back to the house and finds her letters, the narrator
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feels that she sees the true woman.
And in her the narrator finds nothing.
This beautiful woman with the lovely house and exciting life is nothing but
empty.
“that seemed like some acid to bite off the unessential and superficial and to
leave only the truth (…) Here was woman herself. (…) 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…”
Portrait of a woman whose character is examined both from outside and in, and
found to be empty.
 ‘The Lady in the Looking-Glass’ thus exemplifies the modernist principles
Woolf outlines in her essay ‘Modern Fiction’ (1921), in which she advocates
the presentation of ‘this varying, this unknown and uncircumscribed
spirit’ of personal consciousness, rather than ‘the alien and external’, the
dry events of a life.