Virginia Woolf and "The Lady in the Looking Glass: A Reflection"

My God! Virginia Woolf's life was filled with so much loss at an early age that I couldn't imagine how it would feel to be dealt those cards. The first blow would come in the death of her relative Julia Cameron. Soon after, Woolf's half-sister who was also her substitute mother died during childbirth. After this came the death of her father in 1904. Two years later, her brother died of typhoid during a trip they were on in Greece. Needless to say, her losses were sure to have had a significant influence on her writing, both in style and content.

In her work, "The Lady in the Looking Glass: A Reflection", Virginia Woolf, according to the book, "takes the garden shears of her missing character and tears representation to pieces (1224)." The story is somewhat difficult to follow at first, because you have no clue as to who the poem is discussing. While it's a narrative, we find out a little deeper into the work that her name is Isabella Tyson.

Apparently, the story deals with the inward journey of Tyson. She is trying to figure out who she is as a person, and decided that she isn't happy with what she sees. Depressing, I know. The beautiful thing about this poem, in my opinion, is that it shows us that we are fully capable of metacognition and this helps us make the changes necessary to better ourselves.

We can see Tyson's reflection of herself change when she says the following:

"Suddenly these reflections were ended violently and yet without a sound. A large black form loomed in the looking-glass; blotted out everything, strewed the table with a packet of marble tablets veined with pink and grey, and was gone. But the picture was entirely altered. For the moment it was unrecognisable and irrational and entirely out of focus. One could not relate these tablets to any human purpose. And then by degrees some logical process set to work on them and began ordering and arranging them and bringing them in to the fold of common experience. One realised at last that they were merely letters. The man had brought the post." (p.1226)

To me, Woolf was realizing all of the good things about herself, until she takes a negative turn and starts thinking about her downfalls. The most important thing to take away from this is to understand that it's not thinking about bad thoughts that makes your self-image go down, but it's how you respond to those negative thought. There's an old saying that applies to this: "Life is 10% what happens to you and 90% how you react to it."