See(k)ing the Self: Mirrors and Mirroring in Bicultural Texts

When David Levinsky put on his new clothes, and had the barber cut off his side-locks, his mentor remarked: "Quite an American, isn't he?" as he brought him to a mirror. To quote Levinsky: "When I took a look in the mirror I was bewildered. I scarcely recognized myself.... It was as though the haircut and the American clothes had changed my identity" (Cahan 101). It seems to me no coincidence that mirrors and mirroring occur so often in texts written by bilingual, bicultural authors; that in work after work either the mirror surprises the one who looks into it, or an Other in some fashion mirrors the protagonist. Typically there is some discrepancy between the actual, surface, external mirror image that any onlooker could see and some sort of interior, mental self--whether wished-for, or felt, or despised--which prompts--or results from--the questions: who and what am I? which is the real me? Admittedly, this phenomenon is not exclusive to bicultural texts any more than are the issues of identity formation and conflict at the heart of the imagery. One remembers the "stranger" in Jane Eyre's mirrors at those junctures in her life where she (like the bicultural protagonists) embarks on a new life, and perceives herself in a new light or new role, for example when, in her wedding gown, she looks in the mirror and sees "a robed and veiled figure so unlike [her] usual self that it seemed almost the image of a stranger" (362; See Siebenschuh 309, 313). Kathleen Woodward writes of the preponderance of mirror images in literary representations of the aged body, and the horror at the recognition it forces on the one looking into the mirror (104).(1) She cites an example from a footnote Freud appended to his essay, "The Uncanny." While he was sitting in his compartment on a train, the lavatory door swung open, "and an elderly gentleman in a dressing gown and a travelling cap came in." Freud jumped up to redirect the stranger, assuming he had come into the compartment by mistake. As he writes it: "I at once realized to my dismay that the intruder was nothing but my own reflection in the looking-glass of the open door. I ... thoroughly disliked his appearance" (106). What these examples have in common with one another, and with the examples I find in bicultural texts, is that the view in/from the mirror dramatizes a difference between a mental self-image and the "external" mirror image. Coincidental though it may be, the context of the journey is an appropriate "frame" for the mirror incident. Whether a literal journey such as Freud's train trip, or the immigrant's crossing; or a metaphorical one, as with Freud's new awareness of how far along in age he has come, or Jane's arriving at a new "station" in life, or the immigrant's in becoming more like an American, the mirror can suddenly force the "traveler" to see how different he or she is from those others who seem so much at home. But more complicated is the strangeness one can feel when, looking in the mirror, one sees no discernable differentness from those around her, but rather from one's former image, and from the people at her mother's dinner table--a difference more complex and more conflicted than the first. For this reason the look into the mirror--indeed the very need to look into the mirror, to seek one's image--seems to assume greater urgency as well as clearer self-consciousness in bicultural texts where change and difference is more obvious or more sudden, and therefore more clearly dramatized, than in the conventional bildungsroman or metaphoric journey of progress through stages of life, maturation, self-realization. Whether sought or come upon accidentally, a view in a mirror is instantaneous, not a gradual process over time; the unexpected difference reflected in the mirror, a trope (as well as a crucial incident) expressing identity disruption or formation. Levinsky's image was suddenly and radically different; and that difference, but the physical manifestation of a suddenly, radically changed environment and way of life; he had crossed to an unfamiliar place, become surrounded by an incomprehensible language, stripped of all former intimates or even nodding acquaintances. …