The Writing Experiment by Hazel Smith

She glares back at me

warningly.

She says, ‘I’m bitterly disappointed.’

Then she says,

‘You’re lucky.’

I turn my eyes.

Even sideways I still catch glimpses

of clenched jaws, pursed lips

hurt senses.

‘I’m most upset.

You can’t survive,’ she says

‘without deep resentment.’

‘The Mirror’ (McMaster 1994, p. 121)

In this (fairly conventional but strong) poem the mirror is used as a way
of thinking about identity and our genetic and familial heritage. The
speaker looks into the mirror of her life hoping to see herself, but only
finds the dominating presence of her mother and her own unwelcome
likeness to her. The poem exploits the mirror image to convey the power
struggle between mother and daughter, and to challenge the ideological
assumption that such relationships are close and harmonious. But the
mirror also symbolises the tension between the burden of our heritage and
the potential of what we can achieve.
The mirror image often appears in novels. In the following extract from
American writer Carson McCullers’s The Heart is a Lonely Hunter , the
mirror symbolises the ambivalence of memory, and Biff ’s reassessment of
his identity, when the death of his wife ends their dull, limited yet secure
marriage:

Example 1.24

Biff uncorked the bottle. He stood shirtless before the mirror and

dabbed some of the perfume on his dark, hairy armpits. The scent

made him stiffen. He exchanged a deadly secret glance with himself

in the mirror and stood motionless. He was stunned by the

memories brought to him with the perfume, not because of their

clarity, but because they gathered together the whole long span of

years and were complete. Biff rubbed his nose and looked sideways

at himself. The boundary of death. He felt in him each minute that

Playing with language, running with referents 21