ABSTRACT
During the eighteenth century the mirror functioned as one of the most prominent images of mimetic or imitative representation, of art that reflected the external world with fidelity. The mirror might be positioned so as to reflect the external or the internal, paradoxically standing for both imitation and expression. If the mirror, as an analogue for art, can reflect the internal or external, particular scenes of mirroring similarly play with the boundaries of interior and exterior, subjective and objective. The mirror image provides the illusion of an ideal self, one that transcends the fragmentation and incoherence of the rest of the world. To be carried away by passion for the mirror image entails recognition of one's own hatred, directed internally and externally. The reflective images that Richard Wagner chooses to express the relationship between male and female, poetry and music, allow for an alternative reading.
