The mirrored self

On the dust jacket of Victoria Blum’s exploration of cosmetic surgery in America, Flesh Wounds: The Culture of Cosmetic Surgery (2003), feminist fiction writer Fay Weldon begins her endorsement of Blum’s book with an astute comment: ‘I blame mirrors. If it weren’t for them we wouldn’t need plastic surgeons’. Despite their ubiquity, it is only within the past century that industrialized processes of sheet glass production and silvering have seen mirrors colonize domestic surfaces and urban landscapes, presenting modern selves with inescapable and frequently uneasy relationships with their own reflections. Weldon herself is the author of The Life and Loves of a She Devil (1984), a modern fable in which the plain protagonist, Ruth, incensed by her husband’s infidelity with a petite romance writer, uses cosmetic surgery to transform her bulky form into a replica of her rival to ultimately assume her identity and savagely avenge the betrayal. As Ruth’s story unfolds we are left in little doubt that her life has been defined by her appearance. Her plainness has, furthermore, been used to legitimize her rejection by those closest to her. Firstly her parents and now her husband have discarded her, extinguishing her very right to participate in their lives. Mirrors, however, are not the reflectors of Ruth’s self-worth; it is the reflections of those who are closest to her that inform and relegate her to the realms of abjection. In a parting rant her husband exonerates himself of any responsibility for the demise of their marriage and his desire to seek the affections of another. He levels all blame at Ruth and accuses her of being other than human, a she devil. In this moment of scathing rejection Ruth realizes that while she is unable to change the world, she can change herself. Life’s scrapheap will not be her destination and she initiates a brutal restitution. Over time, Ruth forces her self-centred nemesis to account for her injustices by employing cosmetic surgery to gradually morph into a replica of her petite form. Following her foe’s eventual death, Ruth finally resumes her place beside her husband, now dazed and emasculated by the chain of events unleashed by his stirring of Ruth’s wrath. Weldon’s fiction is essentially a feminist fairytale in which the beauty system, the way it is sustained and replicated, and the unjust hierarchies embedded within it are brought into heightened focus. For Ruth, however, undergoing cosmetic surgery is not about becoming beautiful, since

beauty in and of itself is of little interest to her. For her, beauty is power. Weldon gives a provocative reading of cosmetic surgery and the beauty system, and while her comment on Blum’s book regarding mirrors is simply stated, it is nonetheless well observed. Mirrors have become a distinct feature of modern architecture, delivering the ultimate tool of self-surveillance and invariably changing the ways in which we have all come to view ourselves. When I started interviewing for this study it immediately became obvious

that it was difficult for participants to speak about how they felt about their appearance, particularly prior to having surgery. I presumed from the outset that the desire to change one’s appearance must emerge from dissatisfaction with it, but I quickly realized that it was somewhat disconcerting for participants to respond to such a direct line of enquiry. Rather than asking about feelings aroused by appearance, I found a much more fruitful question sought to establish how participants had felt when they saw themselves reflected in a mirror. Indeed, in the same way that mirrors mediate our view of ourselves, they also mediate and facilitate personal discussion about appearance, and it was abundantly clear that asking participants to recall the feelings evoked by looking at themselves in a mirror did stimulate a discussion about appearance more effectively than questions relating directly to feelings about appearance. At the time I did the interviews, my concern was to facilitate a discussion, to encourage the interviewees in speaking informally and comfortably about what shaped their decisions to seek surgery. I was acutely aware that such a line of enquiry might venture into highly personal and, as I was to find, highly sensitive aspects of personal narrative. It was therefore in the interests of both myself, as the convener of the interview, and the respondents, to make the interview ‘space’ conducive to conversational flow. As I analysed the interviews, however, I came to realize that framing questions around feelings associated with negotiating appearance raised a number of theoretical questions concerning the formation of body image. It also became increasingly clear that notional ideas of self and body image merge and separate continuously and can, in given situations, be two entirely different things. Mirrors, moreover, as the ultimate modern tool of self-surveillance and evaluation, are instrumental to that process. Reflective surfaces have long held the fascination of developing humanity,

but it has only been within the past century that the development of industrialized processes and changing domestic architecture have seen mirrors proliferate in both public and private spaces. In his history of the mirror, Pendergrast (2003) traces the technological development of the earliest reflective surfaces, from black obsidian hand polished by Stone Age huntergatherers in Turkey around 6200 BC, through simple reflective metal surfaces made from copper and bronze, to the mass production of sheet glass in the period from 1850 until 1950. Industrial manufacture of the earliest mirrors was a dangerous and expensive enterprise and, as a consequence, mirrors were only to be found in the homes of the wealthy or selected public places. A revolutionary method of spraying silver on to the back of glass sheets was

developed in the 1940s which vastly reduced the volatility of earlier manufacturing processes and paved the way for the mass production of mirrors. Subsequent reductions in expense saw mirrors increase in both size and ubiquity within evolving modern architecture, to take their place in the increasingly privatized space afforded by the bathrooms and bedrooms so readily embraced by the middle and aspiring working classes. This provided a fascinated population unprecedented opportunity to scrutinize their reflections within the privacy of their own homes. One can speculate that the relatively recent proliferation of mirrors, modifications in domestic architecture and the concomitant rise in visual culture, with its evident privileging of youth and beauty, have all contributed to a steadily increasing self-consciousness and subsequent angst surrounding the body and its appearance, which, according to the sociologist Norbert Elias (1978, 1982), have evolved over many centuries within Western culture. One could further speculate, as indeed Weldon does (on Blum 2003), whether the ascent of cosmetic surgery and, indeed, the ever-expanding plastic arts of self-production more generally, could have occurred without the installation of mirrors in the inner sanctums of private life. Mirrors provide visual access to the body and its appearance. As Hepworth

(2000) observes, viewing oneself in the mirror is a personal act informed with social meaning, but he also notes that it is a mediated representation of one’s self-image that is reflected back, a view of the self that is, in effect, a flattened and immobile image.