Boredom and Individualism in the Lady in the Looking-Glass: A Reflection

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Then the narrator begins a closer description of the outside – the garden, gradually extends to the protagonist – Isabella Tyson, but then breaks off, calling attention to the inadequacy of the description of Isabella, to “how little, after all these years, one knew about her” (Woolf, 1992: 76). Although the narrator observes Isabella, but there is no conversation between them, the boredom extends to every corner in the romm. They are from different backgrounds and what’s more, Isabella is a spinster with a lot of money. There is no common ground for them to begin a dialogue. The sketch continues with a description of the letters that are imagined within the cabinets and drawers of the room, which, along with the furniture itself, seem to possess more secretes of Isabella than the narrator. “Under the stress of thinking about Isabella, her room became more shadowy and symbolic; the corners seemed darker, the legs of chairs and tables more spindly and hieroglyphic” (Woolf, 1992: 77). The uncertainty or sense of suppressed meaning portrayed in it marks the limits of the narrator’s capacity to comprehend Isabella’s status. Isabella “was rich; she was distinguished; she had many friends; she travelled – she bought rugs in Turkey and blue pots in Persia. Avenues of pleasure radiated this way and that from where she stood with her scissors to cut the trembling branches while the lacy clouds veiled her face” (Woolf, 1992: 79). But the indifference of her face tells nothing. All of these Isabella’s idleness, coupled with her nonlinguistic expression through gardening, makes her a cipher.

Then the only male-identified postman invokes boredom as the mark of subjective self-satisfaction, an individual distinction. The interruption of the postman created a sense of defamiliarization between the narrator and the Isabella, for “the picture was entirely altered. For the moment it was unrecognizable and irrational and entirely out of focus. One could not relate these tablets to any human purpose” (Woolf, 1992: 77). In this moment of defamiliarization emerged along with the postman, boredom produces a feeling of how much the narrator dislikes all that has gone before her, not just the outside view, but in whole entirety. The boredom of the narrator has been cut in by a third person who makes her observation incomplete. When the mail was delivered, the stability of boredom goes on. From the narrator, the letters were imagined as “tablets graven with eternal truth; if one could read them, one would know everything there was to be known about Isabella, yes, and about life, too” (Woolf, 1992: 78). This conclusion leads the narrator into a trancelike boredom to imagine the reactions of Isabella after reading those letters. The narrator proceeds to imagine the details of her life, “she was filled with thoughts. Her mind was like her room… stuffed with letters, like her cabinets” (Woolf, 1992: 79). But it is still a mystery that attracts the narrator.

Finally the sketch ends with an image of Isabella shorn of illusions, “she stood naked in that pitiless light. And there was nothing. Isabella was perfectly empty. She had no thoughts”, presented as “old and angular,” as “perfectly empty” (Woolf, 1992: 80). All the characteristics of Isabella are imagined by the narrator’s boredom. And when the truth is uncovered, Isabella is only a woman in boredom without thinking. So the narrator concluded “People should not leave looking-glass hanging in their rooms” (Woolf, 1992: 80) where boredom functions as the subject’s resistance to the knowledge of the reality constitution. Here, as throughout the story, it is a boring text that enacts its own boredom in the form of its consciousness. But the uniqueness of the story is valued. “If time and history are markers of meaning that in their knowability and predictability shape the possibilities of human action, it is significant that in boredom time and history lose this capacity”(Pease, 2012: 98).

- Individualism in the narrator and Isabella

The very title of the story speaks directly to a close engagement – both here and elsewhere – with the issue of individualism, and the possibility of its narrative description. Similarly central to Woolf’s aesthetic is the tension between the individual’s public personae and his or her ‘private’ self. Through a range of biographical, autobiographical, and fiction strategies, Woolf explores the extent to which the private individual can be conceptualized as a fixed, unitary, and bounded identity. In the story The Lady in the Looking-Glass: A Reflection, Woolf also explores the individual about the narrator and Isabella.

In the story, the narrator, situated inside the house, watches the elderly Isabella. Woolf’s focalization of an “obscure” life such as Isabella’s displays Woolf’s wish to inscribe neglected areas of female experience into the realm of literature. “As for facts, it was a fact that she was a spinster; that she was rich; that she had bought this house and collected with her own hands – often in the most obscure corners of the world and a great risk from poisonous stings and Oriental diseases – the rugs, the chairs, the cabinets which now lived their nocturnal life before one’s eyes” (Woolf, 1992: 76). This is a reality description about Isabella. Isabella is a spinster and she is rich, which means she needs no one to rely on or becomes man’s dependent. At this level, Isabella is independent in economy and free as a single. It seems prosaic alongside the rich psychical life that the narrator ascribes to Isabella: for instance “the fall of the branch would suggest to her how she must die herself and all the futility and evanescence of thing” (Woolf, 1992: 79); Isabella’s thoughts seems to have a profundity of self-identity which the “facts” of her life lack. As a domestic woman, Isabella cannot distinguish herself in any traditional or public sense, so the attempt to distinguish her through the medium of biography is necessarily contingent upon gaining imaginative access to her private consciousness. Without the self-identity, Isabella cannot be simply defined as individual.

Throughout the story, the narrator has tried to enter Isabella’s consciousness, but this only emphasizes the complexity and inaccessibility of the inner individualism that the narrator seeks to understand: Isabella “was filled with thoughts. Her mind was like her room, in which lights advanced and retreated, came pirouetting and stepping delicately, spread their tails, pecked their way; and then her whole being was suffused, like the room again, with a cloud of some profound knowledge, some unspoken regret, and then she was full of locked drawers, stuffed with letters, like