Alyssa Wallingford
October 9, 2022
English 206
Quotation: “But, outside, the looking-glass reflected the hall table, the sunflowers, the garden path so accurately and so fixedly that they seemed held there in their reality unescapably. It was a strange contrast – all changing here, all stillness there. One could not help looking from one to the other.”(Woolf 215).
Comment: I believe here she is saying that the garden is so still because in looking in the mirror, the outdoors seems so removed from the reality of the outdoors as well as the room she is currently in. However, she was comparing herself to a naturalist, and her description of someone in this profession is witnessing shy creatures roaming around while hiding in the leaves. This seems odd to me because she seems to be saying that a naturalist witnesses the movement of creatures that are not often seen, which means that they see movement, but then she goes on to say how still the outdoors is. The way to reconcile this in my mind is to see the mirror as a kind of picture, or a still shot into the outside, that is being constantly updated, it just takes a larger movement to notice any significant change when looking into this “window” to somewhere else, reflected back at you. The fact that a mirror is reflective could also play into this otherworldliness that Woolf seems to attribute to gazing into this mirror.
Question: If she sees the inside as always moving, but the outside garden as something still, would the roles be reversed if she were outside looking at the indoors through the mirror? Since she had just finished comparing herself to a naturalist, but then claims that the outside is so still, and I wonder if it is the mirror causing that effect.
