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The book is divided into two major sections. The first is an
account of the glass-making industry, mostly in Venice and
France, and of the perfection of its fabricating techniques.
This section primarily dwells on the intrigues and undercutting
strategies of the two pioneer manufacturers, although we are
also told about the other major centres of glass production and
its subsequent silvering.
We learn of the
fierce competition between Venice and France, of the eventual
triumph of Colbert’s Royal Mirror Company in the 17th
century in France and its near monopoly of mirror production
since then. Focussing on the economics of glass, it offers a
glimpse of yet another emerging capitalist enterprise in Europe
in the periods ahead.
It is, however,
the second section that is of special interest to the cultural
historian as well as to the interested layman. Here
Melchior-Bonnet marshals abundant evidence from mythology and
theological and social guidebooks to establish the mirror’s
provenance as a cultural artifact mediating between individual
and society.
She begins with
the myth of Narcissus whose transgression of the injunction not
to look at his reflection becomes an allegory of the dangers
lurking behind the quest for self-identity. "Narcissus dies
from not being able to reach his self because the identical
cannot grasp itself." Giving a ‘variation of sameness’,
the metaphoric mirror of the myth indicates a split
consciousness that Lacan later makes the cornerstone of his
psychoanalytical theory.
The myth has many
variations, as the author realises in her discussion, but by and
large, its basic ambiguity as both reflection and projection is
seldom altered in differing versions. We have comparable
instances of it in Mahabharat.
For Plato and
other ancient philosophers and in religious literature of the
medieval period, the mirror continues to be seen in its
reflective and projective functions. Since Plato regarded the
material body as a poor semblance of the soul, the mirror
becomes a means of letting us probe our inner being which
otherwise remains intangible.
In European social
and communal history the mirror sustains the effort of
introspection imposed by religious and moral codes. St. Augustine
draws on the semantic richness of the mirror image inasmuch as
he sees in it his own fallen self and the promise of God’s
divinity — a tradition continuing in the theological writings
of the period. For Descartes the mirror reflects the agitation
of the soul and supports man’s search for spiritual uplift.
In seventeenth and
eighteenth century Europe the mirror aids in the fashioning of
the bourgeois gentleman and becomes an instrument of social
deportment. Melchior-Bennet draws upon numerous sources to
reinforce the point. In Rabelais’s Gargantua, there are
9332 mirrors in as many rooms to allow the residents of the
utopian Thelme Abbey to view themselves in full measure in order
to improve upon their behavioural defects. The gaze of the
mirrors disrupts the confusions of self-love and encourages
self-knowledge and humility.
Whereas men
practised gentlemanly demeanour, women perfected their vanities
by looking at the mirror. The author discovers many obscure
paintings of women with mirrors, trying to mould themselves into
social butterflies. The theory of the masquerade itself is a
carry-over of the masked mirror in which women as much as men
hide their true identities.
In our day
Virginia Woolf and Borges develop the deceptive qualities of the
mirror along with their symbolic import. Woolf’s Mark on
the Wall and Borges’s Aleph play with the dual
connotations of the mirror image, the former in its
psychological aspect and the latter in its mystical-metaphysical
one. The author makes a brief reference to Borges, and bypasses
Woolf altogether. In Tarkovsky’s film The Mirror and in
Kumar Shahni’s Maya Darpan, apart from of Orson Wells’s
opening shots of Kafka’s The Trial, the mirror comes
into its own and transforms the characters through its highly
charged and often distorted back-stare.
There is mystery
in the mirror and we shall never completely know what lies
behind it. This solid book is as much about mirrors as about our
selves.
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