The Mirror Trick
In Marie-Odele Delacour and Jean-René Hulue’s “Introduction: The Game of ‘I’”, they draw special attention to the rhetorical and thematic use of perspective in Eberhardt’s writing. In “The Mirror,” a short prelude to the rest of her short story collection, the first-person narrator is Mahmoud Saadi. He is a male wanderer who becomes the vessel for Isabel’s writing, though in the text he is not named, and without further inspection his role is mostly passive. The more active subject is Mohammed, who is described to be of “perfect masculine beauty.”. Mahmoud observes Mohammed looking at himself in a little penny mirror and speculates at his interiority — at the end Mohammed closes the mirror and smiles, and the reader is left unsure as to whether Mohammed was using the mirror to spy upon the spying on Mahmoud.
While reading this passage, I remembered a quote that’s been pinging itself around in my head recently. Margaret Atwood says: “Male fantasies, male fantasies, is everything run by male fantasies? Up on a pedestal or down on your knees, it’s all a male fantasy: that you’re strong enough to take what they dish out, or else too weak to do anything about it. Even pretending you aren’t catering to male fantasies is a male fantasy: pretending you’re unseen, pretending you have a life of your own, that you can wash your feet and comb your hair unconscious of the ever-present watcher peering through the keyhole, peering through the keyhole in your own head, if nowhere else. You are a woman with a man inside watching a woman. You are your own voyeur.” While this refers more to heterosexual objectification, it nevertheless provides an interesting perspective on Eberhart’s superfluous and intersectional identity as a woman who often disparages women, a woman who travels as a man, and a white person who claims a middle-Eastern identity and inheritance.
In their reading of “The Mirror,” Delacour and Hulue claim Eberhardt as an incredibly active participant; through their description, it’s easy to mistake her as a character in the narration itself. With this supportive interpretation, the question that the Atwood reference then invokes is whether or not there is such a thing as an internal, uncorrupted female gaze. The fact that Eberhardt is the female puppeteer behind these two male figures is a significant reverse-power play considering the context of her time, but that logic is marred when taking into account the privilege of her whiteness in shaping ethnic stories. The infinite “spying” aspect of the mirror trick also relates to Atwood’s quote as it is unclear if Mohammed is reflecting internally within himself, if it is only Mahmoud is spying on Mohammed, if it is Mohammed is spying on Mahmoud spying on Mohammed, or, to get really rhetorical, if Mohammed is piercing the veil of Mahmoud to lay his eyes on Eberhardt; Atwood’s quote is less about separate male and female gazes, but and more that they are inevitably melded within a woman. Is Eberhardt, this double agent of politics and identity, just living an amped up version of this psychosis?
The use of Atwood’s quote here, to me, is both well-selected and ripe for further interrogation. More specifically, the “psychosis” Eberhardt experiences, resultant from the incorporation of both a male and female gaze into one psyche seems to me an insufficient answer. What gives a gaze its “maleness” or what negates a gaze’s “maleness” insofar as to make it “female”? Continuing with that train of thought, where do the androgyne, the ambiguous, and the blurred identities of gender find themselves categorized in the realm of “male fantasies”, if they find themselves resigned to neither only the realm of “female” or “male”?
what a fascinating set of questions raised here–both in your comment Cat–but also by Ayanna in her response. Which text is the quote from Atwood taken? Im unfamiliar with it. The ubiquity of the male gaze in her reading troubles me, even as i see its allure/truth. Yet–could we not see/read IE and in particular this story (The Mirror)–as a reverse gaze, a step toward developing a female gaze as a counter to the male? What a pity we didnt talk about this story in class…see if you can insert it in a future conversation? Also—you may consider relating these comments/insights to the role played by Kim Novak in Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo—and weave in Laura Mulvey’s theoretical apparatus on the male vs female gaze in realist film. Certainly there is a lot of “spying” going on in the film—and I wonder if the male gaze is also a colonial gaze, with woman as territory