{"id":56,"date":"2025-09-21T22:46:10","date_gmt":"2025-09-22T02:46:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/gss206-f25\/?p=56"},"modified":"2025-09-21T22:46:10","modified_gmt":"2025-09-22T02:46:10","slug":"the-mirror-trick","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/gss206-f25\/the-mirror-trick\/","title":{"rendered":"The Mirror Trick"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Mirror Trick<\/span><\/p>\n

In Marie-Odele Delacour and Jean-Ren\u00e9 Hulue\u2019s \u201cIntroduction: The Game of \u2018I\u2019\u201d, they draw special attention to the rhetorical and thematic use of perspective in Eberhardt\u2019s writing. In \u201cThe Mirror,\u201d 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\u2019s 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 \u201cperfect masculine beauty.\u201d. Mahmoud observes Mohammed looking at himself in a little penny mirror and speculates at his interiority \u2014 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.<\/span><\/p>\n

While reading this passage, I remembered a quote that\u2019s been pinging itself around in my head recently. Margaret Atwood says: \u201cMale 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.\u201d While this refers more to heterosexual objectification, it nevertheless provides an interesting perspective on Eberhart\u2019s 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.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

In their reading of \u201cThe Mirror,\u201d 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 \u201cspying\u201d aspect of the mirror trick also relates to Atwood\u2019s 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\u2019s 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? <\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Mirror Trick In Marie-Odele Delacour and Jean-Ren\u00e9 Hulue\u2019s \u201cIntroduction: The Game of \u2018I\u2019\u201d, they draw special attention to the rhetorical and thematic use of perspective in Eberhardt\u2019s writing. In \u201cThe Mirror,\u201d a short prelude to the rest of her short story collection, the first-person narrator is Mahmoud Saadi. He is a male wanderer who … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “The Mirror Trick”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6527,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,5,9,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-56","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-deception","category-feminism","category-gender","category-race"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/gss206-f25\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/gss206-f25\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/gss206-f25\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/gss206-f25\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6527"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/gss206-f25\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=56"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/gss206-f25\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":57,"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/gss206-f25\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56\/revisions\/57"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/gss206-f25\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=56"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/gss206-f25\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=56"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/gss206-f25\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=56"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}