Date: Thu, 10 Oct 1996 02:39:29 -0500
From: chantel <chantel-AT-iw.net>
Subject: Re: mirror questions


Marilyn Vogler Urion wrote:
> 
> Story:  I read my poetry at a grad students' lunch gathering yesterday.
> One of them  begins:
> 
> Reflecting
> ... how in the inevitable gravity of time
> the soft folds of skin at the corners of my mother's mouth
> flinch
> discovered in the silvered morning of *my* bathroom mirror;
> 
> I was in the computer lab afterward, and one of the fellows who'd been at
> the reading looked at me very hard for a moment and said, "Your face
> changed -- I thought for a minute you were your mother."
> 
> Question:  What does it do to/for the notion of the mirror stage when a
> woman looks into the mirror and realizes she and her mother are *not*
> separate ... that they ... what? ... overlap, merge, blend?  This probably
> isn't a universal experience, but I don't imagine I'm the only one it's
> happened to either.
> 
> Another question:  Carol Gilligan talks about young women 'going
> underground' (I think those are her words) sometime in their early teen
> years and not emerging until their thirties -- though I may have the times
> wrong.  It's been a long time since I read it.  How might the
> mother-in-the-mirror be related to women's re-emergence?
> 
> Thoughts ? ...
> 
> Marilyn Urion
> mjurion-AT-mtu.edu
> 
>      --- from list french-feminism-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---Marilyn,
The process of a female child looking into the mirror is not as cut and 
dried as it seems. Since according to a lot of psycholanalytic theory, 
there is no place for the girl to take up in the symbolic order other 
than that of the mother she is always in s state of ambivalance toward 
her. Her identity cannot ever be completely separate of the mother and 
supposedly she reacts with great hostility or actually takes her 
mother's place by giving birth herself. Some great writing on this is 
Irigaray's "And the One Doesn't Stir Without the Other" in the journal 
Signs, and in Kristeva's "Motherhood According to Bellini".Kristeva also 
wrote another really interesting piece on the subject and it's somewhere 
in Black Sun. But I cannot remember the chapter. It's about a woman who 
has no "voice" due to depression and then becomes pregnant.If you are 
interested in art at all, I had the priviledge of working with a 
professor/painter named Hanneline Rogeberg who deals with this subject 
matter beautifully in her paintings. She is a Norwegian artist and is 
currently teaching at Rutgers. The only catalog I think that is 
available on her work is "A Century of Norwegian Figure Painting" at the 
National Museum of Women in Washington, DC. This is one of my favorite 
subjects to discuss so any feedback or other interest would be 
wonderful.
Sincerely, 
Chantel


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