‘Mirror Mirror On the Wall’, Who Am I of them all?A Study of Self-Discovery in Stephanie Campisi’s ‘The Glass Girl Looks Back’ and Ren Watson’s ‘Optics’

Abstract

Sailing into the self and investigating its depths and dimensions have been a grand concern as well as a mark of literature. This paper investigates two examples of self-exploration in two short stories, namely, ‘The Glass Girl Looks Back’ (2010) by Stephanie Campisi and ‘Optics’ (2019) by Ren Watson, in the light of Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalytic theory, the mirror stage. Campisi and Watson delve into the reservoir of the psyche, exploring the road to self-discovery through two women and their mirrors. The main characters’ identity formation is achieved with the gradual growth and development of the human being, starting from birth until s/he is an adult human being with a supposedly fully formed identity. This paper investigates

reversing the line of identity formation. In other words, the argument highlights that the more a human being grows, develops, and assumes that s/he achieves the full formation of identity, the more this identity blurs and disperses. The ‘climax’ takes place when the moment the identity is thought to be fully formed, it shatters. It is not by completion, but through fragmentation and shattering, that identity formation is achieved.