Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Mirrors In Russian Women’S Autobiographical Writing: The Self Reflected In Works By Alla Demidova And Vera Luknitskaia, Karin Sarsenov

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

In autobiographical writing, the mirror is not only a privileged metaphor for the genre as a whole; it also functions as a primary administrator of boundaries, demarcating the space of the self from the foreign, the chaotic, and the unknown. The mirror metaphor is not gender neutral: in Western elite culture the mirror has served to reinforce the patriarchal dichotomy between man/mind and woman/body, prompting Luce Irigaray’s view of the mirror as “a male-directed instrument of literal objectification.” This article examines two women-authored texts in which the mirror motif is fundamental to the construction of the autobiographical self: the actress …