Flesh and the Mirror by Angela Carter
"Flesh and the Mirror" by Angela Carter is a poignant narrative that explores themes of love, identity, and self-perception through the experiences of an English woman in Tokyo. The story unfolds over a day-and-a-half, during which the narrator wanders the city's bustling streets, grappling with the emotional turmoil of an unreciprocated love. She perceives her life as a theatrical performance, embracing her role as an abandoned lover while reveling in the melodrama of her situation. This self-dramatization is intensified when she encounters a stranger and enters a hotel room with a mirror above the bed, where she confronts a raw and unfiltered vision of herself.
As the mirror reflects her image, it strips away the social constructs that define her, revealing a self that is both disconcerting and enlightening. The juxtaposition of her romanticized expectations and the reality of her relationship becomes painfully clear during her reunion with her lover, where she realizes that her idealization of him has created an illusory ghost of a partner. Ultimately, the narrative captures her journey from theatrical self-indulgence to a more authentic understanding of love and self-identity, as she learns to see beyond her own histrionics and confronts the truths of her emotional existence.
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Flesh and the Mirror by Angela Carter
First published: 1974
Type of plot: Autobiographical
Time of work: Summer, probably early 1970's
Locale: Tokyo, Japan
Principal Characters:
An English woman , the narratorHer lover , probably Japanese, who ends his relationship with herA young man , probably Japanese, who has sex with her
The Story
"Flesh and the Mirror" is narrated by an English woman, who recalls a day-and-a-half period in which she wanders the streets of Tokyo, weeping, searching for her lover. She turns herself into a character in a melodrama, she later realizes, living her life as a performance, relishing her anguish and hysteria. She observes her own life from outside, as if it were taking place on stage. She has always lived as if she were a actor in a romantic play and now she eagerly throws herself into the age-old role of abandoned lover, loving the opportunity to indulge in self-dramatization.
The narrator returns to Japan from an emergency trip home to England, expecting her Japanese lover to meet her. He is not there, and she wanders the rainy, crowded streets of Tokyo's pleasure quarter, relishing her showy unhappiness, weeping, observing her own performance as if she were the heroine in a soap opera. The narrator switches, briefly, from first to third person, underscoring her later realization that she had turned herself into a puppet moving through life as if it were a stage production.
A stranger—a young man, presumably Japanese—falls into step beside her and asks why she is crying. They go to a hotel that caters to sexual trysts and take a room that has a mirror on the ceiling above the bed. As they make love, the mirror reflects the narrator back to herself as an "I" stripped of all the social constructions that has made her who she is, allowing her to experience herself shorn of history and context. The mirror assaults the narrator with her own flesh, a reflection seemingly more real than the drama she had made of her life. Japan had confronted her with a land beyond her ability to imagine; now the mirror assails her with a self—herself—she had never envisioned.
Disturbed, she dresses and leaves her anonymous young companion. She goes out into the hot, gritty city and resumes her search for her lover. She wanders, weeping, admiring her own romantic self-spectacle. She has not yet absorbed the lesson that the mirror offered.
She locates her lover. They immediately quarrel. She realizes that she wants the love affair to end in a tragic and passionate scene, like it might in a romantic storybook. She has constructed her lover in the guise of a ghost-self that lives only in her mind, ignoring anything about him that does not fit that image. In a rage to love, she has created her own love-object and has turned herself into a mawkish version of a heroine in love. The mirror has scrambled her world, confronting her with a gap between her constructed self and her real self.
She and her lover go to a hotel. They make love passionately, as lovers in romantic dramas are supposed to do, although their flesh tells them a more mundane story, that of a moribund love affair. She and her lover soon part. Tokyo ceases to be a magical and strange place, and she learns to laugh at her own histrionics. The mirror has transformed her reality.