Reflections: Exploring Identity in 20th Century Brit Lit
“ The happiest man on earth would be able to use the Mirror of Erised like a normal mirror, that is, he would look into it and see himself exactly as he is.” — J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (1997)
I am always thinking about identity, and how people go about exploring it. And so, of course I am excited by the diverse depictions of this that you get in literature. No matter the narrative, it is a source of tension and can manifest itself in many ways, from what is versus what could be, to the thoughts of others versus the self. I will explore some of the ways identity — both internal and external — manifests in texts from both ends of the twentieth century and see how they compare.
Harry Potter
One of the earliest revelations about identity in the Harry Potter series comes from the Mirror of Erised (as its inscription reads backward “I show not your face but your heart’s desire”). The magic of the mirror is that it reveals the motivations of the person who looks into it (e.g. Ron’s insecurities about living in his brothers’ shadow), showing them something they may or may not already know is working to influence their paths in life. In doing so it subverts the very purpose of a mirror. A mirror is meant to show surfaces, the exterior. It should show how other people see you, and indeed, if you see someone else in this mirror you cannot see what they do (Ron can only see Harry, while Harry sees his family). In doing so, it brings a piece of their identity from the inside out, but keeps it private. It is a tool to look inside yourself and see yourself as not as you are, but as you dream to be. So, it is easy to see why you could be consumed by the image, longing for reality to match the reflection no matter how unattainable that might be.
Harry looks into the mirror many times, first having discovered it accidentally on a relatively average night, and then re-encountering it at the end of the novel when facing his enemy. And each time, he sees something very different. The first time he looks into the mirror shows his most enduring desire, unsurprisingly to be surrounded by family. The second time, he sees himself finding the Philosopher’s Stone, in order to prevent it from falling into Voldemort’s hands. This reveals two things: first of all, that even the deepest desires of your heart are flexible and dependent on the circumstances. In the moment of need, Harry’s desire to stop Voldemort eclipses everything. Second, that it is driven by something innate and uncontrollable. No matter how good Voldemort is at manipulating people face to face, he cannot trick the mirror into giving him the stone because his intentions are innate. Harry, meanwhile, is pure of heart. He succeeds without having to try because it is in his very nature.
Although Dumbledore continually speaks of choice as the thing that determines your goodness, I think this mirror, among other things, challenges that idea. These characters may have had a choice in who they were, but their circumstances shaped their nature in a way that made those choices happen. Even as Rowling makes an effort to draw similarities in the backgrounds of Harry and Voldemort — both of them orphans, raised by muggles in ignorance of the wizarding world — she gives each of them a magical bond to good or evil. As we learn in the sixth book, Voldemort is descended from a family whose obsession with blood purity resulted in generations of abuse and mental instability. His very conception, achieved through love potion, is an act of coercion. And so from the start, he is both genetically and magically inclined to darkness and the inability to love. Between his abandonment by his remaining family and the status quo of the wizarding world being on his side, it was easy to reinforce those seeds. Harry, on the other hand, was born into a loving home and had that ripped away. And through his mother’s sacrifice he is magically protected by love, that (despite their neglect of him relative to their own son) is preserved by the care of his aunt and uncle. And when he moves on into the wizarding world, he is immediately surrounded by family figures. Can it really be all that surprising that these characters ended up where they did?
Ultimately, identity is driven by the need for the outer self to match the desires within. In this case, it is deeply tied to actions and a sense of morality. Still, the inner self seems to come from something essential that cannot be controlled. The role of choice, then, is only secondary. We never genuinely think that either of these characters are going to change, no matter how often Harry Potter questions whether he is somehow bad. Indeed, Harry’s prevailing goodness is the very thing that helped him survive in the end and led him to find the family he always wanted. His story may have begun as a self-fulfilling prophecy, but by the end it certainly seems that there is some level of fate.
White Teeth
Zadie Smith’s White Teeth (2000) also uses a mirror to explore identity, both literally and symbolically, in the chapter “The Miseducation of Irie Jones”. Not being magical, Irie’s mirror is the Mirror of Erised’s exact opposite. What she sees is a reality that she does not want to accept. Irie’s appearance sets her apart from the people around her and so she works hard to change it. By focusing in on her appearance this passage takes a postmodern approach: it brings attention to surfaces and the importance of the community in forming identity. It expresses the desire to fit in through the way you express yourself, even if you have to come by it through artificial means.
But Irie’s desire to fit into her community is in no way shallow. I think that her relationship to the mirror is really rooted in loneliness. At the beginning of the chapter it says she “…didn’t know she was fine. There was England, a gigantic mirror, and there was Irie, without reflection. A stranger in a stranger land.” Because Irie is of mixed race in a predominantly white area, she cannot escape being seen as different. In the scene where her class reads Sonnet 127 , Irie momentarily sees herself in the poem by interpreting Shakespeare’s “dark lady” as a black woman, who much like her had worked to alter her appearance in order to conform — only to have her thoughts crushed by her teacher, who will only see things one way. So, it is not that Irie actually wants to look like a white girl. I don’t think she does. What she wants is to see herself reflected in her culture. She wants the mirror that is England to reflect the true diversity of the people within, instead of just the average so that instead of people like her teacher treating her like A Black Girl she can be treated like a person first. But because she cannot change the society she is in, her inner self clashes with her outer self and looks to clothing and cosmetics to try to strike the balance. In that way, Irie — and the other characters in White Teeth — do have the power to change things, even if not in the way they expect. Irie thinks she wants to change her appearance, but decides to travel to Jamaica instead. Instead of changing herself, she changes her surroundings.
Although this novel has many instances of what may be considered fate — such as Archie’s survival and resulting marriage at the beginning of the novel — it makes it clear that fate is up to interpretation. Archie begins the novel as someone who is utterly average. He decides to kill himself because of the flip of a coin (the way he makes nearly all decisions) but is coincidentally saved by the halal butcher, which makes him believe that finally, the world wanted him. Fate is something we believe in when it was convenient. But by choosing to go to that street on that day, Archie unintentionally set off the events that would lead to his marriage, the birth of his child, and everything else that happens in the novel. At the end of the day, these characters dealt with and shaped their identities through the unexpected consequences of choices.
Sherlock Holmes
Now let’s travel back to the beginning of the century. The two stories I am writing about do not directly use mirrors, but in a sense they do still rely on reflection. The character of Sherlock Holmes is in himself a kind of mirror, as through his tricks of observation he makes you aware of the way you appear to the outer world. Of course, since Holmes lives in a world of mystery, he is surrounded by disguises and deceptive people. Time and time again, people — Holmes included — take advantage of the ability to change their outward experience to get what they want.
In The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902), Watson is sent to investigate the mystery at Grimpen Mire on his own. While he is there, he observes as Sir Henry Baskerville and Miss Stapleton have a conversation. Baskerville has intentions to marry her, and this seems to be going well, until Mr. Stapleton interrupts in a rage. Watson thinks the reaction is strange, since Baskerville is an honourable man, but he fails to see through the lie of the situation. It takes Holmes to point out that Stapleton’s wife had been posing as his sister. Stapleton was committed enough to his deception that he made his lie into a lifestyle, but still, he could not help revealing his true identity. His jealousy took over and for a moment, Stapleton the brother disappeared. This demonstrates something that is integral to Holmes’ method ever working: in this world, you cannot help revealing the truth to the world. Your appearance bears signatures of who you are whether or not you want it to.
Holmes is also portrayed as an exceptionally gifted actor, to the point where even Watson fails to recognise him. In that way, the external identity of Holmes himself is especially malleable. The character is built around the ability to act as a mirror to everyone else, while also completely hiding his own knowledge until the moment of convenience. Holmes is famous for his fascination with minutiae and love for exact detail and that would seem to link him to Ford Madox Ford’s description of “non-impressionist” writing, that is, tending to describe things literally as a news correspondent might. On the contrary: Watson is glad to meticulously describe detail, while Holmes, although always acknowledging that information, conceals it for effect. Watson will tell you what a person looks like; Holmes will tell you their profession and the circumstances of their daily life, shocking the people around him by concealing information. The side of Holmes we see is almost always a put-on exterior. The inside is uniquely concealed in a world where that is otherwise impossible. In that way, he is a modernist figure in a Victorian world. Unlike the Victorian figures, he is willing to see the dark side of people and admit it is there, and in doing so allow the world to return to order by removing them from society.
The Good Soldier
Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier (1915) makes identity very hard to pinpoint. For one thing, its narrator is extremely unreliable. Not only does he only tell you what he wants you to believe, he continually insists that he doesn’t actually know anything. So not only can you not know exactly who Dowell is or what his intentions are, you also can’t know anyone else. He writes “ If for nine years I have possessed a goodly apple that is rotten at the core and discover its rottenness only in nine years and six months less four days, isn’t it true to say that for nine years I possessed a goodly apple?” What he means is: If I just ignore the fact that my all my friends have been sneaky manipulative people, even though I definitely know that they’re getting into scandals behind closed doors, they’re still good people right? If I pretend it didn’t happen, can I make it go away? As Sherlock Holmes is a modernist figure in a Victorian world, so Ford’s characters are Victorians in a modernist one. Just as in The Hound of the Baskervilles, the truth of these people is visible to anyone who pays attention and thinks about it, but Ford puts a spotlight on the Victorian mindset of acting oblivious to this for the sake of society without giving you a Holmes-like character who is willing to see through it. The only reason why Dowell doesn’t know anything is because he doesn’t want to know it. He chooses ignorance. And he also wants you to choose ignorance of what exactly he is really up to in telling you this story.
Through its confusing language, The Good Soldier obscures its narrator, presenting you with your own goodly apple. Dowell tries to convince you of his identity as a trustworthy person while at the same time concealing his own violent tendencies — such as the time he beat his elderly black servant for no reason — in a wall of text that deliberately diverts attention away from it. He makes himself out to be a nurse, a caretaker for “heart patients”, but is so ambivalent to his own wife’s death that by the end of the novel you could be forgiven for forgetting about it for a while. This text deceives you by putting emphasis on the Ashburnams’ scandals while Dowell talks about his own issues with the utmost casualty. And so it is easy just to breeze over his deceit while trusting him to tell you about everyone else. But when you finally realise what has been going on with him the question becomes: can I believe any of this story when the narrator pretended to be someone he’s not? Both The Good Soldier and The Hound of The Baskervilles expose our relationship to other people’s identities by letting us take trust in a character for granted and later revealing their darkness. Because nothing can really be known, the end is hazy, and instead of resolution we are left with the consolation prize of the continuation of society through Leonora Ashburnam’s second marriage and Dowell’s new life living with a woman who can only say “shuttlecock”. We can choose to believe everything will be okay with Leonora, or not. Either way, there can be no true resolution to this story.
Conclusion
There are many types of identity and they can all clash with each other: who you are and who you want to be, who you think you are and who they think you are, and whether or not there is any objective truth in any of this. Harry Potter, Sherlock Holmes, and to a smaller extent The Good Soldier all tend toward a sort of essentialism. That is, while Harry Potter and Sherlock Holmes both exist in worlds where people are essentially good or bad, Ford Madox Ford draws up a similar world and sort of satirizes it by making everyone a little bit bad. But in Sherlock Holmes and The Good Soldier, secrets are inevitably revealed by the exterior, no matter how ignorant others choose to be of it. While the early twentieth century texts focused a lot on how we view other people, the later ones examined how we view ourselves and want to be seen by others. The older texts maintain a lack of choice in whether we reveal ourselves. The newer ones emphasized choice and especially in White Teeth, choice prevailed. Identity is an ever-evolving, complicated topic, but it is also everywhere. And inevitably, it effects any story’s end where at least here it seems, the more clearly one knows oneself and others, and the more control one has over one’s life, the better things will end up. But before you can get there, you are free to explore any identity you like and hopefully wind up finding yourself.
