mirror

occupation / innovator as

journalist

nationality

American

literary critic

is, in early modern English artistic practice, reflective not of a reflexive self-consciousness which might be seen to herald the birth of modem individuated subjectivity. Rather, they were upward-tilted instruments of correction intended to reflect paradigms of virtue... remembrances of mortality... and cruel reminders that sins such as vanity must be punished.

Debora Shuger argues that mirrors in early modem English artistic practice writings, paintings, woodcuts and the like describe not a reflexive self-consciousness that might be seen to herald the birth of modem subjectivity but, in fact, the reverse. 42 She suggests that while representations of mirrors reflected many things, they almost never revealed, or even purported to display, an individuated self (p. 22). Mirrors were instruments of correction... Platonically angled, upward-tilted emblems intended to reflect paradigms of virtue... remembrances of mortality... and cruel reminders that sins such as vanity must be punished. (They functioned, indeed, as all of the symbols toward which Shakespeare gestures in Sonnet 62.) On this basis, Shuger argues convincingly that the early modern mirror was not a Buckharditian exemplar of the birth of an individuated self but the mark of a culture that did not yet have a place, or a vocabulation, for the kind of 'I' with which we are now so familiar.

Debora ShugerThinkers

Debora Shuger