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The Mirror Stage by Jacques Lacan and roots of human aggression

Introduction
People are born into a world of rotting bodies; bodies that melt with time. With each
passing day, we fall apart and then in the same day repair and build up again. Each day another
layer of skin falls and each day that it does we are reborn; yet we are also dying. Covered with
the remnants of nature, human fault and pollutions, our skin absorbs it all and we rot under the
blaze of the sun that gives us life but also helps these bodies soften, dissolve and then fade with
each passing day. At birth we do not recognize ourselves; instead we see blurred images of these
rotting bodies. They all blend together, separated by just color and grotesque shapes, and united,
until that moment of development when we identify ourselves. In this moment, we no longer see
ourselves connected along with these other shapes as blurred images, but rather we finally begin
to identify the other. As we look into a mirror we can see a separate figure, one different and
away from the others. We begin to classify our distinctiveness from the rest and more
importantly, individuality separate from the mother.
The Mirror Stage
This moment of psychoanalytic development, when the baby identifies itself separate
from the other, is called the “mirror stage”, a concept originated from psychoanalytic literary
critic, Jacques Lacan. Through his research on literary work, Freud and childhood development,
he recognizes the significance of this moment in development and how the identity of oneself is
the most influential and essential flash in one’s life. According to Lacan, “This development is
experienced as a temporal dialectic that decisively projects the formation of the individual into
history…(an) assumption of the armor of an alienating identity, which will mark with the rigid
structure the subject’s entire mental development,” (Lacan). Through language, culture and
society, with time, this identity develops and the self-identity is created. According to Lacan, this
is the stage in which the child is first able to fear the aggressions of another, to desire what is
recognizably beyond the self, which is usually initially the mother, and must want to compete
with another for the same, desired object. It is the stage at which the child first becomes able to
feel sympathy with another being who is being hurt by a third individual and begins to cry when
another cries, out of sympathy and emotional connectedness with the other. This structure and
development is not only seen often in daily life but is sufficiently projected in many of the
characters of the novels and short stories we read today. Through the identity of the other from
language and discourse, the characters in Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre and Charlotte Perkins
Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper show parallels in identifying themselves in their experiences of
the mirror stage.
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Lacan uses the term “mirror stage” as a metaphor for the time in an individual’s life when
he or she realizes what role he or she must take on in society. How other people react to the
individual gives an indication of the identity or role that person has in society. Through this
identification, Lacan claims that the self is a social construct and that an individual projects
himself into predetermined roles. If the individual successfully plays out this role, then society
will reward him but, if the individual does not, they will be recognized as the outcast in society,
or in this case the other. If an individual accepts this role, then he will lose their unique identity
and will then subsequently repress their desires of acceptance into that society. At this point the
individual must decide whether they must deny their true identity to be accepted into society, or
refuse to repress its desires and be an outcast (Journal for Lacanian Studies). It is in this way that
the mirror stage becomes recognized as a moment of loss. In The Yellow Wallpaper, the reader
does not have the opportunity to follow the individual as she experiences the mirror stage
however, they do get to see the effects of the mirror stage that precede and her in her
identification of herself she loses herself too. It tells a story about a married women; who in
trying to cure her illness is locked away in a room covered in yellow wallpaper and struggles to
both find her identity and try to maintain the solace of her desire to write. The story was
published in 1899, during the Victorian era, a time when motherhood was the prime joy and the
sole identity that most women held in society. Women were not open about their sexuality and
they were often considered those who maintained purity and divinity in a relationship in
repressing their sexual desires. The main character has one child, but does not find any joy with
it. In fact, she is never around the child in the story and hardly mentions him or her. She claims
that her husband, John, moved the family to a vacated house in order to cure her. However, in
doing so she not only loses her commonality with the rest of the women of society at the time but
she also loses the only identity she knew and understood as well (Diamond). She does not feel
comfortable around her own child; she does not like to entertain like most other women. Instead,
she has a desire to write. John forbids her to write and believes that isolation will cure her. The
main character’s repressed desire to write, and to not be a mother puts her at odds with societal
norms and because she does not adapt to this typical female role, she is punished. The main
character also mentions in the very beginning of the story that she does not want to be left alone.
Often her husband pushes her away and even refers to her as a little child, instantly cutting on
any sort of sensual desires that typically exist in the relationship between the husband and wife.
It seems as though they couple do a role reversal and once again the main character’s typical
female identity is lost as her sexual desires for him rise and his, in contrast, decline. Perhaps in
denying her as a sexual entity, the main character’s true desire that of intercourse becomes so
repressed that she loses awareness of it. It is not until the end of the story when we recognize the
other (the wallpaper), that she is finally able to identify herself. It is only until the very end,
when the main character seems to really lose touch with reality, and John faints, she is able to
obtain her true desire; the first physical, almost sexual contact, as she climbs over her husband. It
is only at this point where she is finally able to accept her desire and no longer repress it. It is
only after the main character identifies with her desires and finally identifies the other in
Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper, that the main character is able to complete
the mirror stage and in succession is finally able to identify her.
Roots of human aggression
It is true that in order to complete the mirror stage, one must be able to attain to one’s
desires and identify oneself. But according to Lacan all of these developments need to involve
projecting beyond the self and, by extension, construct one's own self, or an "ego, according to
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Freud (Diamond), as others begin to view the other as well. Such structures, according to Lacan,
are what Lacan calls the absence or lack of being. Lacan argues, a child's recognition of its
gender is intricately tied up with a growing recognition of the system of names and naming, part
of the larger system of substitutions we call language. The mirror stage, which Lacan also refers
to as the imaginary stage, is fairly quickly succeeded by the Oedipal stage (Journal for Lacanian
Studies). Jane Eyre is a cornerstone of literature; it tells the story of a small Jane who struggles
into life desperately reaching out for a sense of her identity. It is a novel of rebellion, of self and
society, and of changing gender expectations. But it also contributes to troubling investigations
of identity crisis. Throughout the novel Jane suffers through a black dark tunnel of confusion and
uncertainty as she tries to identify who she is. Left orphaned with no name and no identity she
walks bare, like a baby, only seeing colorful images and shapes of people, blending in with the
rest of the crowd. The school she attends is covered with dull images and even the girls all dress
the same. She lives this life of blending images hoping for change until the day she decides to
step out and find a new name for herself as governess. It is not until she reaches Rochester’s
house in her older years of life and finally goes through her most crucial stage of development,
the mirror stage that she begins to see something different in which she was in comparison to the
others around her. It is not until the critical scene where Jane discovers that Rochester is hiding
Bertha in the attic that Jane finally gazes into the mirror, in other words the attic, and sees the
face of the other, which in this case is Bertha. In chapter twenty-five, Jane describes what she
sees to Rochester, “It seemed sir, a woman, tall and large, with thick and dark hair hanging long
down her back,” (Bronte). Then Rochester continues to ask, “Did you see her face?” and then
she says, “Not at first. But presently she took my veil from its place; she held it up, gazed at it
long, and then she shrew it over her own head, and turned to the mirror. At that moment I saw
the reflection of the visage and features quite distinctly in the dark oblong glass,” (Bronte). By
looking at Bertha Jane saw a vision of an “other” for the first time in her life; someone who did
not fit with the norms of society, someone who violated the rules of society and was not like
other women. She was not classy and elegant and dainty like the other woman Jane had
encountered all her life, instead, with mangled attire hair and persona, she only fit the opposite of
that image. Typical Victorian women, like Jane, made sure to keep themselves very proper and
well versed in elegant language. It gave them structure and made them appear well groomed and
this woman, however, unable to communicate and unable to wear the veil as elegantly as the rest
of the woman could, stood out from the rest and this frightened Jane. Recalling Lacan’s theory of
the mirror stage, the other represents other people, other subjects whom the individual
encounters in social life. It stands for language and the conventions of social life organized under
the category of the law (Beaty). Because language and the codes of human societies pre-exist any
individual human being, the systems that are not common and people cannot understand are
other to the individual subject. The subjects themselves, internally alienated, and the necessity
for them to be able to employ the other of language and the law to interact with other subjects is
crucial to Lacan's theory. Jane could not communicate with this new, foreign woman and could
not identify with her in any sense or form; therefore she became savage to Jane and helped Jane
identify the other for the very first time, in her experience of the mirror stage. It helped Jane
identify herself as an individual and made her realize that she did not need to follow typical
societal norms to feel free. By identifying Bertha as the other and later leaving her job and
relations in Rochester’s home, she identified her individuality and established her freedom in
response. It was only through Jane’s identification with abnormality and the other that Jane was
finally able to inaugurate her identity in the end of Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre.
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Conclusion

As humans and creatures of this earth we all have bodies. We all have grotesque dying,
rotting bodies that are like all other bodies in this world. We rely on the other bodies and we rely
on our own for survival but we cannot survive walking down the same path. In identifying
others, seeing new faces and experiencing new things people can finally find this individual path.
They can finally find who they are in comparison to the others in their lives. Like Jane and the
main character in Jane Eyre and The Yellow Wallpaper, people too need the tendency to become
individuals to create names for themselves. Jane was born without a name, with no parents and a
home to call her own, but after meeting Bertha she was finally able to create a name for herself,
by connecting with Rochester. The main character in The Yellow Wallpaper too never had a
name in the story, but it was through her identification of the other, the wallpaper, that resided in
the room with her, that she was able to identify herself in the end, by identifying with it. It is
through Lacan’s research and our mirror stages that we as humans are able to step out of our
decaying bodies and become walking individuals with our own identified egos and it all starts
with one look in the mirror.
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Works Cited

Diamond, Arlyn, and Lee R. Edwards. The Authority of Experience: Essays in Feminist
Criticism. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2015. Print.
Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. "The Yellow Wallpaper." The Norton Introduction to Literature. Ed.
Kelly J. Mays. 11th ed. 2013. 478-89. Print.
Lacan, Jacques, Juliet Mitchell, and Jacqueline Rose. Feminine Sexuality: Jacques Lacan and the
École Freudienne. New York: W.W. Norton, 2016. Print.
Nancy, Ginsburg. Psychoanalysis and Culture at the Millennium. Ed. Ginsburg Roy: New
Haven: Yale U.P, 2015. Print.