The Looking Glass is a short story written by Anton Chekhov. I have read many of Chekhov’s short stories now and really enjoyed them. So, picking another one was an easy task. In this story, a young woman named Nellie is daydreaming about her life with her fiancé while staring into a looking glass.
Nellie is the daughter of a landowning general. She is staring into the looking glass not for vain reasons, but she is imagining what her future life will be like. Nellie is intently focused on the looking glass and ponders about how her married life will be, and she imagines all romantic notions related to it. Then, her imagination starts to darken. Her romanticized idea of her marriage turns dark when her fiancé falls sick, and she is frantically trying to help him. She finds a doctor who is not feeling well himself and refuses to help her. The lines between her romanticized imagination and reality blur, and she realizes that her overthinking and anxiety are reflected in her daydreaming too.
The prominent themes for me were the fear of the future and the use of the mirror as a symbol to depict reality versus illusion. Nellie is imagining a whole life for herself by staring into the looking glass. She imagines what her relationship with her fiancé and then her husband will be like and what kind of future will she have. The anxiety and fears of reality make their way into her imagination because there is no escaping from them. The perfect and romanticized illusions of her future take a darker turn when uncertainties in her mind creep in. The looking glass becomes a symbol of hope in the beginning and of fear in the latter half. Nellie’s reality is different than what she is imagining right now, yet she becomes emotionally distressed as her imagination turns scary.
For someone who daydreams a lot and has an overactive imagination, this story hit a little too close to home. The story does seem to criticize the romanticization of life, especially of the future, and in this case, specifically Nellie’s thoughts on marriage. What we imagine our life would be and how it actually turns out are poles apart. This imagination of a certain future and romanticizing life causes emotional stress because reality is far different. In the story, Nellie causes herself emotional distress through her imagination when she is not even at that stage in reality. The end of the story is open-ended, and I think there can be multiple interpretations. The reflective nature of the story and the flawless transition from reality to her imagination makes this story extremely engaging.
The Looking Glass by Anton Chekhov is a beautifully written and poignant classic short story. It perfectly captures the tendency of humans to romanticize life; it has psychological elements throughout the story. The way the narrative flows showcases the inner conflict and blurs the lines for the reader as to what is illusion and what is reality. It is introspective and hones in on the themes in such a short span. I enjoyed reading this story.
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