The Looking Glass Close Reading

 “The Looking Glass,” written by Anton Chekhov details the life of Nellie, a young woman aspiring towards marriage. Chekhov approaches the story through bleak, dull and lifeless imagery to convey the unhappiness of its main character, Nellie. The story opens describing Nellie with, “motionless eyes and parted lips,” Nellie was, “pale, tense and as motionless as the looking glass.” The color grey is continuously repeated throughout the story to reinforce the dullness and emptiness Nellie’s feeling as she looks into the looking glass. Chekhov details that Nellie’s only sense of happiness can come from marriage when he states, “the destined one was for Nellie everything, the significance of life, personal happiness, career, fate. Outside him, as on the grey background of the looking-glass, all was dark, empty, meaningless.” This emphasizes the popular belief during the 1880’s when this story was written, that a woman’s sole purpose was to become a wife, and only then would they find their true meaning and bliss in life.

Chekhov takes an unconventional approach to that common belief when he describes Nellie’s reaction to her husband dying. Upon having to physically drag the doctor back to her home only to realize that he had become sick as well, she begins to comprehend that her husband dying is only going to leave her with the financial troubles they had previously been experiencing and the inevitable fate of her children’s future hardships and potentially deaths as well. Nellie describes this by believing that, “all the previous life with her husband seemed to her a stupid prelude to this.” Nellie begins to wonder if marriage is really as idealized as she made it seem. Throughout the entire story, Nellie is looking into a looking glass and upon making this revelation about marriage she sees, “one looking glass lying at her feet and the other standing as before on the table.” This is a metaphor of sorts in which the fallen looking glass represents all she had envisioned for the future and how promising she had convinced herself it would be really not being anything of the wonderful things she had assumed it would be. Nellie defies the common stereotype in Russia at that time through being a woman who doesn’t think marriage will be as glorified as women are expected to believe it to be.

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