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Shvoong Home>Books>Poetry>Abstract on “the Looking Glass” by Kamala Das Review

Abstract on “the Looking Glass” by Kamala Das

Book Review   by:akso6o175     Original Author: Andy Kester Sawian
  • Summary rating: 4 stars (17 Ratings)
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‘The Looking Glass’ is included in the anthology of ‘The Descendants’. The poet uses irony to flatter the male ego by admiring his prowess only to highlight her own soft, feminine self. This way she is able to excite his passion and satisfy his superior male ego. She says,”…be honest about your want as/ woman stand nude before/ the glass with him” so that he feels himself “the stronger one,/ And believes it so and you so much more/ softer, younger, lovelier…”.She lets him feel that he is her “only man” and to satisfy her “endless female hungers” she offers to him her whole female being which includes “the musk of sweat between the breasts, “scent of long hair” and “the warm shock of menstrual blood”. These lines depict pure sensuality in the form of touch and smell. The body has its own grammar of desire and makes its own demands, hence she does not want to hold back, but says: “Gift him all that makes you a woman”. The idea of the gift here is used in the sense of surrender and to submit without any reservations.
The looking glass or mirror, in the general sense, refers to that glass where the image is reflected when one is placed in front of it. Here, however, Das uses irony to emphasize the lopsided character of a man-woman relationship where it is the woman who has to maintain the pretence of subscribing to the idea of a strong man. The view that men have enhanced their so-called superiority over women by seeing women as the looking glass as analyzed in Virginia Woolf’s, ‘A Room of One’s Own’. ‘Stand nude before the glass with him So that he sees himself the stronger one’; even in the nude, it is the man who appears stronger than the woman: this is meant to be read metaphorically, where the strength of the male is a matter of cultural conditioning and women are expected to carry on subscribing to such a view.
‘With your eyes that Gave up their search’; there are two possibilities here: first, the companion of the woman-subject has passed away, hence there is this sense of loss or second, she is now separated, for which no union is possible: what Das suggest is that since the woman had completely surrendered herself to the man in her life, his departure (because of either death or separation) makes it impossible for her to consider any other man in the sense of a companion. But there is a sense of despair towards the end of the poem because in spite of total surrender and self-effacement, she cannot possess her man “Getting a man to love is easy, but living/ without him afterward may have to be/ faced”. Her sexual self that once received warm erotic touches now becomes ‘drab’ and ‘destitute’. ‘Gleamed Like burnished brass, now drab and destitute’; without her companion who stood by her, she has lost her glow and is lost.

Published: November 05, 2010   
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