“The Silver Glaze of the Mirror”: Fire and Ice in Byatt’s Fairy Tales
This article proposes to use the motif of the mirror as a way to decode, interpret, and analyse the narrative structure, content, and style of Byatt’s fairy tales. The paradox of the mirror as a transparent trap implies the re-working of the fairy tale trope into an element of complexity in Byatt’s...
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| Xuất bản năm: | URI:https://journals.openedition.org/jsse, |
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| Tác giả chính: | |
| Định dạng: | Article ou chapitre numérique |
| Ngôn ngữ: | Anglais |
| Được phát hành: |
Journal of the Short Story in English
2022
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| Truy cập trực tuyến: | Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM |
| Tóm tắt: | This article proposes to use the motif of the mirror as a way to decode, interpret, and analyse the narrative structure, content, and style of Byatt’s fairy tales. The paradox of the mirror as a transparent trap implies the re-working of the fairy tale trope into an element of complexity in Byatt’s short stories: the duplicity of the reflecting surface embodies a creative possibility. Stories such as “The Glass Coffin,” “Cold,” “The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye,” or the novella “Morpho Eugenia,” utilise the mythography of glass, building on fairy tale motifs, to engage with paradoxes, to discuss rigid dualisms, and to ultimately propose a reconciliation of opposites. Fire and ice, introspection and experience, independence and sharing, looking in and looking out: mirrors become instruments of revelation, narrative tools for questioning binary structures. This article starts by introducing the potentialities of transparent surfaces for post-modern fairy tales and then outlines the peculiar and revolutionary use of mirrors in Byatt’s short fiction. By means of examples and comparisons, glass is shown to be “literally a paradoxical ethereal substance” (Armstrong 5), which finds its place in the various forms of objects in the story, ubiquitous metaphors, but also narrative structures. Glass itself is, in the end, in its physical substance, an epitome of metamorphosis. |
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