(urth) Short Story 100: In Looking-Glass Castle

[Marc Aramini]

“In Looking-Glass Castle” first appeared in 1980 in *TriQuarterly* and is
reprinted in *Storeys from the Old Hotel. *

SUMMARY: In a female dominated United States, men, considered pigs, are
hunted and scorned. Reproduction is undergone through cloning. A
mathematician working for an important space project moves to West Cocoa
Beach, Florida, (Cocoa Beach was a minuscule Florida village until the
space program brought an influx of workers) and buys a house whose previous
owner died under somewhat suspicious circumstances, drowning. She finds a
few volumes of fiction written by men behind the accepted female authored
texts in her library and also realizes that some of her food is
disappearing. Eventually, she confronts the bearded man who seems to live
in the shadows of her house, but does not turn him in. He begins to leave
her small gifts, such as books by Lewis Carroll. Eventually, the police
search her house, and she takes the first opportunity to escape by
accepting a position on a boat. Even there, she sees the face of the man
below deck.

COMMENTARY: Perhaps Wolfe’s definitive exploration of the aggressive
feminist philosophy which desires exactly the same method of power and
influence as that stereotypically sought by men, “In Looking-Glass Castle“
is complicated by the enormous number of allusions for such a short story.
Many of them are probably irrelevant on a plot level (for example, the
gifts of *Sylvie and Bruno* and *Pillow Problems*, two books by Lewis
Carroll, are almost certainly present to highlight the real reference at
work in the title, *Through the Looking Glass* (and *Alice in Wonderland*)).
In addition to the overwhelming drowning imagery, as can be seen in the
literary allusions discussed below, we can extrapolate fairly easily that
Daisy will not long survive the end of her story. As a microcosmic
reflection of her self-destructive society, several of the themes are quite
clearly explored in Daisy’s character.

Daisy is a female mathematician who must hide her status as a doctor from
the public, but for all her book knowledge, she wonders if her car is made
of aluminum or fiberglass. This lack of practical understanding is mirrored
in her society, which treats everyone with suspicion. It understands the
cold theory of how things work without understanding specifics of happiness
and fulfillment (such as the idea that if one is lonely and unfulfilled,
one can simply take a cell scraping and beget a clone). That car also
serves as a simple metaphor – the old fashioned cars cannot long survive
the corrosive atmosphere, and neither can old fashioned women. Daisy isn't
certain which type of vehicle she has, nor is she certain which type of
woman she is. When she mishears “the sisters got her” for “the cistern got
her” when she inquires as to the fate of Jane, the previous owner, coupled
with the necessity of hiding her degree, we see that there is very little
solidarity or trust left. Instead of a supportive sisterhood, all
relationships are suspicious. While the logic the man uses to keep her from
turning him in may be spurious (blaming her for knowingly harboring him),
there is enough truth in his claim that his denouncement of her would
logically have disastrous consequences.

Mention of sympathizers in the North and the fact that the male-authored
texts of Maupassant and Kafka are found in the library read to pieces
forces us to make an interpretive choice. Did the previous owner, Jane
“Something”, read those stories until the pages fell out on her own, or is
the man who lurks in the shadows of the house real? When Daisy is
confronted with the man at last after suspecting his presence, they have a
fairly long discussion, and she asks if he killed the previous owner (who
refused to clone herself and probably resisted other aspects of the
society). By my reading, Jane was in love not with any real man, but with
the idea of them, and was a true “sympathizer” mentioned in the text, who
read those books. When her ideals became obvious, her sisters killed her.
Thus, the idea and imago of man leads to her murder. When asked if he will
kill Daisy in the same manner, he replies in the negative (see unanswered
questions below). Jane was murdered by her sisters for embracing the idea
of man. It seems more likely that Daisy, in trying to flee, is more prone
to self-destruction, a different kind of death.

Daisy is actually not a true sympathizer – she fears loneliness and having
too much responsibility. When Char Cavallo dies of a heart attack, we see
some of the unnatural stress which has been created by this system. When a
new woman comes to the apartment, Daisy offers to let her stay in the house
rent free, “but the new woman was attractive and had, it seemed, better
offers.” Daisy can't even attain the companionship she craves by opening
her house for no charge.

Of course, the possibly imaginary male serves as a mouthpiece criticizing
the entire ideology of this brand of feminism, which seeks to take the
power of the masculine and then eliminate males as unnecessary: “The sphere
of logic has never been the world of women and men. If we can manage to
forget it, we can both be free, or at least as nearly free as we are
capable of being. … [Logic] should serve us, and not master s. Don't you
agree, for example, that if we both wanted the same thing, we could not
both have it. Look, here's a slice of bread … we could divide it between us
– evenly, or by some complicated formula you would work out. But if we both
wanted the whole slice, could we both have it? Both eat it?”

The critique of the all female society inherent in the text is strong:
Daisy must balance her loneliness with the need to seek companionship, and
she is forced unnaturally to think of other women as a man would: “She was
quite good looking, Ms. McKane thought … though perhaps a little too old. …
Her left hand was beside her leg, where the agent could touch it easily if
she wished. She did not.” The same games that men and women play with each
other are found in this new society, and Daisy is exasperated by having to
assume the more masculine role because of her relative lack of
attractiveness. Her horrors are of solitude and loneliness: “of running
down on a lonely road, and so many roads were lonely now.” She wonders if
she “can find someone to live here with [her]” and can’t clone herself, for
she knows that “unless [she] can find someone to share the house, there’d
be no one to look after the baby.” She even finds herself forced to pay for
a meal after being invited to lunch as a matter of course with no offer of
splitting the bill, and thinks to herself, “How is this better?”

When Wolfe comments that the society is based on those of bees or ants in
his introduction to *Storeys from the Old Hotel*, the large size of Pearl,
the woman across the street, seems something like the increased size of the
insect queen, and she has actually reproduced in the fashion accepted by
this society. However, this process is repugnant to Daisy because of her
personal revulsion for Pearl, and the “eccentric” Jane also refused it,
though perhaps for different ideological reasons.

It is quite clear that the society’s entire basis is suicidal, and that
Daisy serves as a mirror to show its effects. In seeking to suppress and
eliminate the male figure, the society still operates in almost the same
exploitative way, except some of the females like Daisy must abandon their
feminine roles and serve more masculine ones or be left alone. Has this
forced Daisy to conjure a fantasy? In many ways, while the work is
realistic in nature, many of the allusions are to fantasies. Indeed, the
final literary allusion, to *Cradle of the Sea* by Joan Lowell, was
published as a memoir in which the main character fabricated an entire life
raised on the sea, with the ship finally sinking as she swum to shore with
kittens clinging to her back. *Through the Looking Glass* is a similar
phantasmagorical fantasy, a dream reality where things in the real world
have cognates through the mirror but are not necessarily physically real.
When Daisy moves to the house in Florida, her size is emphasized, just as
at the beginning of *Alice in Wonderland*, when Alice eats or drinks to
shrink or grow to gigantic proportions:

“[The house] was uncomfortable as a garment too large is uncomfortable by
its very looseness. She had felt big and clumsy in her tiny Boston
apartment Now she herself was tiny,without force, without impact in this
hulking structure. She made noise for the sake of noise and found herself
wondering … if someone were not pounding her front door. … She seemed to be
eating too much and felt sure it was in a subconscious effort to grow
larger.”

Something is missing in her life and her subconscious is working to make
things “fit”. In this scene in *Alice in Wonderland*, the tears shed a
giant cause a flood which almost drown her later, and this theme of
drowning is repeated again and again in Wolfe's story. At first Daisy
thinks the woman across the street is speaking of the previous tenant of
the house who capsized in a boat, when in fact the woman's cloned daughter
Pearl IV perished in that fashion. Daisy dwells on the idea of “Jane
rolling dead, naked in the surf”, though in reality she as been thrust down
the cistern out back. This fall also seems to resonate with Alice's fall
down the rabbit hole into a world that has some nightmare qualities. Daisy
resolves to get a cat (Alice’s experiences in *Through the Looking Glass*
began by playing with her white and black kittens).

Certainly the death of the Char Cavallo, with the name which means black
night or black horse, summons the scene in *Through the Looking Glass* when
Alice is threatened by the red knight. Is there really a white knight to
save her in this reality?

Any attempt to brand the man as a phantom of Daisy’s conscious must
confront her claim, “You killed the other woman – the one before me”, to
which he responds, “Indirectly and unintentionally, yes.” When she first
hears him, she thinks, “the sound was so devoid of stealth that as soon as
it had died away she felt sure it had been a waking dream, a phantom of
hearing.” When the police cannot find any trace of her male guest, his
reality really does seem to be that of Daisy's fantasy (like the fabricated
memoir *Cradle of the Sea* – a fantasy masquerading as reality, or Alice's
dream, with real objects inspiring a dream fantasy).

Ironically, the spaceship that Daisy is working on is called the *Aphrodite*,
the goddess of love and procreation (though it is perhaps fitting that in
at least one origin story she arose when Uranus' genitals were cut off and
thrown into the sea). The nautical ship on which Daisy finally embarks is
named after a famous Australian opera singer, Frances Alda, reputed to have
a strong temper and bitter wit. Her attempt to escape is frustrated: “In
the darkness below deck she glimpsed the stowaway's bearded face.”

The final effect of attempting to flee but seeing the man's dark face
underneath lets us see that Daisy's attempts to truly escape him are
impossible. We can expect that she, too, will drown, but by her own hand in
an attempt to escape the that which cannot be fled. When she steps into
looking-glass castle, she sees in a distorted mirror the things which have
been missing from her life – it is not a true man she sees, but the absence
lurking inside her, given form. For a looking-glass is nothing but a mirror
to behold the self.

LITERARY ALLUSIONS:

Of course the female authors represent the canon with the male figures
excised or cut out, so there is perhaps little thematic purpose for their
presence (Jane Austen, the Brontes, Mary Shelley, Flannery O’Connor, and
Dorothy Parker) . However, there are three male authors referenced: the
short stories of Guy de Maupassant and Kafka, as well as the works of Lewis
Carroll.

In addition, the poem “Harp Song of the Dane Women” by Kipling is misquoted
by Daisy as “Go to the old gray window-maker.” The poem is important
because it seems to summon the allure of the killing sea (which is the “old
gray widow maker), for whom men would leave their women. Clearly the word
widow no longer exists in Daisy's society.

What is a woman that you forsake her,
And the hearth-fire and the home-acre.
To go with the old grey Widow-maker?

She has no house to lay a guest in
But one chill bed for all to rest in,
That the pale suns and the stray bergs nest in.

She has no strong white arms to fold you,
But the ten-times-fingering weed to hold you
Out on the rocks where the tide has rolled you.

Yet, when the signs of summer thicken,
And the ice breaks, and the birch-buds quicken,
Yearly you turn from our side, and sicken—

Sicken again for the shouts and the slaughters.
You steal away to the lapping waters,
And look at your ship in her winter-quarters.

You forget our mirth, and talk at the tables,
The kine in the shed and the horse in the stables
To pitch her sides and go over her cables.

Then you drive out where the storm-clouds swallow,
And the sound of your oar-blades, falling hollow,
Is all we have left through the months to follow.

Ah, what is Woman that you forsake her,
And the hearth-fire and the home-acre,
To go with the old grey Widow-maker?

While it is impossible to pin down only one of probably 300 short stories
of Guy de Maupassant as being of particular import, fortunately I am
familiar with one that has an eerie kind of resonance – one of his fantasy
tales, called “The Horla”. The narrator lives by the water and waves at a
three masted ship, and soon finds that someone is living in his house,
drinking his water. Believing himself to have gone mad, he tries to travel
and escape his situation before seeing a mesmerist. The mesmerist makes a
woman believe a playing card is a looking glass. He even flirts with the
idea of poisoning the unwelcome guest in his house: “How could I kill Him,
since I could not get hold of Him? Poison? But He would see me mix it with
the water; and then, would our poisons have any effect on His impalpable
body?” (Maupassant 25)

However, the nature of the Horla is vastly different from the man living in
Daisy’s house, unless he represents a physically stronger other: “One might
say that man, ever since he has thought, has had a foreboding and a fear of
a new being, stronger than himself, his successor in this world, and that,
feeling him near, and not being able to foretell the nature of the unseen
one, he has, in his terror, created the whole race of hidden beings, vague
phantoms born of fear” (Maupassant 19).

He even comes to see the thing in a looking glass: “Behind me was a very
high wardrobe with a looking-glass in it, which served me to dress by every
day, and in which I was in the habit of inspecting myself from head to foot
every time I passed it. So I pretended to be writing in order to deceive
Him, for He also was watching me, and suddenly I felt, I was certain, that
He was reading over my shoulder, that He was there, almost touching my ear”
(24). The narrator beholds the phantom in the looking-glass, because it is
very possible that the phantom is the narrator's own broken mind. After
burning down his house, the narrator’s final conviction is that, “I suppose
I must kill myself.” (27)

With all those similarities, there are still enough differences to remain
uncertain as to its impact on Wolfe’s story, and perhaps it is the
attempted suicide of Maupassant after a descent into syphilitic madness
that we should take away from reference to his stories.

The connection to Kafka is even more nebulous and speculative. The
alienation and reaction to a man become a bug or vermin in a household
might evoke the feeling of “Metamorphosis”, or even the presence of the
death boat in “The Hunter Gracchus” carrying the long dead titular
character, wandering aimlessly and eternally over the seas after falling to
his death. In his introduction, Wolfe says that he imagined the society
based on that of bees or ants, with their strong eusocial groups dominated
by a queen and female workers. Perhaps this is enough for the Kafka
“Metamorphosis” reference – human society transformed into something
insectile. The Wolfe-wiki takes this analysis in a different direction, and
claims “In the Penal Colony” is the relevant Kafka story because of its
totalitarian state with harsh punishments. It also posits “Mademoiselle
Pearl” as the relevant Maupassant story, when an old maid is chosen as
queen for twelfth night. This is also possible.

The attempt of a pawn to become a queen as is indicated in the movements of
Alice in *Through the Looking Glass* certainly resonates with the story, as
Daisy even quotes the White Queen. If there is any specific chess move that
is being used here, I think that it involves the threat of the Red Knight,
which is thwarted by the White Knight. In Wolfe's story, the Queen has
gotten rid of all her knights.

While the writings of James Tiptree Jr and Joanna Russ are never explicitly
mentioned, there is certainly a sense that the zeitgeist following their
feminist SF promoted an environment for the writing of “In Looking-Glass
Castle.”

Borski’s claim that Edith Berg indirectly references Alban Berg’s *Wozzack*
goes a step too far for me. We have enough imagery of drowning and the sea
to avoid having to resort to name magic.

UNANSWERED QUESTIONS:

The kindle version of *Storeys from the Old Hotel* has an interesting
change from my published print version. The answer he gives to her
question, “Will you kill me the same way?” is “Not.” In the print version,
he says, “No.” The question is of course loaded anyway. If he says yes, he
will kill her. If he says no, it won’t be in the same way. Which answer is
more definitive, “not” or “no”? Is there truly any grammatical distinction
between these two answers?

While the very title “In Looking-Glass Castle” evokes all the chess imagery
and the obvious Alice references, it still describes a castle that is
primarily a mirror. Alone in the house, has Daisy just begun to see herself
and her own frustration and fears? If the Maupassant story “The Horla” is
truly one of the sources, where a kind of progressive insanity leads to
suicidal self-destruction, then we can assume, beyond the idea that she
will kill herself, that the man haunting her is quite probably a
manifestation of her own fears and desires.

If he isn’t a part of her subconscious, how does he know to avoid the
poisoned food and where does he hide? If he IS a part of her subconscious,
how did he indirectly kill the previous tenant? Does sympathizing with the
plight of suppressed men and what they represent constitute enough on our
phantom's part to claim that he actually indirectly killed Jane?

There is one point when the man claims that if Daisy tries to hurt him,
then that would be the only thing that would make him stop being afraid of
her. Is this a complicated way of saying that she can only hurt him by
hurting or killing herself?


 CONECTION WITH OTHER WORKS:

The society depicted in *There Are Doors* is one that is dominated by
females by a trick of biology rather than by choice and is far more
sympathetic than the social order in this story, but the fascination Wolfe
has with a matriarchy in the later part of the 1970s (“Many Mansions”) and
throughout the 1980s (the exploration of the war between the triple goddess
and mother earth in the Soldier series, in addition to other short stories)
fades as his career unfolds. Often criticized for putting females in
secondary roles or depicting them as sexual manipulators or objects, here
we have his most blatant depiction of women in power, but the theme, that
attempting to change our nature to conform to society's expectations is
destructive and perhaps suicidal for the soul, is not as vitriolic as many
might first claim – the critique is of a very particular type of militant
feminism which appropriates masculine power and eliminates rather than
engenders and embraces.


 Maupassant, Guy. “The Horla”. *Hyperfiction*. 2010. Web. 21 August 2014.
http://www.eastoftheweb.com/short-stories/UBooks/Horl.shtml
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