"Looking at the Back of Your Head": Mirroring Scenes in Alice Walker's The Color Purple and Possessing the Secret of Joy

   Lara, it said, sit here where the sun may kiss you ... Lara, it said, lie
   here where the moon can make love to you all night long ... Lara, it said,
   one bright morning when she knew herself to have been well kissed and well
   loved: sit here on this stone and look at your beautiful self in the still
   waters of this stream. (4)

She listens to and obeys her inner voice and finally appears to believe it: "Calmed by the guidance offered by her inner voice, Lara sat down on the stone and leaned over the water. She took in her smooth, aubergine little snout, her delicate, pointed ears, her sleek, gleaming black fur. She was beautiful!" (4).

Similar to Celie's experience, the panther views parts of herself in the stream's reflection as a means of coming to an appreciation of her whole self. And it does seem that she gains a unified vision of self when she recognizes that "She [is] beautiful!" (4). But, whereas Celie continues to envision herself as complete, Lara does not. Her inner voice remains a fragmented part of her self, something that calms her with its guidance rather than becoming a part of the total, beautiful her.

Certainly, the conclusion of the story points to the possibility that Lara remains consciously fragmented. Her inner voice continues to assure her of her beauty and yet she cannot grasp that she is beautiful: "Each day it seemed to Lara that the Lara in the stream was the only Lara worth having" (5). The incomplete Lara so longs to unify herself by fusing with her reflected image that she "lean[s] over and kisse[s] her own serene reflection in the water, and h[olds] the kiss all the way to the bottom of the stream" (5). Here Tashi's story of Lara resembles Ovid's story of Narcissus:

   ... How often He tries to kiss the image in the water

   ...

   He watches, all unsatisfied, that image Vain and illusive, and he almost
   drowns In his own watching eyes. (Humphries 70-71)

Unlike Lara, however, Narcissus dies after acknowledging that the boy he has fallen in love with is, in fact, his own reflection: "I know / The truth at last. He is myself! I feel it, / I know my image now" (71-72). Tiresias's prophecy that Narcissus would only live to a ripe old age, "if he never [knew] himself," (68) holds true. Narcissus fades away and dies at the water's edge, leaving only the flower that bears his name. Here self-knowledge induces unhealthy obsession and untimely demise. Though her death is not preceded by self-knowledge, Lara's pursuit of a complete self also ends in a narcissistic suicide; her attempt at self-possession, doomed by her misrecognition of the "mirror" image, results only in self-negation. Since Lara's tale is the opening story we hear from Tashi, we have a clear indication that the quest for selfhood will be more complicated and costly in this novel than it was in The Color Purple.

Fortunately Tashi's end is not as abrupt as Lara's. Unlike the panther, she eventually moves to a state beyond the mirror stage. But the vision that Tashi accepts is unlike Celie's. Tashi, who seems more complex than either the panther or Celie, works through her extensive psychic damage and begins to celebrate her different selves rather than pursuing the unified vision of selfhood that Celie and Lara cling to. But similar to the other two, she needs mirroring experiences in order to move from her experience of psychic pain to a place where she can find and enjoy her diverse self.