The Mirror Shows Your True Self in Literature.
Authors:
- Used by Nathaniel Hawthorne in at least two short stories, Dr. Heidigger's Experiment and "Feathertop". In the former, a number of rejuvenated old people are seen in their wrinkly true selves in the mirror; in the latter, a handsome young cavalier is seen in the mirror in his true form of a dilapidated scarecrow.
Specific Works:
- In Mercedes Lackey's The Black Swan (a retelling of Swan Lake), the sorceress Odile tells Odette that Baron von Rothbart won't have any mirrors in his house because "mirrors show the truth." When he asks Queen Clothilde to cover or hide all the mirrors in her ballroom, you know something's up.
- In chapter eight of Broken Gate, this is inverted, as the mirror doesn't really show Nezumi's true self, actually, as Nezumi's reflection is the opposite of what she is, right down to being more emotive. The reason for this because said reflection is a manifestation of her madness, the which she talks to.
- This is Played With in Brothers in Arms: Miles is on a subway transport, and sees his reflection in the glass. He's currently wearing his mercenary uniform, but the Miles in the mirror has on his ImpSec uniform, reflecting his inner turmoil about his split personalities diverging. Turns out it wasn't Miles — it was his clone, and they were going to attempt a switch; they just had the wrong uniform. Miles passes it off as being a hallucination while on heavy medication.
- In The Castle in the Attic, one of the primary weapons of the evil wizard Alastor is a Magic Mirror with this power. It eventually gets turned around on the villain himself, with fairly satisfying results. When turned on The Hero, all he sees in the mirror is himself.
- Invoked in The Chronicles of Prydain. Taran spends most of Book 4 searching for a Magic Mirror that supposedly shows the true nature of anyone who looks in it. Eventually, he reaches it, and discovers that it's a puddle of water. He looks in it and having gone through a lot of Character Development, sees himself for who he is -a person with some faults, and some flaws, but overall good and kind. Above all, he is who he has always been-himself, no more, no less. It's never revealed whether the mirror was actually magic, or whether it was never anything more than a pretty puddle of water.
- Subverted in Discworld: Witches are well aware that mirrors don't show your true self. They can show your opposite self a billion times, which can be problematic when there's only one soul to go around. When Granny Weatherwax has to find the "real her" out of a vast number of reflections, she taps her own chest.
- Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone: Played with. The mirror of Erised shows the viewer's fondest desire at that moment and definitely NOT anything objectively true. But when Dumbledore turns the mirror into the final obstacle to the titular stone, he rigs it so that anyone who's truest desire at the moment was to find the stone (and not to use it, in which case the mirror would work as normal and just show them making gold or the Elixir of Life or suchlike) would actually get it.
- The Alan Dean Foster series Journeys of the Catechist features the main character, Ehomba, using a mirror to scare away some creatures that had been bombarding the party with giant pine cones. Afterward, each character looks into the mirror in turn. The normally jovial and exuberant Simna appears much more somber and depressed. The enormous cat Ahlitah appears as the height of feline majesty, and the recovering drunkard Knucker sees himself as he is when drinking. When Ehomba first looks into the mirror, the other three are momentarily blinded by the sun's reflection when they try to look. Looking again, the mirror is showing Ehomba exactly as he is. Only Ahlitah notices that the sun was in front of Ehomba, not behind him, and so couldn't have been the source of the light that the others saw in the mirror.
- The Knight in Rusty Armor: In the Castle of Knowledge, the titular knight comes across a mirror. At first he ignores it, since he doesn't consider himself good-looking. Once he finally looks, he's surprised to see his reflection as a handsome, almost perfect-looking man. It's explained that the reflection represents his potential when he learns to love himself.
- In The Lunar Chronicles, the Lunars' Glamour does not affect mirrors and security cameras. As such, Queen Levana ordered that all mirrors on Luna be destroyed so that no one can ever see her true appearance. She even had her scientists engineer a completely non-reflective type of glass to prevent any reflections at all. In addition, she wears a veil that covers her entire face during all of her broadcasts.
- In The Machineries of Empire, any mirror Cheris looks at shows her Shuos Jedao, who's attached to her soul, instead of her own reflection.
- In the teen horror novel Mirror, Mirror (a reimagining of The Picture of Dorian Gray), the beautiful Alpha Bitch protagonist receives a mirror as a gift from a mysterious new friend. As her personality gets more and more ruthless and nasty, her reflection in this mirror gets increasingly horrific. She also becomes increasingly unbalanced, as she will react with fright, look into another mirror in which she looks normal, then look back into the jinxed mirror, where she also now looks normal, leading her to wonder if she's hallucinating and going crazy.
- The Neverending Story. Played with; Bastian and Atreyu aren't the same person, but they do see each other in the magic mirror and Atreyu is in many ways Bastian's Avatar inside Fantastica. Atreyu is merely confused by it, but when Bastian reads it he freaks the hell out.
- In Pact, the protagonist Blake Thorburn lacks a reflection of his own—in its place is Rose Thorburn, his magically-generated Distaff Counterpart, who is trapped in a mirror world, only able to go where there are corresponding reflections in Blake's world. Rose is not just Blake born as a girl, but an Other created by their grandmother—when Blake dies, his death will allow Rose to step into the real world in his place, taking the mantle of the heir to the Thorburn family and all the enemies that come with it.
- In L. Frank Baum's Queen Zixi of Ix, the title queen can only make herself look beautiful to others because of this trope.
- A short story Simple Peters Mirror tells of how Simple Peter is given a mirror which shows anyone who looks into it not as they are, but how other people see them. At first, he sees nothing at all when he looks in the mirror. When he asks people to help him find his reflection, the mirror shows him as a goose. He uses the mirror to rescue a princess from a dragon, by telling the dragon that he has a monster fifty times bigger. The dragon looks in the mirror and sees this monster. Simple Peter then sees himself in the mirror as a brave lion. He sets out on a quest to make people see him as he really is.
- In the Spellsinger novel Time of the Transference, the group finds this kind of mirror. Mudge is shown as an old otter whose body and mind have succumbed to hedonistic excesses, to the alarm of everyone else, but he says that he doesn't mind because he already saw himself that way (and he is in the process of changing his lifestyle due to Weegee's influence). Weegee appears as a regal princess. Cautious simply appears as himself. Jon-Tom has no reflection at all because of his indecision over who he is (spellsinger, law student, rock musician) and where he belongs (in his old world or in the world with the others).Cautious: I am what you see. Worse things to be.
- In Star Darlings, when a Mirror Mantra is said before a mirror, the Star Darlings can see their true appearances and gain a confidence boost.
- In Barry Hughart's The Story of the Stone, The Mirror of Souls is a large crystal mirror in the Chinese underworld that can see and show all of your past incarnations. It can speak and display scenes from the past and a spirit level that shows how good or evil you were.
- In the third book of The Stranger Times, mirrors are used to host remnants, a split portion of a person's soul. Remnants may show something of the soul's internal state. For example, the remnant of a woman with body-image issues looks fatter than the real woman, reflecting (no pun intended) the fact that she mentally exaggerates her weight.
