Imagination vs. Realism Theme Analysis

In this story, the narrator observes Isabella Tyson through her reflection in the looking-glass. Notably, looking-glasses are a common symbol for realist fiction, which seeks to accurately reflect the world back to its readers so they can see their own reality more clearly. In addition to seeing Isabella through the looking glass, the narrator spends a significant portion of the story using imagination to try to reveal Isabella’s inner life. By telling the story entirely through imagination and a mirror’s reflection, Woolf comments on imagination and realism as methods of accessing truth, suggesting that while both methods are inherently limited, imagination has the potential to create beauty in ways that realism can’t.

Throughout the story, Woolf explicitly questions how useful the imagination can be as a tool for discerning hidden reality. When Isabella can no longer be seen in the looking-glass's reflection, the narrator begins to imagine what she might be doing out in the garden—perhaps picking flowers and cutting overgrown branches. The imagined scenes feature just as much detail as the scenes in the looking-glass, with descriptions of the flowers Isabella might pick—“light and fantastic and leafy and trailing”—as well as how she feels about cutting a branch: “filled with tenderness and regret.” These imagined scenes include rich language and impressive imagery, and Woolf tells them in lush, ornate sentences such as, “Avenues of pleasure radiated this way and that from where she stood with her scissors raised to cut the trembling branches while the lacy clouds veiled her face.” By crafting these imagined scenes to be some of the most aesthetically pleasing in the story, Woolf makes a case for imagination as a tool for heightening a story’s beauty.

Yet despite the fact that they are aesthetically pleasing, these imaginative leaps are not necessarily related to the truth of who Isabella is. In other words, imagination is clearly creating beauty in the story, but it’s not necessarily giving access to truth. In one example, the imagined scene of Isabella picking flowers and snipping branches is full of references to her relationships and inner life. She thinks about sending “flowers to Johnson's widow,” and cutting a branch makes her sad “because it had once lived, and life was dear to her.” Yet all these possible glimpses of Isabella’s ideas and thoughts are undermined by the final paragraph, in which the narrator decides that Isabella actually has “no friends” and “no thoughts” of her own. Though the story never confirms whether the narrator's final assertion is true, it is clear—due to the fact that the narrator does not ultimately trust their own imagination—that readers also cannot trust imagination as a source of accurate information about Isabella. And the fact that the narrator's imaginative efforts do not lead to a new understanding of Isabella is further underscored by the way the story ends with the same words it starts with: “People should not leave looking-glasses hanging in their rooms.” These words give the story a circular feeling, showing how, despite the narrator’s beautiful flights of fancy, nothing has changed; no real insight into Isabella has been gained.

Along with imagination, the looking-glass is the other potential source of truth in the story, one that could be thought to provide more accurate information, given how it directly reflects the world. Yet the looking-glass, too, is flawed—and Woolf uses these flaws as a way to implicitly critique realist literature. Though the story is told partially through the reflection in a looking-glass, it also consistently casts doubt on the authenticity of what that looking-glass shows. Woolf spends a lot of time describing how the looking-glass distorts things, making them “irrational and entirely out of focus” or slicing them off at odd angles with its “gilt rim.” With these descriptions, Woolf indirectly questions the idea that a looking-glass—or, by extension, a story—is capable of reflecting reality without altering that reality in the process. By using a looking-glass to ask this implicit question, Woolf also questions whether realist literature is capable of reflecting the world back to its readers clearly and without bias. In this story, skewed and imperfect reflections show how even a device as simple, commonplace, and seemingly trustworthy as a mirror may distort the truth. In this way, Woolf challenges realist literature’s fundamental assumption, positing that if even a looking-glass distorts reality, then a fictional story certainly can’t claim to reflect reality as it is.

Thus Woolf suggests that realism, like imagination, cannot ultimately provide access to truth; neither gives the narrator insight into Isabella's inner life. Furthermore, realism is limited to portraying only what can be directly reflected in the looking-glass, making it less useful than imagination, which at least offers a chance for human connection through beauty. In the end, the story makes a compelling case for imagination as a storytelling tool: though it cannot ultimately tell unambiguous truth, imagination can create beauty, while realism’s superficial focus is both aesthetically bland and far too limited to provide any “real” truth at all.