The Mirror or Tinned Youth
Paul Jay

THURSTON THOMPSOM, Venetian Mirror, 1853

Snow White

"Mirrors are doors through which death comes and goes." (Jean Cocteau)

"To ask the mirror is to let oneself go in what would be an endless, dizzying delving into the self." (Gilles Perriot)

The first surprising thing in this Grimm tale is the stepmother's mirror. There is the mirror that cannot lie. It's that simple and valid for all mirrors. What is more surprising is what we have there already, before the daguerreotype, 'a mirror that remembers' (Snow White's beauty). The whole problem of the stepmother stems from the mirror not being able to retain her youth and beauty. Over time, it tells her that she is growing old, and that others, like Snow White, are more young and beautiful. And that is what she cannot stand.

The décor in black and white is well established.

1- It is winter and it is snowing: "the snowflakes fell from the sky like lint and feathers". There's the 'white'

2- "A queen is sawing as she sits in front of a window framed in deep black ebony" There's the 'black'... and the author insists: it is a 'deep' black that of the 'ebony'. And even more, it is this black that serves as a 'frame' for the 'window'. So the window is already mirror. It holds the precious scene, the variations in black and white, etc. and like the mirror it is an entrance -as Plato has said- and a passage between two worlds.

3- There is also 'blood'. The queen indeed pricks herself and three drops of blood fall onto the snow... death is hiding there somewhere.

All this leads to the desire for splitting herself in two. But this could become a sign of disappearance: reflections in the water become erased (Narcissus). It is also, contrarily, as it is in the Bible, it could become a sign of eternity. Splitting oneself in two, then is also childbirth "you will see the children of your children", "Oh! If I could have a child as white as the snow, with lips as red as blood and as whose hair is as black as the ebony of this window"! Thus, this child is composed like a painting (one would not yet dare to say like a photograph), based on 'materials' and 'colours' placed in a frame: the snow, the ebony and the blood, black, white, and red (...)