Wolf Alice

Today, in class, we were discussing the importance of the mirror and it's role in humanizing Alice and the Duke. Alice was able to see herself in the mirror all along, but what she saw in her reflection changed as she was aware of her natural body. However, the Duke wasn't able to see his reflection until Alice linked his wounds. When I read this piece, I understood the mirror as a reflecting an image of what the characters thought of their own physical identity. For Alice, she first saw herself in the mirror, she touched it with her "fore paw". She mentally and physically identified herself as a wolf, so that is what she saw in the mirror, that is until nature started to change how she identified herself. That was when she was able to realize that she was looking at herself, and that she was more human than she thought. For the Duke, he obviously had some kind of history of being labeled as an outsider and different (that is why the nuns brought Alice to him), so I thought that the reason that he couldn't see himself in the mirror was because the way that he identified himself was being different, or someone that no one else cared about, so when he looked in the mirror he saw nothing. But when Alice licked his wounds, it showed him that someone really did care about him, and that is why slowly his face appeared in the mirror. He slowly realized that, maybe he was different, but he felt like a human at that point because someone care about him.

I just thought about it like this because even today, people look in the mirror and see themselves as something that they physically do not really look like. For example, how people think they look too fat or too thin, when really they aren't. It's all about how we identify our self, when we look in the mirror we see whatever we think our body looks like. We pinpoint something and think that we look a certain way, whether we really do look that or not. Others see what we really look like, but when you look in the mirror you see what you want to see.

-Jessica Mitchell