Mirrors in Russian Women’s Autobiographical Writing : The Self Reflected in Works by Alla Demidova and Vera Luknitskaia
In autobiographical writing, the mirror is not only a privileged metaphor for the genre as a whole; it also functions as a primary administrator of boundaries, demarcating the space of the self from the foreign, the chaotic, the unknown. The mirror metaphor is not a gender neutral one: in Western elite culture the mirror has served to reinforce the patriarchal dichotomy between man/mind and woman/