Reflection as Commodity: A Short Ethno(historio)graphy of Victorian Mirrors
Reflection as Commodity: A Short Ethno(historio)graphy of Victorian Mirrors

Summary/Abstract: The task undertaken in this text is to show the way mirrors, as Victorian commodities, embodied the emerging nineteenth-century consumerist culture and changed the desiring subject’s self-perception. For the first time in the cultural history of the West, mirrors became cheap, spectacularized and omnipresent, lurking around every corner. As the subject encountered itself incessantly, something changed at the level of desire: the subject misunderstood its own reflected image for the truth of its inner self. By way of this short ethno(historio)graphy of the Victorian mirror reflection, the text discusses the Victorian visual culture of spectacle and desire.

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