Virginia Woolf: THE Lady in the Looking Glass

Virginia Woolf is a challenging modern poet for me to understand. After reading her bio and extra information from Wikipedia, I could understand why her style of writing was the way it was. She had many psychological issues, including depression as well as she suffered from mental breakdowns for much of her life.
In the Looking Glass, she writes about the life of a Lady through what of her belongings one can see through a mirror hanging over her mantle. The mirror is something that Woolf enjoyed using in her work; having it illuminate the idea that writing is supposed to mirror reality, but Woolf was very skeptical in that even the best writers cannot utilize language and words to explain something as well as when someone actually experiences something. She was a firm believer that words and language have limits and they simply are no substitute for the subjective experience of something.
She begins with the following comment, “People should not leave looking- glasses hanging in their rooms any more than they should leave open cheque books or letters confessing some hideous crime” (p. 1224). This certainly hints to the fact that Woolf believes that firstly, when looking through a mirror we get a pretty good glimpse of reality and secondly, looking at a person and their belongings through a mirror can give you a good idea of their personal identity. She then describes everything that can be seen in the room through the mirror’s reflection including a sofa, a path outside the window, curtains blowing, and a rug. She describes the images seen through the mirror as, “held there in their reality unescapably… things had ceased to breathe and lay still in the trance of immortality” (p. 1225), which is very true; they are stuck there forever as if in a picture book as opposed to real life.
Woolf begins to describe the young lady who lives in this house. “But one was tired of the things that she talked about at dinner. It was her profounder state of being that one wanted to catch and turn to words, the state that is to the mind that breathing is to the body, what one calls happiness or unhappiness” (p. 1227). This sentence gives a lot of interesting ideas for the reader to interpret. First, she discusses certain things at the dinner table probably because those are things expected of a young lady. She was not taught to discuss how she was feeling. Woolf may be hinting to some issues she has with gender roles of the time. Secondly, interestingly, Woolf uses the word “profound” to describe the state of being happy. This word seems to be reserved by most people for well versed public speakers and intriguing novels not for a woman’s state of being. Thirdly, Woolf desires to have the woman’s state of being interpreted into words; but, turning a subjective feeling into words for others to comprehend seems like a very difficult task. Lastly, she makes the claim that happiness is to the mind that breathing is to the body, which I’m not sure is scientifically valid, but considering Woolf’s constant state of depression, she is certainly aware of what it is like to live in a state of unhappiness.