Book 1 Chapter 12: The Mirror of Erised

I’ve decided to do something a bit different this week. When I was first thinking about this project, it was about forming a new relationship with Harry Potter. Halfway through the book, I still don’t really know where I’m going. I found myself thinking about the stories and authors I have a good relationship with, and I wondered if one of them might help me out. If reading is a form of communication between author and reader, what would happen if I brought another voice to the table?

One of my favorite authors of all time is Shirley Jackson, author of “The Lottery” and The Haunting of Hill House among many others. The book Let Me Tell You: New Stories, Essays, and Other Writings published a number of works that were never released in Jackson’s lifetime. One of these was “Garlic in Fiction,” a lecture that Jackson gave discussing the use of imagery in fiction.

There are a number of images that come to mind when Harry Potter comes up: a lightning-bolt scar and dark-rimmed glasses; black robes and stiped scarves; broomsticks; owls. I haven’t spent much time on any of these, and so I decided to spend a chapter looking at the images used and how they look when placed next to my favorite author’s advice.

In “Garlic in Fiction,” Jackson explains that “what I am calling images or symbols or garlic is actually a kind of shorthand, or evocative coloring, to a story.” She adds:

… the writer must operate as vividly as he can, drawing as much as possible upon a sympathy with the reader, hoping that a single word will be enough to turn the reader inward, remind him, perhaps, of a similar emotion of his own, to bring him along willingly down the path of the story.

As an example, she talks about the images used in The Haunting of Hill House for the main character, Eleanor, to draw the reader into an acceptance of the novel’s unreality and to evoke the longing and melancholy that colors the character’s life. It does spoil the ending of the novel, so I don’t want to share all of the details, but I will say that reading the lecture feels like a magician unveiling their tricks. But I’ll get deeper into Jackson’s writing later.

Turning to Harry Potter, it felt serendipitous to realize that this week’s chapter is “The Mirror of Erised,” which I remember as having a particular mood that stands apart from the rest of the book. It’s somber and introspective in a way that almost feels odd in a children’s book.

But when I started reading, my first thought was that there might actually be too much garlic. Within the first page and a half, there are descriptions of snow, storms, wind, warm fires in the common room, freezing dungeons, Fred and George bouncing snowballs off of Professor Quirrell’s turban, Harry measuring “powdered spine of lionfish” in Potions class, and Malfoy comparing Harry’s Quidditch performance to a wide-mouthed tree frog. Some of this is distracting (Why lionfish, and what do their spines do in a potion? Do tree frogs really have wider mouths than other frogs?) and all of it slows down the story. Naturally, it’s important to set the scene, but there is a limit to how much time you can spend on that.

In Jackson’s essay, she says that her method is “to catch at the reader and hold him with small things, used—and here is where the garlic comes in—sparingly and with great care, but used always to accent and emphasize.” I don’t see Rowling using great care with these images, although some of them are fun. This chapter includes Christmas dinner, which has the standout image of the wizard crackers. When Harry and George open one, “it went off with a blast like a cannon and engulfed them all in a cloud of blue smoke, while from the inside exploded a rear admiral’s hat and several live, white mice.”

That’s a fun idea, especially when Dumbledore “swap[s] his pointed wizard’s hat for a flowered bonnet,” but I’m completely distracted by the idea of the mice. Why are there live animals inside party favors? Have they been cooped up inside magical prisons for an unknown length of time, or are they magically created by the wizard crackers? If it’s the latter, it would mean that magic is capable of creating life, which has more implications than I’m willing to delve into; if it’s the latter, it would be unsettling and unnecessary animal cruelty. After dinner, “Harry [has] a nasty feeling that they were going to end up as Mrs. Norris’s Christmas dinner,” which raises the question: what was their purpose in the first place? Who wants to have mice running around on the table at Christmas dinner?

It's getting a bit old to hear Harry Potter fans complain that “I feel like I’m putting more thought into this than Rowling ever did” about countless details in the books, but it’s hard to resist repeating.

All that said, the two main symbols in the chapter are pretty strong. I’m talking about the invisibility cloak and the mirror, both of which have to do with seeing and being seen. The invisibility cloak is one of Harry’s unexpected Christmas presents, sent by a mysterious person with a note that only says it once belonged to his father.

Harry’s perspective isn’t explored except to say that “He felt very strange,” and he forgets about it until he’s lying in bed at night. He decides he wants to have a private journey with his father’s old cloak, and he uses it to venture into the library’s Restricted Section, because the kids have an unexplained determination to discover what Fluffy is hiding. (I can understand curiosity, but I’m not convinced that some 11-year-old kids could sustain such an intense focus on an irrelevant and fruitless pursuit that they would spend all of their free time in the library for weeks.)

As soon as Harry opens a book in the Restricted Section, it starts screaming, and Harry has to skedaddle before he gets caught. As he runs from Filch and Snape, he stumbles into an unused classroom that holds the chapter’s other major symbol. Harry steps in front of it and is shocked to see that not only is he not invisible, but he’s surrounded by a crowd of people. A woman stands behind him and waves: she can see him. Harry reaches out for her, but touches nothing. Getting closer to the mirror, Harry realizes that he’s looking at his mother, and father, and their ancestors behind them.

The Potters smiled and waved at Harry and he stared hungrily back at them, his hands pressed flat against the glass as though he was hoping to fall right through it and reach them. He had a powerful kind of ache inside him, half joy, half terrible sadness.

Harry stares and stares until a noise startles him, and he has to leave.

Harry returns twice, once with Ron and once by himself. In the time between, he’s listless, losing interest in Fluffy’s secrets as well as doing anything fun with Ron. He stops eating. He acts like a fairy-tale character who’s gone to Fairyland and back, and now wastes away from dissatisfaction with reality—or like a real-world addict, doing the same. Ron worries and tries to get him to leave the mirror alone, but Harry dismisses him.

On the third night, Harry is met by Dumbledore, who teaches him what the reader has likely already guessed: that the mirror shows a person’s desires. Dumbledore also explains the danger of the mirror, of madness and wasting illness. He doesn’t explain why the mirror affected Harry so much more than Ron, but it’s not hard to guess why. Like a real addiction, he’s made more susceptible by his pain.

The mirror shows us Harry’s grief and his longing for family, and it reminds us of the abusive situation he’s come from.  For a whole month before leaving for Hogwarts, the Dursleys pretended that they couldn’t even see him. Now, he looks into the mirror and is seen, but only by people who don’t exist. Finally, the chapter ends and Harry finds that he is seen by someone real: Dumbledore, who had been as invisible to Harry as Harry has been his whole life.

The invisibility cloak plays on this theme in a different way. With the cloak, this not-being-seen-ness is something that Harry can take on and off. Further, it’s a gift inherited from his father—a real emblem of what Harry’s searching for. But it doesn’t feel real; it’s “strange to the touch, like water woven into material,” and Harry questions whether or not it really belonged to his father. The real thing is less satisfying than the illusion; the reality is that Harry’s parents are gone.

The cumulative effect here is to produce a sense of uneasiness, sadness, and longing for something impossible. The cloak and the mirror are load-bearing images because of the emotions that they call to the mind.

These, I think, are the kinds of images that Shirley Jackson had in mind. At the end of “Garlic in Fiction,” the editors of Let Me Tell You added a note saying that Jackson finished the lecture by reading two of her short stories. One of them is “The Third Baby’s the Easiest,” an account of the birth of her third child that was first published as a short story and later incorporated into the memoir Life Among the Savages. (The other is “Charles,” which you should really experience yourself. If you have time to read this then you certainly have time for Shirley Jackson.)¹

“The Third Baby” has a number of images that stand out. The first that caught my attention was this passage:

We received only one pair of booties, and those were a pair of rosebud-covered white ones that someone had sent Laurie when he was born and which I had given, still in their original pink tissue paper, to a friend when her first child was born; she had subsequently sent them to her cousin in Texas for a second baby and the cousin sent them back East on the occasion of a mutual friend’s twins; the mutual friend gave them to me, with a card saying “Love to Baby” and the pink tissue paper hardly ruffled. I set them carefully aside, because I knew someone who was having a baby in June.

It’s simple, relatable, and funny, and it’s evocative enough that I thought it would recur throughout the story, maybe to comment on community in childbirth. But the booties and the pink tissue paper never appear again, so it might be compared to the Christmas crackers in Harry Potter.

The obvious difference is that the booties aren’t distracting. They’re a glimpse of how humans interact in the context of the story’s theme—childbirth—and they give a particular mood. The regifting shows a kind of community care that’s genuine, but lacks intimacy. They’re a gift that could be given to any random baby-haver, and they are. The lack of understanding and true empathy reverberates throughout the rest of the story, as Jackson argues with nurses who dismiss her profession, chews out her husband for reading The New York Times and ignoring her, and is repeatedly told, “You’re only having a baby.”

The booties, although they’re only mentioned once, are part of the building blocks that create the depiction of the community. On the other hand, the Christmas crackers don’t seem to be doing anything much. They contribute to the festive atmosphere that Harry is experiencing for the first time and show the wizarding world’s improved version of the real world, but they also raise questions that aren’t answered or even considered. They leave me feeling bewildered while the booties leave me feeling like I’ve been let in on a secret.

“The Third Baby” also has a more important image that comes up several times, which is the suitcase that Jackson packs full of comfort items, especially a yellow nightgown. This comfort recalls a statement from the very beginning of the story, which is “cynical people seem to maintain that a woman with two healthy, active children around the house will do anything for ten quiet days in the hospital.” [3]

The nightgown is mentioned for the first time just a few paragraphs after that, and comes up the second time as Jackson has just started going into labor and is trying to make breakfast without alarming the children.

They were all staring at me oddly, and I kept giving them my reassuring smile; I did feel splendid; my months of waiting were nearly over, my careful preparations had finally been brought to a purpose, tomorrow I would be wearing my yellow nightgown. “I’m so pleased,” I said.

The imagined future comfort comes with an air of transparent desperation, which again recalls the remarks of “cynical people.” She soon departs in a taxi with “one arm lovingly around my suitcase, which held my yellow nightgown,” but before the ride is over she’s clutching it tightly.

At the hospital, she encounters a woman in “a baggy blue bathrobe” who introduces herself by saying, “I’m across the hall…I been hearing you.” She’s a sharp contrast to Jackson, with her precise speech and lace-trimmed yellow nightgown, but the two women immediately bond over their shared experience. Shirley is wheeled off to the delivery room, looking at this nameless woman and quoting Shakespeare to her: “She loved me for the dangers I had passed…and I loved her that she did pity them.”

The woman in the blue bathrobe gets the final line in the story. She’s in the hospital for the second time after a false alarm, and the baby still doesn’t seem to be ready to come. Jackson asks the woman if she’s going to go home again, and this is the exchange that ends the story:

“Listen,” she said. “I been thinking. Home, the kids all yelling and my mother looking sad like she’s disappointed in me. Like I did something. My husband, every time he sees me jump he reaches for the car keys. My sister, she calls me every day and if I answer the phone she hangs up. Here, I get three meals a day I don’t cook, I know all the nurses, and I meet a lot of people going in and out. I figure I’d be a fool to go home. What was it, girl or boy?”

“Girl,” I said.

“Girl,” she said. “They say the third’s the easiest.”

This, finally, connects the threads that have been woven: the desperation for a bit of comfort, the lack of community care and empathy, the dismissal of women’s work and pain. Although Jackson approaches the story with humor, there’s a barely-hidden darkness to it that’s characteristic of her work. The images are used masterfully—"sparingly and with great care,” as she writes in “Garlic in Fiction.”

The nightgown and suitcase are more than just objects, in the same way that the invisibility cloak and the mirror are more than themselves. All of these images become symbols through the accumulation of meaning and the emotional weight they carry. It seems obvious to me, though, that Shirley Jackson’s use of imagery is far more skillful than J.K. Rowling’s.

It might seem unfair to compare the two, considering that one is writing for adults and the other for children, but I would argue that the techniques used are essentially the same even if the audience is different. This way of using imagery is a way of communicating emotion in an affective way; it’s meant to make the reader feel rather than to think. These authors are doing the same thing, but Jackson is doing it better.

The invisibility cloak and the mirror are solid, though, and I suspect that the reason for that can be found again in “Garlic in Fiction.” I want to reiterate this quote that I provided earlier:

… the writer must operate as vividly as he can, drawing as much as possible upon a sympathy with the reader, hoping that a single word will be enough to turn the reader inward, remind him, perhaps, of a similar emotion of his own, to bring him along willingly down the path of the story.

The two images in Harry Potter may be evocative because of they come out of real emotion. Rowling wrote Harry Potter after the death of her mother,² so it makes sense that her most powerful writing would come out when she approaches that subject. She’s able to communicate emotion in a real way.

Unfortunately, that makes her real-world failures of empathy all the more vivid. Rowling has enough emotional intelligence to make a reader empathize with Harry’s grief, but she herself lacks the ability to empathize with trans people, as I’ve mentioned several times before now. I’m left with the feeling that’s been dogging my steps with this project: the frustration that she should be able to see this. Why doesn’t she see it?

1. “The Third Baby’s the Easiest” can be read for free on Archive.org here, pages 583-593, and there’s an audio version of Charles that you can listen to here:

2. 'There would be so much to tell her...' Interview with Tatler Magazine, January 10, 2006:

https://web.archive.org/web/20240217210158/http://www.accio-quote.org/articles/2006/0110-tatler-grieg.html