DAVID COPPERFIELD, URANIA COTTAGE

It is not unusual that in novels with a strong autobiographical bias even though a fictional one, the process of self-examination should include a watchfulness over the visible image of the self that is presented to others. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that the text of David Copperfield (1850) should be occasionally punctuated by moments in which David carefully considers his own image in a mirror. But it is intriguing that he should choose to do so at moments of heightened anxiety and distress, when he pores over the reflection of his external appearance with a morbid fascination at just those moments when his desire to be alone, one would think, ought to be construed as a desire to hide his sufferings, to conceal them from view. One such occasion is when he has been banished to his room after a beating by the odious Murdstone: ‘I crawled up from the floor, and saw my face in the glass, so swollen, red and ugly that it almost frightened me. My stripes were sore and stiff, and made me cry afresh, when I moved; but they were nothing to the guilt I felt’ (DC 62). The process of contemplating the image of the beaten and punished self is what actually contributes to the production of guilt. Even more striking and peculiar is the force of this compulsion to look in the mirror that overcomes David even after the occasion of his mother's death: ‘I stood upon a chair when I was left alone, and looked into the glass to see how red my eyes were, and how sorrowful my face’ (DC 123). It is this curiosity about the self that others might see that provides a vivid introduction to the chronic division in David's sense of self that the novel as a whole elaborates.

Parallel to David's inspection of his own face within the frame of a mirror is his espial of other faces similarly framed by appearing in windows, and it is clear enough that on such occasions what David is seeing in these faces are projections of his own sense of self. The most obvious case arises when David pays a visit to his old childhood home at Blunderstone.