From Breaking Dawn: [spoiler alert!]

First, at Edward and Bella’s wedding, only 57 pages into the book; this is Bella’s first sight of herself as a bride and occurs after the sunset ceremony. “I caught just a glimpse of Edward’s reflection–a perfect duplicate of his perfect face–with a dark-haired beauty at his side. Her skin was cream and roses, her eyes were huge with excitement and framed with thick lashes. The narrow sheath of the shimmering white dress flared out subtly at the train almost like an inverted calla lily, cut so skillfully that her body looked elegant and graceful–while it was motionless, at least. Before I could blink and make the beauty turn back into me …”

Next, immediately after her sacrifical death (to give life to her daughter) and her subsequent “fiery” transformation into the immortal vampire. Alice brings in a gilt-framed mirror: “My first reaction was an unthinking pleasure. The alien creature in the glass was indisputably beautiful, every bit as beautiful as Alice or Esme. She was fluid even in stillness, and her flawless face was pale as the moon against the frame of her dark, heavy hair. Her limbs were smooth and strong, skin glistening subtly, luminous as a pearl.

My second reaction was horror.

Who was she? At first glance, I couldn’t find my face anywhere in the smooth, perfect planes of her features.

And her eyes! Though I’d known to expect them, her eyes still sent a thrill of terror through me.

All the while I studied and reacted, her face was perfectly composed, a carving of a goddess …

I stared at the beautiful woman with the terrifying eyes, looking for pieces of me. There was something there in the shape of her lips–if you looked past the dizzying beauty, it was true that her upper lip was slightly out of balance, a bit too full to match the lower. Finding this familiar little flaw made me feel a tiny bit better. Maybe the rest of me was in there too.

Here is my attempt to unpack this, and as I’m desperately new at the Coleridgean thing, it may be imperfect or even flat-out wrong. I’ll look forward to any corrections anyone has to offer!

In the first case [which is almost literally in "a glass, darkly" as she's standing outside at night looking at her reflection in the glass wall of the Cullens' home] she sees herself united to the divine aspect, Edward, whose gift of reading minds makes him a small version of the All-Knowing. In the second, not only is she united to Edward (who is standing beside her) but she sees Light as a part of–continuous with–herself: face like a moon, skin glistening, “luminous, like a pearl” [of Great Price?]

In both mirror scenes, Bella struggles to recognize herself–and yet it is herself that she sees. Oddly enough, she doesn’t seem to struggle to see the divine; her struggle is to see that she has any part in that. Her joy, discovered particularly from that last mirror scene onward, is in finding that she does–that she not only partakes, but belongs and has a role in that.

Her power, like Harry’s invisibility cloak, is to “shield others as well as herself”. She proves this in the final confrontation with the Volturi, as the gift that protects her mind from all invasion, even Edward’s, “blinds” the enemy–mind-reader Aro, desensitizer Alec, torturer Jane, and bond-breaker Chelsea are all rendered useless as long as Bella holds firm. The Cullens and friends can literally blind the enemy, thanks to Zafrina, and Edward can “see” into all of their minds, but it is very much like a one-way mirror with the Cullens having the see-through side. Volturi leader Aro, used to domination, sees his own vulnerability and the battle ends, like the Cold War, without a single shot being fired.

So that’s Twilight. Lewis was the other author I thought of, and interesting stuff in both the Narniad and the Space Trilogy came to mind:

Eustace, in Dawn Treader, looks into a pool and sees he has become continuous not with the divine Logos, but with the evil principle–the dragon. When he meets Aslan later, he goes through multiple efforts to remove his dragon-skin, but looks into a pool and sees himself still reptilian. He surrenders to Aslan, who claws right through the skin and throws him in the mirroring pool, effectively baptising him–and he finds himself human again. I’m not sure if this is relevant to the discussion exactly, but it intrigued me.

In That Hideous Strength, the episode is actually mirror-less:

” ‘Isn’t that like a man?’ exclaimed Mrs. Dimble. ‘There’s not a mirror in the room.’

‘I don’t believe we were meant to see ourselves,’ said Jane. ‘He said something about being mirrors enough to see another.’ “

Through each others’ eyes, the commonplace Ivy Maggs becomes “a pert fairy”, graceful Camilla stands “like starlight, in the spoils of provinces”, and the barren Mrs. Dimble becomes “a tribal matriarch, a mother of mothers.” Jane never knows exactly what she becomes, only that in the eyes of the others, it is fitting. Lewis describes their transformations this way: “The commonplace had not exactly gone from her form and face, the robe had taken it up, as a great composer takes up a folk tune and tosses it like a ball through his symphony and makes of it a marvel, yet leaves it still itself.” In this case they are not seeing the reflection of the divine aspect in themselves–that, they must take on the word of the others. They are seeing the divine reflected in one another.

Thoughts, anyone? I’m very curious as to whether this is insightful, tangential, or ludicrous.