SOURCE: “Mirror Images in ‘La Maison du berger,’” in French Review, Vol. 56, No. 3, February, 1983, pp. 393-99.

In the following essay, Evans studies Vigny's poem “La Maison du berger” in the context of psychoanalytic theories of self-consciousness and reflection.

That homely object the mirror has played over the centuries an extraordinarily rich metaphoric role. At various times a figure of human vanity, an image of the mimetic function of art, or a mythic emblem of self-consciousness, it has lately been elaborated and enriched as a metaphor of human consciousness by psychoanalysts like Jacques Lacan and Luce Irigaray. In his essay “Le Stade du miroir”¹ Lacan brilliantly condenses Hegel's description of self-consciousness and Freud's formulation of narcissism into a new mythic figure: the child before the mirror. In Lacan's view the process by which the child reaches self-consciousness always includes the splitting and projection of the self into an external...