Mirrors

Mirrors

The now-popular idea that vampires cast no reflection in a mirror (and often have an intense aversion to them) seems to have first been put forward in Bram Stoker‘s novel, Dracula. Soon after his arrival at Castle Dracula, Jonathan Harker observed that the building was devoid of mirrors. When Dracula silently came into Harker’s room while he was shaving, Harker noticed that Dracula, who was standing behind him, did not appear in the shaving mirror as he should have. Dracula complained that mirrors were objects of human vanity, and, seizing the shaving mirror, he broke it.

When the novel was brought to the stage and the episode in Castle Dracula deleted, the incident of the mirror was transformed into a confrontation between Dracula and Dr. Abraham Van Helsing. The mirror incident does not seem to have any precedent in either vampire folklore or the earlier vampire short stories and dramas, although Stoker seemed to have been aware of folklore about mirrors. Mirrors were seen as somehow revealing a person’s spiritual double, the soul. In seeing themselves revealed in a mirror, individuals found confirmation that there was a soul and that hence life went on. They also found in the reflection a new source of anxiety, as the mirror could be used to affect the soul negatively.

The notion that the image in the mirror was somehow the soul was the source of the idea that breaking a mirror brought seven years’ bad luck. Breaking the mirror also damaged the soul.

Thus, one could speculate that the vampire had no soul, had nothing to reflect in the mirror. The mirror forced the vampire to confront the nature of his/her existence as the undead, neither living nor dead. On occasion, in both vampire fiction and the cinema, the idea of nonreflection in mirrors has been extended to film, that is, the vampire would not appear in photographs if developed.

In her popular reinterpretation of the vampire myth, Anne Rice dropped Stoker’s mirror convention. She argued in part that although vampires have certain “supernatural” attributes, they existed in the same physical universe as mortals and generally had to conform to the same physical laws, including those of optics. Hence, in Interview with the Vampire and Vampire Lestat, Louis and Lestat de Lioncourt, respectively, saw themselves in a mirror and experienced a moment of self-revelation about their new vampire image. (Of course, Rice’s vampires didn’t follow all physical laws since they had the ability to fly.)

During the 1990s, vampire writers and movies have moved back and forth on the problem of mirrors, and the related problem of capturing the image of the vampire on film, television, or with the new digital cameras. Some, for example the vampires of “The Twilight Series” and the books of L. A. Banks can see and be seen in mirrors. Meanwhile, most still cannot, including those of television series such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Being Human, and the popular books of Charlaine Harris and Laurell K. Hamilton.

Sources:

The Miss Lucy Westenra Society of the Undead see: Vampire Fandom: United States