SOURCE: Cole, Merrill. “The Purloined Mirror.” LIT: Literature Interpretation Theory 8, no. 2 (October 1997): 135-51.

In the following essay, Cole investigates the sexual and gender role of the mirror and mirroring in Poe's fiction, specifically focusing on the tale “The Assignation.”

Does the mirror tell the truth? Does it consolidate a fiction that becomes the truth for the viewer? A mirage of unwavering identity, an unreachable oasis which fixes in permanence the hazy limits of sexuality and gender? Does it reveal not only who is the prettiest, but also who best fits an ideal, heterosexual model? How then would the mirror position the queer viewer? In “The Purveyor of Truth,” Jacques Derrida contests Jacques Lacan's use of Edgar Allan Poe's short story, “The Purloined Letter,” “to illustrate,” to mirror the meaning and the truth of a psychoanalytic law: according to Derrida, in Lacan, “the letter will always refind its proper...