Mirror Mirror On The Wall
             Do you recall the wicked step mother in Snow White? She was constantly looking into the mirror, not to see her own reflection, but rather to see what others thought of that reflection. "Mirror mirror on the wall, who is the fairest of them all?" That same question rattles around the minds of many today. It is around that very concept that sociologist Charles Horton Cooley "developed one of the two most basic concepts in social psychology" (McNeal and Tiemann 118), the Looking Glass Self. Cooley's Looking Glass Self has three principal elements to it: "the imagination of our appearance to the other person, the imagination of his judgment on that appearance, some sort of self feeling, such as pride or mortification" (Cooley 121). To summarize this theory, it is how we evaluate ourselves through the eyes of someone else, or how we perceive ourselves based on what we believe others think or feel about us. Connie from Joyce Carol Oates "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been," and Mrs. Turpin from Flannery O'Connor's "Revelation," truly embody Cooley's theory of the Looking Glass Self.
             Imagining how she seems or appears to others, Connie continually checks her own reflection, as well as the faces of the onlookers. "She was fifteen and she had a quick nervous giggling habit of craning her neck to glance into mirrors or checking other people's faces to make sure her own was all right" (Oates 130). In the eyes of this fifteen year old, appearance is everything. In her own mind she is pretty and she believes that others view her as beautiful too. "She knew she was pretty and that was everything" (130). Connie's imagined view of herself through her own eyes and the eyes of others is an example of the first element of Cooley's Looking Glass Self theory.
             Much like Con...