Reflected Selves: The Heterotopia of Mirror in Carson McCullers’s The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter

The mirror constitutes a significant image that recurs multiple times in The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, and it is mainly associated with Mick Kelly and Biff Brannon, who are reckoned in the novel grotesques in terms of sexuality. This article does not consider the mirror as something merely reflecting the subject in front of it, but as a media that occasions self-examination and self-reconstitution of the subject. It superimposes Michel Foucault’s concept of heterotopias onto McCullers’s depiction of the two characters’ construction and reconstruction of subjectivity as well as their search for identification. Nonetheless, the so-called identification with the mirror image, paralleled by what Lacan observes in the mirror stage, is but a misidentification, for the mirror is in essence a heterotopia of illusion.