Mirror as Companion Object: An Exploration of Trauma and Recovery in Jayne Anne Phillips’ Night Watch

Sascha Goluboff

In a review of Jayne Anne Phillips’ 2023 novel Night Watch for the New York Times, Dwight Garner complains that he “often had little idea what was happening for pages at a time. Pronouns go for long walks without antecedents. Phillips destabilizes her narrative, then destabilizes it again. Reality slides like furniture on an ocean liner during a storm.” However, I found that it is exactly this slipperiness that holds the clue to the meaning and genius of the novel. Destabilization, obfuscation, bifurcation are manifestations of a mirror’s magic. Reading Night Watch, I was struck by the multiplicity of mirror-like objects. Upon reflection (no pun intended), I began to see how they instigate action, reveal characters’ state of mind, and explore personal and familial trauma, as well as possibilities for recovery.

Mirrors have a long history in literary tradition. One of the earliest examples is Ovid’s Narcissus, who realizes that his beloved living in the “watry Glass” is really his own reflection: 

Ah wretched me! I now begin too late.

To find out all the long-perplex’d Deceit;

It is my self I love, my self I see;

The gay Delusion is Part of me (Craft 112) 

The glass-like surface of the water reflects back an alternate persona which becomes Ovid’s object of desire. Just like Ovid, we can be misled by our mirror image. Think of a time when you caught a glimpse of yourself in the mirror and didn’t recognize yourself. This is the “uncanny.” Trauma can also cause the uncanny, which manifests as dissociation or emotional dysregulation. Characters in Night Watch experience and conceptualize trauma by interacting with mirrors. Phillips uses mirrors as symbols and catalysts for action to explore the complex physical and psychological shifts that come from violence and heartache. 

Night Watch is set in West Virginia during the Civil War. The novel opens with ConaLee, the twelve-year-old protagonist, accompanying her mother Eliza to the Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum to receive treatment from Dr. Thomas Story. Dr. Story follows the Kirkbride Plan to cure mental illness through spacious living quarters, contact with nature, and individual therapy sessions. We soon learn that Eliza’s husband Ephraim left to fight as a sharpshooter in the Union army before ConaLee was born. In his absence, Eliza and ConaLee are cared for by Dearbhla, Ephraim’s adopted mother who is a healer/conjurer, until an escaped convict insinuates himself with Eliza and her daughter. He cuts them off from Dearbhla, tells ConaLee to call him “Papa,” and sexually assaults Eliza repeatedly. When Eliza becomes catatonic after birthing his babies, he drops her and ConaLee off at the Asylum. Papa tells ConaLee to refer to her mother as “Miss Janet” and pretend to be her maid. Many months later, ConaLee and Eliza are reunited with Ephraim, who, because of a head injury, has lost his right eye and all memory of the past, and is working at the Asylum as the night watch. 

Perhaps Gardiner perceives pronouns in Night Watch as taking “long walks without antecedents” because the antecedents themselves shuffle. As the story moves forward and backward in time, ConaLee, her mother, and her father have different names, signifying alternate identities brought on by trauma. For example, Papa pronounces ConaLee’s name wrong by calling her “Connolly.” At the Asylum, ConaLee refers to herself as “Miss Eliza Connolly” and the staff calls her “Nurse Connolly” when she becomes her mother’s companion. When Papa takes over the household, he calls Eliza “Mrs.” At the hospital, she is referred to as “Miss Janet.” Later, we find out that her married name is “Mrs. Eliza Connolly” and that she named her daughter after her husband’s surname. At the conclusion of the novel, we learn that ConaLee’s father’s name is Ephraim Connolly. Before that, we know him as Dearbhla’s son, the sharpshooter, the one they lost, John O’Shea, and the Night Watch. 

Additionally, main characters have their own companion mirrors. These objects allow them to “see” – to reflect/think, observe, and name – their multiple identities and to show to themselves and others their fragmented-ness. The connection between light and trauma begins when Papa has sex with Eliza in the back of the wagon while ConaLee sits in front. The event is told from ConaLee’s perspective.  

I would see things shift sometimes, and go tight and clear and strange. Just now, threads of seed on floating strands glimmered, lifting the tree’s canopy in a ruffling wave I knew could not happen but in my sight. The fields turned gold then, and the grass was lit and sharp. Shining blades pulled at the twilight, pulling it down, firing red and blue and red before the bright inside the colors pierced me through. (7)

As reflectors of light, mirrors are also objects of divination. In his re-reading of the Narcissus myth, Max Nelson (2000) details how Narcissus engages in scrying to foretell the future. He falls into a trance by staring at a fixed point in the water until a bright reflective light induces a vision of the “gay Delusion.” 

This moment, when lights and colors bombard ConaLee in the carriage, is not a unique incident. ConaLee can “see lights,” and she develops this power of discernment through the novel. She is the character with the most personal agency, and her POV chapters are in first person while the rest are in third. She carries a small round mirror which she stole from Papa on the way to the Asylum. Later, we find out that the mirror originally was ConaLee’s and had instigated Papa’s arrival when ConaLee flashed it in the sun, catching Papa’s attention as he rode through the dense forest near their home. 

Eliza and ConaLee experience trauma at the hands of Papa. He takes away Eliza’s will and her body: 

She (Eliza) rose from bed only if Papa was gone, or walked about if he dressed her, moved her here and there. He’d put himself in a chair near the bramble and the root cellar, out of sight of the house, and pull her onto him, play her like a doll, turn her like the hands of a clock. (32)

Mirrors also allow characters to take on alternate identities. In their room at the Asylum, ConaLee prepares her mother to become “Miss Janet” by dressing her in front of a mirror.   

I moved her to the girl’s round mirror. I stood behind, lifting it up so that I looked into it over her shoulder. Slip the wire [of the earring] through I said. And clip it behind. She peered at her reflection, amazed it seemed. (38)

ConaLee embodies her new role as her mother’s nurse in front of the same mirror: 

I put it [the organdy cap] on and picked up the mirror with the plaster roses. My reflection, the cap fastened just at my hairline, struck me silent. The uniform, my hair pulled back severely—it was not ConaLee in the glass. I tried to remember the story I’d told of Nurse Connolly… a father and brothers taken by the War, a mother gone. It could be my story. (159)

By looking at their reflections, ConaLee and her mother weave together fragments of a new life story into a coherent narrative.

The mirror as companion object takes an unprecedented turn when Phillips erases its presence in the case of ConaLee’s father. Injured at the Battle of the Wilderness, he (“the sharpshooter”) is taken to a Union hospital in Alexandria, where Dr. O’Shea removes his damaged right eye, bandages up his head, and places a contraption around it so that the wound can heal. 

After they remove his bandage, the sharpshooter “made an effort to meet O’Shea’s gaze, surprised that the old man’s eyes swam with emotion” (112). He sees a reflection of someone else’s emotions instead of his own. Later, left alone in his bed, the sharpshooter 

looked into the room, memorizing every angle. He was so eager to see that he could not rest until he put his palm over his sighted eye. He dreamed that he could not sleep, had never slept, but saw no image of himself, no shape or form. He was the deep itself, moving between one shore and another. (115)

When the sharpshooter requests a hand mirror, Dr. O’Shea says he can have one but only if he chooses a name first. He names himself John O’Shea, in honor of the nurse’s dead son and the doctor. Dr. O’Shea calls John by his new name as he explains what he’ll see in the mirror, which the doctor borrowed from his wife. This passage explicitly links identity and reflection: in order to see his reflection, he must choose his identity. 

The sharpshooter hopes that when he sees his wound he’ll remember what happened to him. 

He’d imagined a hole, black, tunneling deep into his head to all he’d forgotten. But the scared empty oval, when he turned up the eye patch, was a small horror, a shallow cavity, inward and blank, bluish, intimately pink. (118)

This image is like how Eliza remembers her missing husband: “Eliza could not think of his name direct, so soft it was, full like his mouth and tongue, sheltering, strong. His absence deepened like a wound” (77). John O’Shea’s wound is the physical manifestation of his absence from his family, a family he cannot remember nor talk about due to the loss of his “mirror” – his eye.

At the Asylum, ConaLee hones her gift of discernment by imitating Dearbhla. Dearbhla practices the art of scrying to find out what happened to ConaLee and Eliza after they left for the Asylum. 

Dearbhla went into the cabin and breathed across the small mirror on the wall, only to see the vapor disappear, but she hoped to vision ConaLee wavering there, running in a field, calling for her mother, not feared, only following. (143)

Similarly, when ConaLee looks at herself wearing the nurse’s cap, she begins to discover truths about her mother and herself, filling in the gaps in their story caused by Papa’s cruelty:

She (Dearbhla) must know Mama’s surname, and mine. I didn’t even know Mama’s given name. Papa said he was not my father, and I felt in my heart it was so... Mama’s round mirror fogged then. I had sighed across it. (159)

While eating lunch at the Asylum, ConaLee has a realization about her role in her family’s fate. This is a turning point in Night Watch: 

The midday sun just then fell straight across my face and I squinted up at the tall dining room windows. Sheer white curtains hung halfway to the sills, dazzling the eye. In a bright slice of an instant, I seemed to hold in my hand the small round mirror that Papa bade me use to neaten up, that first dawn we arrived at the Asylum. I knew suddenly that the mirror was mine, not his, and from so long ago. (177)

Then, when John O’Shea stands before the carriage to open the door for Miss Janet and ConaLee, ConaLee sees a warped image of the reality before her – father, mother, and daughter – reflected off the black door, foreshadowing the reveal to come: “Our reflections in the glass of the carriage window seemed a tableau, like an image caught in a bubble that might lift and drift away” (226). This vision is uncanny: strange and yet so familiar. 

ConaLee is on the precipice of finding out the real identity of John O’Shea. “The Night Watch inclined his head at me, and I saw that his one arresting hazel eye was framed with the abundant black curled lashes women envy” (226). This line references Eliza’s previous musing about ConaLee’s father: “ConaLee had never known him but in the look of her hazel eyes and dark curls” (77).

Soon after, Phillips provides the following account of Eliza’s and John O’Shea’s reunion as lovers in the Asylum courtyard:

The very ground, the tree limbs hanging over them, seemed to shift, jolted. Fields, exploding. Knee-high grass, trembling, shaken at the root. The mist was smoke, rising, pale as souls until fire streaked the skies red. The sense that he’d been here and could never leave came upon him like a sudden darkness, blindingly lit. (239)

Darkness meets light, mist meets fire. Nothingness meets memory. The light of revelation, the lifting of the fog across the mirror, is a technique reminiscent of scrying. Additionally, O’Shea’s returning memories in the form of light in the sky replicate ConaLee’s visions in the carriage. These similarities reveal not only the mirror-like mechanism of fragmented memory and trauma, but also the family connection in how ConaLee and her father experience the world. 

The truth of John O’Shea’s identity is completely revealed to ConaLee during his climactic fight with Papa who climbs up the Asylum wall and through an open window into Dr. Story’s office. Standing face to face, Papa and O’Shea are mirror images of each other. Papa is her father in name only but the opposite of a Papa in word and deed. O’Shea, who doesn’t remember his real name and who took the name of someone else, is her actual father. 

O’Shea leaps toward him [Papa] in silence, tackling him from the left, throwing him bodily out the open window as the pistol discharges. Fire exploding into his chest, O’Shea hears someone scream but sees his daughter’s face, her panicked hesitation at getting into the carriage with Story and her mother, her eyes and long lashes so… familiar. If he had never left her— (254)

O’Shea’s recognizing ConaLee as his daughter takes the story full circle when he understands his true identity. And yet, this realization happens as a sort of conjuring of an alternative future as he sees his own eye looking back at him – the mirror image of the doctor’s eye he saw when they removed his bandages at the hospital.  O’Shea’s last thoughts -- “As if he had never left her” – occur as the bullet violently opens his heart. The last instance of reflection transforms the mirror from instigating trauma – calling a fake father to ConaLee – to facilitating a moment of love and connection with her real father. 

By the end of the novel, Eliza works through her trauma with Dr. Story’s help and becomes his wife, and ConaLee discovers her true past and no longer needs to conjure alternative futures to move forward with clarity. If Garner had slid along with the characters to ride out the storms of trauma, then he might have discovered that the power of Night Watch lies in how it obfuscates as much as it reveals. 

Sources Cited 

Craft, Christopher. “Come See about Me: Enchantment of the Double in The Picture of Dorian Gray.” Representations, vol. 91, no. 1, 2005, pp. 109-136. 

Garner, Dwight. “Jayne Anne Phillips Finds Anguish and Asylum in Civil War America.” The New York Times. 25 Sept. 2023. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/25/books/review/jayne-anne-phillips-finds-anguish-and-asylum-in-civil-war-america.html. 

Nelson, Max. “Narcissus: Myth and Magic.” The Classical Journal, vol. 95, no. 4, 2000, pp. 363-389. 

Phillips, Jayne Anne. Night Watch. Knoft. 2024.