Looking Glass

The Looking Glass is a circular, imperfect disc of greenish glass, blown by the Quadling glassblower Turtle Heart during his stay at the minister's cottage near Rush Margins. It is created in a single, almost magical session at the kitchen fire, where Turtle Heart mixes sand, soda ash, and lime, and blows a bulb of hot glass that he shapes into a slightly oblong plate. The glass is not a perfect mirror; its surface is impure, and it is hung on a string like a lens or a mirror. From its first appearance, the Looking Glass is associated with prophecy and the supernatural. Turtle Heart uses it to tell Melena that her husband Frex is traveling home with an elderly woman, and the infant Elphaba, barely two years old, is mesmerized by it, sitting before it for hours, her eyes fixed on its surface. The glass seems to have a calming effect on the child, who otherwise is prone to biting and restlessness.

Prophecy and the First Vision

The Looking Glass's most dramatic early function is as a tool for seeing the future. When Elphaba speaks her first word, "Horrors," she is sitting under a dock with the glass, staring into it with one eye closed. Turtle Heart, seeing her, interprets her vision: he describes a balloon from the sky, the color of a bubble of blood, falling from the air, and the fall of the House of Ozma. The glass, for Turtle Heart, is a medium through which the future can be read "in blood and rubies." This moment establishes the Looking Glass as an object that reveals not just reflections but portents, and it links Elphaba, even as a toddler, to a capacity for seeing beyond the visible world. The glass is also present when Elphaba, as a young girl, uses it to catch shadows and reflections, playing with it as if it were a toy, though its power remains latent.

The Glass in the Emerald City

Years later, the Looking Glass reappears in Elphaba's secret room above the abandoned corn exchange in the Emerald City. It hangs below the skull of an elephant, scratched and chipped, its reflective qualities unreliable. During her affair with Fiyero, the glass is a silent witness to their intimacy. Fiyero notices it hanging there, and Elphaba uses it as a looking glass, though its surface is flawed. The glass is also present when Elphaba, after the failed assassination attempt on Madame Morrible and the attack on Fiyero, flees to the Cloister of Saint Glinda. The glass, like Elphaba herself, has become worn and damaged, a relic of a past life. It is in this room that Fiyero, waiting for Elphaba, is attacked by the Gale Force, and the glass, like the cat Malky, is a silent observer to the violence.

The Mirror at Kiamo Ko

After her years at the mauntery and her journey to Kiamo Ko, the Looking Glass is hung in Elphaba's tower room. She keeps it from looking at it, fearing what she might see. When she finally does glance at it, she sees not the present but the past: herself as a green girl in Ovvels, a witness to her father's humiliation at the hands of a Quadling matriarch. The glass becomes a mirror of memory, forcing Elphaba to confront her own history and the origins of her shame. She uses it to spy on Dorothy and her companions as they approach Kiamo Ko, watching the Scarecrow's defeat of her crows and the Tin Woodman's slaughter of her dogs. The glass, once a tool of prophecy, is now a tool of surveillance and regret. It reflects not the future but the relentless unfolding of a tragedy she cannot prevent.

The Glass and the Dwarf's Prophecy

In the final act of the novel, after the murder of Madame Morrible, Elphaba encounters the dwarf and the Clock of the Time Dragon. The dwarf presents her with the oval looking glass, cracked along one side and scratched on its surfaces. It is the same glass she has had since childhood. Inside it, she sees reflections of a young and beautiful Fiyero and a young and impassioned Fae. The glass, which once showed her the future, now shows her only the past, a lost love and a lost self. She takes the mirror and hides it in her apron, a final, desperate attempt to hold onto something that is already gone. The Looking Glass, throughout the novel, is an object that accumulates meaning: it is a tool of prophecy, a witness to love and violence, a mirror of memory, and a symbol of the irrecoverable past. It is, in the end, a thing that reflects not the world but the self, and for Elphaba, that reflection is unbearable.