185 TRUE LOOKING-GLASSES: NARCISSISM AND MOTHERHOOD IN SHAKESPEARE’S sonneTs ZENÓN LUIS MARTÍNEZ University of Huelva This paper studies mirror images and their relationship to the themes of replication and the perpetuation of physical beauty in Shakespeare’s Sonnets. The symbolic potential of mirrors and related images sustains contradictory meanings in the Renaissance lyric: as representations of an individual, these objects connote the reproductive impulse, the lover’s desire that the beloved transmit his/her legacy to a next generation; however, as re-presentations, they are repetitions of the subject’s sameness, of his desire to preserve his own beauty, and therefore, they address the many dangers of philautia or self-love: sterility, decay, ageing, and death. This paper traces the meanings of self-love in Shakespeare through the theoretical framework of post-Freudian readings of the Ovidian tale of Narcissus, and their construction of notions as narcissism and narcissistic aggression (Lacan, Kristeva). More specifically it focuses on narcissistic desire and its implications on the representations of the ageing lover (the literary commonplace of the senex amans), as well as their incidence on Shakespeare’s anxieties about femininity and motherhood. If it be true that in Narcissus’ universe there is no other, one might nevertheless think of the spring as his partner. INTRODUCTION When psychoanalysis approaches literature for theoretical, clinical, or critical purposes, it engages in forms of reading that might be termed allegorical. As in the title of Shoshana Felman’s seminal collection, psychoanalysis poses “the question of reading: otherwise” (1982). 1 In Felman’s intended quibble, psychoanalysis purports to read alternatively, but also intends, in Angus Fletcher’s expression, to turn the text “into something other (allos) than what the open statement tells the reader” (1964: 2). This paper intends to interpret certain interrelated topics in Shakespeare’s Sonnets in the light of post-Freudian notions of narcissism. More specifically, I propose that the Young Man sonnets’ preoccupation with ageing, reproduction, and the concern with time that derive from these are better understood if we accept the narcissistic structure of desire that shapes these love poems. At the outset I am 1. On Felman’s title and its implications to post-Freudian psychoanalytic criticism, see her introduction, “To Open the Question” (1982: 5-10).