49 pages • 1-hour read
Phantom Limb
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Symbols & Motifs
Content Warning: This section of the guide contains discussion of mental illness, self-harm, and death.
The Mirror
In Phantom Limb, the symbol of the mirror represents the volatile intersection of perception, memory, and objective reality, ultimately serving as the catalyst that shatters the protagonist’s delusion. For two years, the narrator avoids the truth of her identity by perceiving her own self-inflicted wounds as belonging to her sister. This deep fragmentation of self is protected by a refusal to truly see her own body. The symbol’s power is fully realized in the psychiatric hospital when the narrator watches her anorexic friend, Rose, stare into a mirror and point to non-existent fat on her emaciated frame. This moment forces the narrator to confront the mind’s capacity for deception, thinking, “She was staring in the mirror and seeing things that weren’t there. […] Her brain had tricked her” (181). This observation is the critical turning point, establishing the mirror as a site where subjective reality is tested against physical truth.
Immediately following this realization, the narrator is compelled to look at her own reflection. In the mirror, she cannot maintain the fantasy that the scars on her legs belong to someone else. She sees her own “mutilated” legs covered in “jagged red cuts” (181), and the physical evidence reflected back at her destroys the narrative her mind had constructed for survival. The mirror becomes an unblinking, objective witness that contradicts her deceptive memories. It functions as the symbol of unavoidable truth, reflecting a reality that collapses her dissociative state and forces the beginning of a painful integration of her fragmented identity.
Cutting and Scars
The recurring motif of cutting and the resulting scars serves as the physical manifestation of the narrator’s unresolved trauma. It transforms her body into a canvas of psychological suffering, making her internal torment visible. This directly develops the theme of Self-Harm as a Manifestation of Psychic Pain, portraying self-harm as a desperate attempt to externalize overwhelming emotional pain. In the beginning, the narrator, believing she is Elizabeth, observes the wounds on “Emily” and reflects, “I understood why she crucified herself” (4). This connection between cutting and a religious image of martyrdom establishes self-harm as a ritual of atonement. The act is not random but a methodical way for Emily to punish herself for surviving the car accident that killed her sister, a responsibility she has repressed but that her body remembers and relentlessly acts upon.
This motif is also crucial to exploring the fragmentation of identity and the deceptive nature of memory. The narrator’s complete inability to recognize the scars as her own highlights the disconnect between her mind and body. The delusion is ultimately shattered through a confrontation with her reflection, where the mirror forces her to reconcile her perceived self with her true identity. This moment of anagnorisis is a turning point: “I felt dizzy and all the air left my body. I gripped onto the sink in front of me, forcing myself to breathe, and then I looked down at my legs. They were mutilated” (181). The sight of her own scarred body forces the collapse of her constructed reality as Elizabeth. The scars, therefore, are not just symbols of guilt; they are indelible markers of her true, repressed identity as Emily, proving that trauma writes its story onto the body even when the mind refuses to read it.
Locked Rooms and Closed Blinds
The motif of locked rooms and closed blinds powerfully represents psychological imprisonment and a retreat from a world perceived as overwhelmingly threatening. From the novel’s opening, the atmosphere is one of confinement and darkness, with the narrator looking up at her apartment window where “[t]he shades were sealed shut” (1). This self-imposed enclosure symbolizes the narrator’s internal state, a mind sealed off from the truth of its own trauma. The dark, locked-down apartment is the only environment where her elaborate delusion—that she is Elizabeth and her wounded self is a separate person—can survive, sheltered from the light of reality. This physical space becomes a direct reflection of her fractured mind, illustrating how an individual might retreat into a psychological prison to cope with unbearable pain and loss.
This motif links the narrator’s present psychological state to the origins of her trauma, demonstrating how past suffering perpetuates itself. As children, she and her sister were kept “locked in our bedroom for days” (20) by their abusive mother. Their childhood was defined by forced isolation and confinement. As an adult, the narrator subconsciously recreates these conditions, turning her apartment into a new version of that traumatic space. This symbolic recreation of her childhood prison reveals how deeply the trauma has been internalized. The locked room is no longer an external force but an internal necessity, a “safety” that is also a cage. The motif thus illustrates that the most enduring prisons are not physical but psychological, built by a mind attempting to protect itself by retreating into the familiar patterns of its own suffering.
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