Reflections by Angela Carter

“Reflections” tells a confusing story about a young man that finds a strange looking shell while walking through a forest, which leads to a series of cryptic events. He is first held captive by an androgynous looking girl who takes him to a big house where a hermaphrodite forces him to go through a mirror. At the other side of this mirror, the entire world seems to be reversed. But the most important event comes when Anna, his initial captor, forces him to the ground and rapes him. The shocking and unexpected turn of events leads us to understand the importance of the story. “Reflections” is actually a distorted mirror that shows us the “horrors of reality”, as several analyses of the story suggest. For instance, the fact that we find the raping of a man by a woman so disturbing proves how it is common for a woman to be raped in our current world, thus demonstrating the horror of the prevalent double standard in our society.