Symbolism and Family Decline in “Broken Mirror”
Legend of Broken Mirror
Broken Mirror is a work full of symbols. Most of them refer to the passage of time and the decline of the family, as well as death and youth.
A clear example is found in the tower: it behaves as if it were a living being, born, growing, and dying as the characters do. It is the symbol of time passing and the life of adults, unlike the garden, representing the lives of children.
This garden is situated within the tower; thus, youth and childhood are lived within the tower.
In this garden, there is a laurel, which symbolizes death, as that is where lightning falls and where Maria, the representative par excellence of the child, commits suicide.
Also, we can find a garden pond filled with water that also symbolizes death because it is where James died drowned. Indeed, water is already a symbol of death at work, also present in Ramon’s strange disease.
Apart from the tower and its surroundings, there are other symbols, some smaller physically but more relevant.
The Japanese cabinet belonging to Nicholas is a piece of furniture we see again and again when they see a moth and old furniture. It represents the idea that over time, everything is damaged.
In the same vein, we also have the mirror, which reflects the life of the witness involved and displays the decline of the family. But it not only symbolizes the passage of time but is a kind of metaphor because, during the play, the characters give their personal vision of a series of past events: their lives, their loves, the dead, etc. These visions form a whole that is fragmented, like the mirror, in the different characters. It also symbolizes the death of the family, a break that begins with the civil war, as it is shattered between exile, war, and other events.
Other symbols of death are the pearl of the turtledove or the tie that is detached and that Theresa takes from Salvador.
The flowers also have symbolism in Broken Mirror. The violets that Barbara carries symbolize the death of a romantic character, doomed to disaster from the beginning. But the flowers represent more than just a fact, a character in the novel, or a relationship between two characters. For example, the cherry blossom represents the pair of Teresa and Amadeu Riera, and the apple blossom, Teresa and Salvador. Barbara’s violets also represent a marital union between herself and Salvador.
The pink flesh refers to Teresa and the red, to Attorney Riera.
And the final symbol of the decline of the family and the end of all things is found in the last chapter with the rat. This provides an objective view of the end of the tower and the burning of memories like the furniture and other objects taken from the tower. The presence of rats at the end signifies the tower’s end, and one is found dead in the trunk of a tree. It symbolizes the end of everything: family, tower, memories, etc.
Location
Mercè Rodoreda was born in Barcelona in the district of Sant Gervasi on October 10, 1908, and died in 1983 in Girona. She began her writing career working for the most prestigious newspapers and magazines of those years, with the publication of novels such as: I Am an Honest Woman (1932) and Aloma (1934). The economic stability that came with her job allowed her to marry Armand Obiols. In 1954, she worked as a translator at the United Nations agency in Geneva, and this led Mercè Rodoreda into a period of enormous creativity: she collected stories that had been dispersed in various journals from her exile, adding new ones and breaking the silence of twenty years with Twenty-Two Stories (1958), which would win the Victor Català Prize in 1957 and spur her to write, almost simultaneously, the novels Garden by the Sea, The Time of the Doves, and Death in Spring. In 1961, she submitted Death in Spring for the same award but it was eliminated. The Time of the Doves was published in 1962. Then came My Christina and Other Stories (1967), Garden by the Sea (1967), and the second version of Aloma (1969). Finally, she wrote the novel Broken Mirror (1974), considered by many to be the most solid of her production.
Suffering from cancer, she died in a very short time at a hospital in Girona on April 13, 1983, and was buried in Romanyà de la Selva.
Plot
Broken Mirror is a novel divided into three parts, which narrates the beginning and end of a family, the Valldaura-Farriols, representing a specific time and place in Catalonia.
The first part, consisting of eighteen chapters, focuses on introducing the characters and the setting, so the narration of events is predominant. We are introduced to the founders of the family, Teresa Goday and Salvador Valldaura, characters belonging to a bourgeois world. It begins with a conflict caused by Teresa selling a needle to help her old family, which her husband, Nicholas, knows nothing about.
Teresa dies and Valldaura marries Salvador, who had a relationship with a violinist who committed suicide. Salvador buys a house in Sant Gervasi with a huge garden and they have a daughter, Sofia.
The Valldaura have an estate in Villefranche, and Teresa and Salvador do not want to sell it to a family friend, Joaquin Berguedà.
Time passes. Salvador dies and Sofia grows up and marries Eladi Farriols. He has a daughter from another relationship, but the couple adopts the girl as their own. They grow up together with the couple’s sons, Ramon and James, under the care of their governess, Rose.
The second part, divided into twenty-one chapters, explains both external events and focuses more on the intimacy of the characters.
In this part, the relationship between Eladi and Sofia is disastrous: he has affairs with the maids and has aged considerably.
Eladi is deceived by Rose, who is weakened by her poor relationship with Ramon and Maria’s marriage. She then goes to find them at the beach where they are vacationing, but has a review of her life and returns. She decides that when they return, she will tell them the truth: they are siblings. Both of their lives are shattered.
Maria commits suicide by throwing herself from the roof of the bay house, fed up with so much pressure.
The last part, consisting of thirteen chapters, continues with the description of the family history. Teresa is the main character; she dies and is accompanied by her most beloved memories. War breaks out and the family must travel to Paris. The evolution of history is also reflected in the tower where they live, which behaves like a living being that ages and is eventually demolished to build apartment blocks around it.
The central theme of the play is death, treated symbolically. It is also the story of a period in Catalonia, and a wealthy bourgeois family broken by the Civil War. Time is not linear but always revolves around itself. As for the characters, two constants remain: the loneliness of human existence.
The Secret Revealed and Family Tragedy
Eladi had had a relationship with a showgirl called Pilar. This relationship resulted in a daughter named Maria. When he marries Sofia, they have two children, one of whom dies, and the surviving one, Ramon, develops a close friendship with Maria.
The governess, Rose, decides to take revenge on those who have subjected her to abuse by revealing to Maria and Ramon the truth about Eladi’s past relationship. She then goes to find the children at the beach where they are spending their holidays, but halfway there, she withdraws and goes home. She decides that she will tell them they are siblings when they return.
When the children learn the truth, their world collapses: Ramon destroys his toys to break with his past. Meanwhile, Maria decides to commit suicide by throwing herself from the roof of the bay house.
Sofia tries to forget the episode with Maria, and Eladi takes refuge in the library, reading books by Proust, which is a book filled with confessions for Valldaura.
Armanda Masdeu dies mysteriously, and they talk about Jesus and his death and the family history.
We can say that the revelation of the secret that Maria and Ramon were siblings was the trigger for the family tragedy because, from the moment of the revelation, a series of events unfold that lead to the decline of the family and its ruin.
On the other hand, there is Sofia’s strength in wanting to break away from the memory of Eladi and Maria and her desire to continue with her quiet life.