Lacan’s Ghost 
Wendy Doniger
- The Mirror: A History by Sabine Melchior-Bonnet, translated by Katharine Jewett
In Duck Soup, Harpo dresses up in exactly the same way as Groucho is dressed (moustache, glasses, nightshirt and nightcap) and, posing on different sides of the frame of a giant mirror which Harpo has shattered, each elaborately mimics the other’s gestures – until Chico, wearing the same outfit, breaks the scene up. This scene is mirrored in Big Business (1988), when Bette Midler meets her unknown identical twin, wearing an identical suit, in a powder room in which a series of mirrors is separated by a series of open spaces, and the two of them play the mirror scene until they realise they are twins.
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Wendy Doniger is the Mircea Eliade Professor of the History of Religions at the University of Chicago. She is the author of, among other books, Splitting the Difference: Gender and Myth in Ancient Greece and India and The Woman Who Pretended to Be Who She Was.
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