Mirror, Mirror on the Water: Water Imaginaries of and by Women in Contemporary English- and Dutch-Language Poetry

While the woman-as-water paradigm has been ingrained in the Western imagination for centuries, far less is known about the way contemporary women writers figure their own relationship to water. Situated in ecofeminist debates amid the rise of the Blue Humanities, this article considers how Dutch and Canadian poets Sophia Blyden, Anne Carson, Rozalie Hirs, and Alycia Pirmohamed reimagine questions of feminine identity through water at the intersection of ecology, spirituality, and the body. To this end, it extends Astrida Neimanis’s framework of hydro-logics by proposing the hydro-logic of the mirror. Shaping and distorting our current realities, these poets imagine alternative, more sustainable futures for women in the Anthropocene through the trope of water’s mirroring surface. The analysis, moreover, suggests that the age-old association between women and water does not entirely hold in the poems of these poets as water’s potentially dangerous qualities are emphasized as well. While their complex renderings of the supposedly natural association between women and water demonstrate affinity with ecofeminist thought, these women writers’ creative use of mirror imagery allows them to bring in other concerns, like those related to race, religion, or the nature of knowledge in the twenty-first century.