Despite the fact that Nel is humiliated by her mother’s “foolish smile” and is “ashamed to sense that these men… were bubbling with a hatred for her mother that had not been there in the beginning but had been born” (Morrison 22), she still echoes this behavior later in her own life. When they are on the train together and Helene “smiled dazzlingly and coquettishly at the salmon-colored face of the conductor” (Morrison 21), she indirectly taught Nel to accommodate and satisfy the needs and wants of others. In this way, Nel is more similar to her mother than she realizes. A more explicit example comes later in the text, when their friendship is described as being “so close” that “they themselves had difficulty distinguishing one’s thoughts from the other’s” (Morrison 83). Although she is not consciously trying to bend her personality to match Sula’s, she naturally accommodates her in order to connect with her. One of the first instances of Nel changing herself because of another person is when Sula visits her home and “Nel, who regarded the oppressive neatness of her home with dread, felt comfortable in it with Sula, who loved it” (Morrison 29). Rather than forming an identity based off of Helene’s, she begins forming identities in relation to other people?first Sula, and then later, Jude. For example, Nel does not purposely try to imitate Helene. However, identification is not always intentional. As a result, her personality begins to diverge from Sula’s because identities are influenced by environment and they identity with different characters. She progresses her narrative through misrecognitions because she continues to identify with various people, or imagos, throughout the story. This misrecognition becomes the basis for her identity, otherwise known as her personal narrative.
This occurs in the novel when Nel sees herself in the mirror and has a cathartic moment, saying, “I’m me. However, the cardinal mistake that is made during the mirror stage is that the child misrecognizes the image in the mirror, or the imago, as being his- or herself rather than a spectral image. The “transformation” that Lacan is referring to is the formation of one’s ego, or sense of self. Lacan refers to the mirror stage “as an identification” or as “the transformation that takes place in the subject when he assumes an image” (Lacan 2).
According to Jacques Lacan’s essay “The Mirror Stage,” a person begins forming an identity when he or she first looks in a mirror and recognizes the image as a representation of the self.
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