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160 / The Extended Familyfrom her body. In Body Schema and Body Image, for instance, Douwe Tiemersmanoted that “The identiƒcation of the mother with the child decreasesfrom the sixth month of pregnancy onwards, especially when the child growstowards the front . . . The mother sees herself more as standing behind thechild.” 39 Tiemersma declines to pursue the ramiƒcations of such radical bodilydualism, but in both Pregnant Woman and Margaret Evans Pregnant thecompositional disjunction between head and body as well as the advancedstages of their pregnancies suggest a radical disjunction of body and mind. Themoment when one is most fully identiƒed culturally “simply as a pregnantwoman,” in Rich’s words, is also the moment of greatest alienation from thebody.This disjunction is pictured as well by the placement of the mirror, whichdisrupts the cohesion of the pictorial space, creating an image within an imageby effacing the corner of the room, cutting off the re„ected body image preciselyat the subject’s belly and, ƒnally, by a sort of magnetic effect, shifting theground plane up, thereby undermining its stability. Within this disjunctivespace, the black triangular wedge—that female symbol—lodged between theimage and its re„ection can only be that gap, that void through which thechild will pass. It is also the passage that Margaret must simultaneously traversebetween Margaret Evans Pregnant and Margaret Evans Mother.The element of time, inseparable from pregnancy, when the sense of selfpermits no clear, stable boundaries, thus also refers representationally to themother/child relationship (as conveyed in the double meaning of the noungeneration). Nancy Chodorow’s The Reproduction of Mothering (1978) arguedthat the woman’s need to “turn to children to complete a relational triangle,or to re-create a mother-child unity, means that mothering is invested witha mother’s own con„ictual, ambivalent, yet powerful need for her ownmother.” 40 Contrary to Freud, this theory posited that in giving birth thewoman does not gain a penis but reproduces the mother. The mirrored Evansdoes indeed look like a different person, an older woman—both herself as themother of a growing child and as her own mother. This tripartite identity, assplit between self-mother and self-daughter is suggested by Evans’s shadow, amirror image of the image in the mirror and the ghost of her former-future self.The trope of the mirror, traditionally a symbol of female vanity, is foundthroughout feminist literature and criticism in this period. In 1960, Anne Sexton’spoem “The Double Image” linked the mirror and the painted portrait, aswould Neel in 1978:And this was the cave of the mirrorthat double woman who staresat herself, as if she were petriƒed