Jennifer Egan’s Look At Me: The Two Charlottes

The industrial revolution rapidly altered the rate of human achievement. Steam trains were first used in the 1820’s and remained the primary mode of modern transport for the next one hundred years. The Wright Brothers arrived at human flight in 1903, and space flight was accomplished only 60 years later. The exponential curve grew even steeper with the technological revolution of the 20th Century; new technologies rendered obsolete as soon as they are taken off the assembly line (a stubborn remnant of the industrial era). Despite these advances, there was a terse atmosphere of stagnation as America drifted into the 21st century. Jennifer Egan’s Look At Me explores this malaise. By examining the transience of personal identity in an age of branding, the commoditization of character, and our cultures’ preoccupancy with violence Egan uses Michael West and Moose as examples America’s fabrication of meaning in a culture with few real hardships, while the two Charlottes illustrate the inherent struggle to find even those fabricated meanings.

Charlotte is on the cusp of adulthood in a difficult time. The “poor thing—looked nothing like her mother,” Ellen Metcalf described by the narrator as pretty and exotic (24). Like her mother young Charlotte doesn’t belong in Rockford, or perhaps anywhere. Her eccentric interests in exotic fish help little with peer acceptance, and when after a sexual encounter her sophomore year she was an untouchable, “no one came near her” (49). Her father uses their small town of Rockford, IL as a benchmark for mediocrity in his market research. Aside from her few eccentricities, Charlotte is quite mediocre. Like her mother, Charlotte is not interested in boys her age, and unlike her father...

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...lightened” world, where we are given access to unprecedented amounts of information, belief is not fact.

Young Charlotte’s father considered Moose a fool, and wondered how a century and a half of trivia and useless facts would give any insight to his breakdown. Ultimately Charlotte herself rejected the notion as well. Like Swenson, Charlotte found a new face, hers behind makeup and a new name. She removed her glasses, the lens through which Moose alleged allowed people to see clearly and “the technological disaster” that would ruin us all (53). If we are what we see, then young Charlotte became nothing, just an identity constructed to cope with the pain of her first heartbreak. Young Charlotte became like a younger Charlotte Swenson, and while the mirrored room may have changed, the meaning still remains the same, to be someone different somewhere else.