The Cracked Mirror

Look at page 252. This is the scene when the mirror breaks in the bathroom: "The mirror crack'd from side to side" is used here in The Icarus Girl, but it is a quote from the poem "The Lady of Shalott" by Tennyson. The motif of the mirror is used over and over in "The Lady of Shalott" to juxtapose reality and myth, and to convey the theme of sight and knowledge. As for Icarus Girl, mirrors create twins in the way that twins "mirror eachother." It's important that Oyeyemi uses this quote here, because in the poem, soon after "the mirror cracks," the Lady of Shalott commits suicide (Her suicide is related to Launcelot). In The Icarus Girl, the mirror breaking causes an escalation of the tension in the novel. Jess's real fear of TillyTilly (who is death?) begins in the bathroom when TillyTilly tells her she wants to become her (essentially kill her).

From "The Lady of Shalott":
She left the web, she left the loom,
She made three paces through the room,
She saw the water-lily bloom,
She saw the helmet and the plume,
She looked down to Camelot.
Out flew the web and floated wide;
The mirror cracked from side to side;
"The curse is come upon me," cried
The Lady of Shalott.

Follow this link for the full text of the poem:
http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/tennyson/los1.html