Imagery in Cynthia Ozick's The Shawl

TABLE OF CONTENTS

1	Introduction	2
2	Imagery in The Shawl	3
2.1	Metaphors: “Metaphor is the reciprogal agent, the universalizing force…”	3
2.2	Similes: “For everything there's a bad way of describing also a good way.”	7
2.3	Symbols: “But The Shawl turns their concerns inside out: every notion owns a double face.”	9
3	Closing words	11
5	Bibliography	13

INTRODUCTION

“I don't want to tamper or invent or imagine, and yet I have done it. I can't not do it. It comes. It invades.” This statement by Cynthia Ozick, the most provocative of Jewish American voices, suggests that she has not intended to make art out of the Holocaust. But The Shawl, “two thousand words of finely honed impression,” is a masterpiece of such. This work describes in an elliptical, impressionistic manner the concentration camp captivity of the protagonist Rosa, her perception of her niece, Stella, and the death of her infant daughter Magda.

An exact description of facts and emotions is not only astounding but also critical as the Jewish author, born in 1928, spent the years of the Holocaust safe in the United States as an indirect witness. But Ozick justifies her depiction of the Shoah by belonging to the Jewish people: “Every Jew…should feel as if he came out of Egypt…Well, if I am enjoined to belong to an event that occurred 4000 years ago, how much strongly am I obliged to belong to an event that occurred only 40 years ago.”

In only seven pages, Cynthia Ozick succeeds in transferring the reader completely to that place “without pity” by portraying Rosa's suppressed rage, her wrenching pain and her paralysing grief in detail. Her figurative language, where almost every word owns a double face, gives The Shawl an undeniable importance in Holocaust literature. The author herself explained the use of imagery and the resulting ambiguity with her intention “[to transform] the strange into the familiar” and to illustrate happenings which actually can not be described. In my paper I will analyze the language of this short story with reference to the three forms of imagery, namely metaphors, similes and symbols. I will reconstruct Ozick's concept of metaphorication by showing how she represents the unfamiliar horrors of the Holocaust in familiar images of household, motherhood and disease.

2. IMAGERY IN THE SHAWL

2.1 Metaphors: “Metaphor is the reciprogal agent, the universalizing force…”

Metaphor is defined as “the most important and widespread figure of speech, in which one thing, idea, or action is referred to by a word or expression normally denoting another thing, idea or action, so as to suggest some common quality shared by the two.” This transference of one meaning to another is based on an impression or interpretation which readers must also discover or experience for themselves.

In her essay Metaphor and Memory Cynthia Ozick once explained the importance of metaphors:

Without the metaphor of memory and history, we cannot imagine the life of the Other. We cannot imagine what it is to be someone else. Metaphor is the reciprogal agent, the universalising force: it makes possible to envision the stranger's heart.

And Ozick is right. How else could we imagine what Rosa Lublin, like more than six million others, has physically and especially emotionally gone through? The Shawl describes life in the death camp and takes out a certain scene, the murder of the protagonist's infant daughter who had been hidden all the time, “wound up in the shawl.” An important role in that short scene plays Stella, Rosa's niece, as she is made responsible for Magda's death: “Then Stella took the shawl away and made Magda die.”

To describe the role and the importance of the three characters in the story the author uses metaphors in the first place. This is how she succeeds in evoking sympathy for her protagonist but also in raising antipathy for her niece Stella. The very first words of the stories run: “Stella, cold, cold, the coldness of hell.” In this line Ozick not only introduces Stella as the “Angel of Death,” (“And afterward she was always cold, always.”) she also shows from which word fields her comparisons originate: they are connected with disease and death. Especially when Stella is described, Ozick chose words that remind us of destruction in general: “Her knees were tumors on sticks, her elbows chicken bones.” Rosa definitely sees in Stella her daughter's murder, and these metaphors she uses express the hatred she feels towards her. As Cynthia Ozick does not intend to beautify the truth, she continues to draw parallels to death, even when she is describing the innocent child. However, when she writes about the baby, she does it in a different way. The words used for the daughter are affectionately “buried” in different metaphors. A “squirrel in a nest” of course evokes more sympathy than a creature with “chicken bones.” With the description of details Ozick succeeds in emphasizing the innocence of the victim “One mite of a tooth…how shining, an elfin tombstone of white marble gleaming there.”

Yet when Ozick is describing Magda, she uses figurative language which transforms the barbarous into the beautiful, the painful into the whimsical. Her rhetorical camouflaging of grim reality is the verbal equivalent of Rosa's psychic camouflaging of what she cannot bear to see.

While Stella is supposed to be the “Angel of Death”, “elfin” qualities are attributed to Magda. The comparisons to others and the setting in invisible beings conducts the whole story. This becomes also evident when the omniscient narrator provides the reader with Rosa's own feelings and perceptions. For example: “Someone who is already a floating angle, alert and seeing everything, but in the air…” and “Rosa and Magda were slowly turning into air.” The single term “already” suggests this idea of another life, a life afterward. “The sunheat murmured of another life, of butterflies in summer.”

This alienation from one's body, caused in youth by the death camp horrors and later by the aging process, results in bifurcation of identity throughout The Shawl. On the one hand, the goyish fantasy of angels replaces the human body as the anchor of Rosa's identity during her death camp trauma.

Rosa is described as a “walking cradle” and “arrested in a fit.” “By injecting arresting metaphors and similes in auspicious moments, Cynthia Ozick painfully heightens the gaps between this infernal and the prior ordinary world.” Because of personal weakness and malnutrition Rosa is not able to nurse her baby and that is why her breasts are described as a “duct-crevice extinct, a dead volcano, blind eye, chill hole.” Ozick gives a detailed description of seemingly insignificant things in order to express Rosa's misery. With the help of those stylistic means the author clearly shows her intention: “Those who have no pain cannot imagine those who suffer.” The author uses euphemistic terminology to describe the concentration camp and accordingly the march itself. The “flowers” and the “rain” of which the prisoners are speaking in the barracks is “excrement, thick turd-braids and the slow stinking maroon waterfall that slunk down from the upper bunks….” The reference to such images helps to avoid a detailed description of the horrors that have taken place. We know that the setting is a concentration camp with a crematoria from a detail Ozick mentions casually: “the stink mixed with a bitter fatty floating smoke that greased Rosa's skin.” To support the tragic realities of the situation, Ozick uses a line of lyrical prose to describe the camp's idyllic natural surroundings.

The portraying of Magda's death is also very interesting. To emphasize the separation of body and spirit the author writes that “the speck of Magda was moving more and more into the smoky distance.” Beautified metaphor and harsh reality are formed in one, the most terrifying, sentence. “Magda had fallen from her flight against the electrified fence.” Those paradoxical words snatch the reader from the secure world of metaphors into horrible reality.

2.2 Similes: “For everything there's a bad way of describing also a good way.”

More tentative and decorative than metaphors are similes, another device of imagery. They are comparisons, “by which the comparing element is joined to the explicit or implicit notion being compared by `like' or `as'.”

“Similitude is not always poetic” as can be seen in the way Stella, the `evil', is compared to certain things. “Stella gazed at Magda like a young cannibal.” Her weapon is her voice that is “grown as thin as a string.” In spite of that quite one-sided presentation the reader has to keep in mind that Stella is a fourteen-year-old, apparently orphan girl. She is jealous of her little cousin being concealed “the little house of the shawl's windings.” “Stella wanted to be wrapped in a shawl, hidden away, asleep, rocked by the march, a baby, a round infant in arms.”

The author also makes use of similes to give us background information on Rosa and the present circumstances.

She indirectly suggests that Magda is the product of an illicit union with a German Gentile: “Magda had”, she writes, “another kind of face altogether, eyes, blue as air, smooth feathers of hair nearly as yellow as the Star sewn into Rosa's coat. You could think she was one of their babies.”

The suspicion that Rosa was raped is not confirmed in the following lines. But in the novella Rosa that deals with life in the years after the Shoah, there is a passage where Rosa states: “Your father was not a German. I was forced by a German, it's true, and more than once, but I was too sick to conceive.”

Whenever Ozick starts to use positive descriptions there is a peculiar flavor nevertheless, reminding us that the background is the concentration camp. “For everything there is a bad way of describing, also a good way.” The figurative language of the author always reaches the most extreme of descriptions. For example “…Rosa's bleak complexion, dark like cholera.” This image of “cholera” could not only be interpreted as disease but also as the clinical picture this disease bears: The comparison of a face with excretions reaches extreme limits of description. This is Ozick's method to reveal reality to the readers.

Animal imagery is another means which is used in this context. “The opposite side of this bifurcation, with identity subhumanized to a bestial level, threads through the text in a web of animal imagery.” These comparisons range from moths (“She was no bigger than a moth.”) over butterflies (“She looked like a butterfly…”) and squirrels to tigers (“like blue tigers”; “She watched like a tiger”). The comparison of hair with feathers stands for a death-expecting atmosphere as well. Even when the author is describing something beautiful, the flight of the butterfly for example, the brutality of the story is expressed in the use of images that actually do not fit together. The butterfly itself hints to the dichotomy between air and ground that goes through the whole story. It is not only the bifurcation mentioned above that speaks of another life, Elaine M. Kauvar suggests that it marks the distinction between the innocent and the evil. “Rosa did not feel hunger; she felt light, not like someone walking but like someone in a faint, in trance…but in the air, not there not touching the road.” Or “she could fly, she was only air- into the arena.”

2.3 Symbols: “But The Shawl turns their concerns inside out: every notion owns a double face.”

The Shawl starts with an epigraph taken from Paul Celan's Todesfuge: “dein goldenes Haar Margarete/ dein aschenes Haar Sulamith.” Celans intention was to use Margarete as the symbol for Germany by referring to the Nordic masterrace. Sulamith therefore symbolizes the typical Jewish woman. Using Celan's poem as a prolog is a symbol in itself as it deals with the mass destruction of Jews during the time of national socialism. This reminds the reader to keep the external circumstances in mind. “The distinction between Margarete and Sulamith, between the golden and the ashen, appears to be an odd one for Ozick to emphasize, for, while both Celan's poem and her story respond to the Holocaust, she blurs Celan's distinction.” Although the German stands for the evil, the Jewish for the innocent, Margarethe refers to the description of Magda (“Golden hair, blue eyes”). Except from Stella's justification why she had taken the shawl (“I was cold”) the only direct speech in this short story that completely omits any dialogue is the term “Aryan”, Stella's statement after she has studied Magda's face. This reveals the hatred, risen out of a jealousy that a fourteen-year-old girl is able to feel under certain circumstances. Ozick succeeds in portraying detailed feelings with only few descriptions and words. This very short epigraph bears many allusions. The author assumes that her reader knows the background of Todesfuge, which gives The Shawl an exclusive character. By using this symbol Ozick avoids to mention the unmentionable, by referring to another writer.

Carefully chosen are the names Ozick gave her characters. Stella, the Latin word for star, again symbolizes the Jewish itself (“as yellow as the star sewn into Rosa's coat”).This puts emphasis on the Jewish identity of the “evil”, of Stella. “Magda”, given to the bi-faced character, demonstrates Ozick's art of writing: This choice of names could have different interpretations. Victor Strandberg who takes reference to the symbolic meaning of the shawl suggests that the polish name Magda has the same root as Magic and may therefore stand for symbols in general. “As a national religion, Judaism condemns magic and occult, but such magic is Rosa's only recourse for recovering her beloved daughter.” But Ozick could also have intended to express the ambiguity of Magda's character. Magda is the East-European short form of Magdalene which originates from the byname of a character in the New Testament, Mary Magdalene `Mary of Magdala.' If Ozick chose the baby's name with that knowledge in mind, she wanted to demonstrate the jewishness of the baby in spite of all the other, external, facts. The name of the protagonist, of course, is deliberately chosen as well. Rosa as reference to the flower, the rose. This could simply stand for flourishing, meaning that Rosa has survived nevertheless. The Dictionary of Names suggests a possible reference to the flower as a symbol of the virgin Mary. In the The Shawl this hint could be possible as this symbol is an allusion to the uncertainty of fatherhood and it symbolizes the innocent Jewish woman. Sarah Blacher Cohen designates Rosa as the Holocaust Madonna, for example.

“The taste of cinnamon and almonds” is another symbol worth being mentioned. This aroma and the saturated shawl evoke the scent of besamin, “the spice-box, which Jews sniff the Havdalah service to mark the end of the Sabbath and to enable them to cope with the ordeals of the weekdays.” This magical aroma in the midst of the stench of entrainment, burning and death helps Rosa to remember and hope for another life, “it prevents the contagion of death from infiltrating Rosa's being.”

The shawl is not only the topic of the story, it is the one example of figurative language which tells us most explicitly about Rosa, Magda and Stella. To all three of them the shawl has a special meaning and it gives also information about their personality: It is not only the ragged swaddling cloth concealing Magda, “the little house she lived in.” It also functions as the replacement breast, nourishing the child. But to Magda the shawl meant more. “The shawl was Magda's own baby, her pet, her little sister.” Stella has not only taken the shawl as a blanket to warm her frozen body. Wrapping herself in it meant to her becoming a baby again and mothering herself with it.

For Rosa the shawl is her magic shield to protect the child from the Nazis. It's the pacifer she uses to mollify her child and prolong her cries of outrage when the child is taken from her. Finally, it is the Magda-flavored remnant she hugs as a substitute for the electrocuted Magda.

3. CLOSING WORDS

Cynthia Ozick's style of writing, the use of figurative language, enables her to provide a lot of information and background knowledge in a few pages only. Although her words and constructed sentences are free for interpretation they contain certain hints on certain facts.

Metaphors are Ozick's mean to reveal personal history. “Through metaphor, the past has the capacity to imagine us and we it.” In The Shawl metaphors are especially used to introduce the specific role of the three characters. But they also represent the atmosphere the story has, as they are connected with disease and death. These fields are familiar to everyone, even to those who have not gone through the hell of the Holocaust.

Similes, as another device of imagery, help in this story to describe internal things, like feelings. This leads to a more psychological interpretation of Rosa's thoughts. Ozick enables the reader the possibility to sense Rosa's feelings beyond the visible wounds of the victims. Especially the comparisons she makes mirror Ozick's intention to replace the unfamiliar horrors of the Holocaust with familiar, everyday images. A peculiar taste of this revelation is the irony which makes the whole situation grim.

By the use of symbols Ozick proves her knowledge of an authentic situation. But she also demands her readers to be informed about certain things. Analysing the meaning or the function of the symbols opens more perspectives and more information. For example, the naming of her characters shows the carefulness Ozick used by writing this short story.

With The Shawl the author succeeded in portraying a situation that millions of people had to go through. With the imagery in her language she does not only reveal facts but she also describes thoughts and feelings in detail. Although she has not been a direct witness of the Shoah, Cynthia Ozick helps to come to terms with the past.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary Sources:

Ozick, Cynthia. 1989. The Shawl. Toronto: Knopf.

Secondary Sources:

Alkana, Joseph. 1997. “'Do We Not Know the Meaning of Aesthetic

Gratification?': Cynthia Ozick's The Shawl, the Akedah, and the Ethics of Holocaust Literary Aesthetics.” Modern Fiction Studies (MFS) 43.4: 963-90.

Baldick, Chris. 1990. The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms.

Oxford: Oxford UP.

Burstein, Janet Handler. 1987. “Cynthia Ozick and the Transgressions of Art.“

American Literature 59: 85-101.

Celan, Paul. 1948. “Die Todesfuge.” Deutsche Gedichte: Eine Anthologie. Ed.

Dietrich Bode. Stuttgart: Reclam, 1988. 321-323.

Cohen, Sarah Blaicher. 1994. “The Shawl: The Tragicomedy of Revolt and

Survival.“ Cynthia Ozick's Comic Art: From Levity to Liturgy. Bloomington: Indiana UP. 146-65.

Dupriez, Bernard. 1991. A Dictionary of Literary Devices. Trans. Albert W.

Halsall. Hertfordshire: Toronto UP.

Hanks, Patrick and Flavia Hodges. 1990. A Dictionary of First Names. Oxford:

Oxford UP.

Hyman, Paula E. and Deborah Dash Moore, eds. 1998. Jewish Women in

America: A Historical Encyclopedia. 2vols. New York, Routledge.

Kauvar, Elaine M. 1993. “The Magic Shawl.” Cynthia Ozick's Fiction: Tradition and Invention. Bloomington: Indiana UP. 179-202.

Langer, Lawrence L. 1992. “Myth and Truth in Cynthia Ozick's The Shawl

and Rosa.”  Admitting the Holocaust : Collected Essays. New York: Oxford UP, 1995. 139-144.

Ozick, Cynthia. 1989. “Metaphor and Memory.” Metaphor& Memory: Essays.

1^st ed. New York: Knopf. 265-283.

Strandberg, Victor. 1994. “The Shawl: Tale of Two Cities.” Greek Mind,

Jewish Soul: The Conflicted Art of Cynthia Ozick. Ed. Frank Lentricchia. Madison: UP of Wisconsin.139-51.

Cynthia Ozick, “Metaphor and Memory,” Metaphor& Memory: Essays, (New York: Knopf, 1989) 279.

Lawrence L. Langer, “Myth and Truth in Cynthia Ozick's The Shawl and Rosa,” Admitting the Holocaust: Collected Essays, (New York: Oxford UP) 140.

Elaine M. Kauvar, “The Magic Shawl,” Cynthia Ozick's Fiction: Tradition and Invention, (Bloomington : Indiana UP) 179.

Paula E. Hyman and Deborah Dash Moore, eds., Jewish Women in America, (New York: Routledge,1998) 1022.

Janet Handler Burstein. “Cynthia Ozick and the Transgressions of Art,” American Literature 59 (1987): 85.

Hyman and Moore 1022.

In 1983, three years after The Shawl, Ozick published a related novella, Rosa that is set approximately four decades later in Miami Beach and shows how Rosa feels radically isolated and remains preoccupied with her murdered daughter. This pair of stories was published in one book under the first story's title The Shawl in 1989.

Sarah Blaicher Cohen. “The Shawl: The Tragicomedy of Revolt and Survival,” Cynthia Ozick's Comic Art: From Levity to Liturgy, (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1994) 148.

Cynthia Ozick. The Shawl, (Toronto: Knopf, 1989) 5.

Kauvar 179. 

Ozick, Metaphor& Memory 280.

Chris Baldick. The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms. (Oxford: UP of Oxford, 1990) 134.

Bernhard Dupriez, A Dictionary of Literary Devices, (Hertfordshire: Toronto UP, 1991)2 76.

Ozick, Metaphor& Memory 279.

Ozick, The Shawl 3.

ibidem 6.

Victor Strandberg, “The Shawl: Tale of Two Cities,” Greek Mind, Jewish Soul: The Conflicted Art of Cynthia Ozick, (Madison: Wisconsin UP, 1994) 144.

Ozick, The Shawl 15.

ibidem 6.

ibidem 3, 5.

Langer 140.

cf. Ozick, The Shawl, 5.

ibidem 4.

ibidem 3.

ibidem 3.

Cohen 151.

Ozick, The Shawl 3,4.

ibidem 4.

ibidem 8.

Strandberg 140.

Ozick, The Shawl 3.

ibidem 3.

Cohen 150.

Ozick, The Shawl 4.

Ozick, Metaphor& Memory 283.

Ozick, The Shawl 8,9.

ibidem 9.

Cohen 151.

Ozick, The Shawl 9.

ibidem 10.

Dupriez 416.

Langer 140.

Ozick, The Shawl 5.

ibidem 5.

ibidem 4.

ibidem 3.

Cohen 150.

ibidem 43.

Langer 140.

Ozick, The Shawl 4.

Strandberg 141, 142.

Ozick, The Shawl 9.

ibidem 9.

ibidem 4.

ibidem 6.

ibidem 6.

cf. ibidem 4.

ibidem 6.

Kauvar 180.

Ozick The Shawl 1,2.

ibidem 8.

Paul Celan, “Die Todesfuge“. Deutsche Gedichte: Eine Anthologie, (Stuttgart: Reclam 1988) 322.

The female protagonist in Goethe's Faust is `Gretchen' and it is also a common name in German fairy tales, for example `Hänsel und Gretel'.

Sulamith was the beloved one in the `Song of Solomon'.

Joseph Alkana “'Do We Not Know the Meaning of Aesthetic Gratification?': Cynthia Ozick's The Shawl, the Akedah, and the Ethics of Holocaust Literary Aesthetics,” Modern Fiction Studies (MFS) 43.4 (1997): 979.

cf. Ozick, The Shawl 4.

ibidem 6.

ibidem 5.

While Ozick was criticized for writing about the Holocaust without having experienced it, Celan was attacked for writing a poem after the Holocaust at all.

ibidem 4.

Strandberg 143.

Magdala was a village on Lake Galilee, a few miles north of Tiberias. The woman `which had been healed of evil spirits and infirmities' (Luke 8: 2) was given this name in the bible to distinguish her from other bearers of the very common name Mary. It was widely accepted in Christian folk belief that she was the same person as the repentant sinner who washed Christ's feet in the previous chapter (Luke 79). (Patrick Hanks and Flavia Hodges, A Dictionary of First Names, (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1990) 218.

Hanks and Hodges 287.

Cohen 150.

cf. Ozick, The Shawl 10.

ibidem 152.

ibidem 152.

Ozick, The Shawl 6.

ibidem 152.

Ozick, Metaphor& Memory 283.

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